December, 2009

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13
Dec 09

Fake Steve Tells the Truth

Fake Steve Jobs is a bit off my usual path, but thanks to one of those odd trails of links, I ended up at Dan Lyons’ ventriloquist act. FSJ is good for poking fun at Steve, but he is also good at poking fun at the larger tech industry. In his most recent post, he does an amazing job of not only pillorying AT&T for complaining about, of all things, pesky users who actually want to use their phones for crazy things like making phone calls and the 3G network for wacky things like moving data around, but also of pillorying corporate America in general which really does seem to have fallen into something of a malaise in the MBA era. (The re-thinking of the MBA by no less than its home, the Harvard Business School, is something for another time.)

Here’s the best two paragraphs from his pretend dialogue with AT&T:

While I’m ranting, let me ask you something, Randall. At the risk of sounding like Glenn Beck Jr. — what the fuck has gone wrong with our country? Used to be, we were innovators. We were leaders. We were builders. We were engineers. We were the best and brightest. We were the kind of guys who, if they were running the biggest mobile network in the U.S., would say it’s not enough to be the biggest, we also want to be the best, and once they got to be the best, they’d say, How can we get even better? What can we do to be the best in the whole fucking world? What can we do that would blow people’s fucking minds? They wouldn’t have sat around wondering about ways to fuck over people who loved their product. But then something happened. Guys like you took over the phone company and all you cared about was milking profit and paying off assholes in Congress to fuck over anyone who came along with a better idea, because even though it might be great for consumers it would mean you and your lazy pals would have to get off your asses and start working again in order to keep up.

And not just you. Look at Big Three automakers. Same deal. Lazy, fat, slow, stupid, from the top to the bottom — everyone focused on just getting what they can in the short run and who cares what kind of piece of shit product we’re putting out. Then somehow along the way the evil motherfuckers on Wall Street got involved and became everyone’s enabler, devoting all their energy and brainpower to breaking things up and parceling them out and selling them off in pieces and then putting them back together again, and it was all about taking all this great shit that our predecessors had built and “unlocking value” which really meant finding ways to leech out whatever bit of money they could get in the short run and let the future be damned. It was all just one big swindle, and the only kind of engineering that matters anymore is financial engineering.

Tell it, Fake Steve Jobs. Tell it.

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7
Dec 09

I Like Terminology with Precision

I would like to be able to use a term like scope in my work as a folklorist:

scope is an enclosing context where values and expressions are associated … Variables are associated with scopes. Different scoping types affect how local variables are bound.

Thank you, Wikipedia.

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7
Dec 09

When Clever Is a Problem

OmniNerd recently wrote about “when clever is a problem.” Having taken a job with NASA and now in charge of maintaining and revising an extensive code base mostly in C, he finds himself often confronted with clever code — elegant in its brevity (the two seem interchangeable sometimes in the language of programmers) — that is otherwise indecipherable. His argument is that it’s actually better to have prosaic code, code that is self-documenting in its almost plodding nature, than to have poetic code. I can’t quite figure out why I am fascinated by this topic, but here it is.

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7
Dec 09

Objectified

The maker of Helvetica has a new film out — apparently he’s at work on a trilogy. This one is focused on the role of industrial design in our lives: Objectified.

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6
Dec 09

The MLA Goes Digital to Think about the Digital

The Modern Language Association, the dominant professional organization among professors of language and literature, has tried over the past decade to confront the emergence of digital forms of communication from within the ranks of its members. The problem has been, of course, that the people most interested in doing it are usually at the bottom of the power (barrel? pyramid? ladder?) and those at the top often have a hard time grasping why someone would prefer something in the ephemeral ether let alone how they might go about doing it and what it does for scholarship. They have a working group, and they have some working policy documents up. Now they have a wiki.

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4
Dec 09

The Man Behind Fictional UIs

Mark Coleran designs UIs (user interfaces) for the movies. You’ve seen his work in the various Bourne movies, in the Lara Craft movie, and in a number of other places.

Coleran's UI for "Tomb Raider"

He has collected the various UIs on a single page on his website, and it’s a great place to go for inspiration both when you are trying to design an interface but also when you are just trying to sketch out the structure of a problem. (Sometimes how you look at data helps you to imagine what your data is.)

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2
Dec 09

Vygotsky and Coding

At the recent Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, an all-star cast of coding greats were convened on “Microsoft Perspectives on the Future of Programming. ” Among other things, Butler Lampson, Erik Meijer, Don Box, Jeffrey Snover, Herb Sutter, and Burton Smith discussed the improvement in IDEs (integrated development environments) and in various languages and how making coding easier, or at least less likely to fail, also means people not knowing everything they should in order to become great. One contributor likened it to anti-lock break systems: “Now you don’t have to be a great driver to perform well in snow. You just mash the brakes and the anti-lock system does all the heavy lifting for you and it pumps much faster than you ever could. It’s just, in my view, a case where computers actually help you think less. It’s like what Vygotsky in activity theory distinguishes between your performance and your competence.” The video is here, and the statement is right at 40:00 in. Check it out.

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