Jesse Liberty

Times have changed

JesseLiberty — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 00:00:00 GMT

When I was a kid my dad told me "nope, no TV when I was a boy, crystal radio.

We just had our friends from college here for New Year's with their kids....Among the 8 of us (the four kids were 17, 15, 11 and 10), we had 7 digital cameras (if you count phones)), three iPods, five digital phones, 14 email adddresses... Just like when I was a kid. Sheesh.

My little one can hardly grasp that when I was a kid:
no vcr
no dvd
no pc
no email
no IM
no answering machines
no fax
no microwave
no touch tone telephone
no cell phones
no ipods
no cds
no stereo
no fm radio
no pbs (we did have wnet but it was aimed at in-school viewing)
no minivans
no suvs
no airbags

Next column: the tradeoff between innovation and a constantly changing environment

JesseLiberty — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 23:53:00 GMT

The following message was posted to my web log on O'Reilly...

Learning new tech. is fun - However, we have to learn things very well and make a living out of it. I guess MS does not really care about the developer who had to run after each so called inovative idea along their way to glory.
The problem I have is I put 10 hours at work and I need to put another 5 hours at home just to get by so that I may still be able to get a job in 12 months again.
If you don't put all this tech. in your resume no one will hire you. You need to know CSS, HTML, SQL SERVER, UML, .NET, COM+,Web Services as well as data modeling, Rup some networking and O/R mapping, web design and you may get a contract for $35.00/hr - Let alone the degree that cost you tens of thousands and the endless stream of books and hours worked for free to catch up with things.
At the end of the day all software usually does is create, read, update and delete data. That is all of it.
While MS is making life difficult for every one who codes, companies are suffering too. Who will maintain the systems written in .NET 1.1 in 3 years from today?
Developers burn thier lives while companies build the tools.
Will MS pay for my re-education or for learning Active-X and VB6 books and courses that is not only worthless now but even harmful?
The funy thing is that CICS and COBOL are still the same. The last 10 years wheras COM+ that cost me $3000 to learn 3 years ago is out of the "windows".
This is not funy. I am very angry I am loosing my life but helpless after the bad investment I made.

My first impulse is to blow off this kind of concern (I for one am happier writing in .NET 3 with C# than I was writing in C for DOS) but there are a lot of folks who feel much the same frustration; they do not see the constant innovation as anything but burdensome.

I'll explore this in some detail, though it is not a new topic, it is one that we all grapple with and with .NET 3 on the way it will be front and center soon.

Free Video on Ajax

JesseLiberty — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 23:51:00 GMT

Self promotion warning

I've just posted a 15 minute quick video on AJAX technology. Now, to be up front, the point of the video is to interest potential readers in my up coming books, but that said, the video may be of interest to some folks here, so I thought I'd mention it. You can see it, if you are interested, by going to my web site, and clicking on books, and then clicking on AJAX video in the box at the top of the page.

If not, sorry to have bothered you.

-j

Dilbert Stumbles

JesseLiberty — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 18:55:00 GMT

Fanatic: noun: a person who can't change his mind, and won't change the subject.

A jerk: someone who can't take a joke, doesn't know when to let a wise crack slip by, turns everything into political commentary.

Scott Adams: one of the funniest men alive.

Okay. I don't want to be a jerk, and I hope I'm not a fanatic, and Scott Adams is one of the funniest men alive (I think I have every one of his books, not to mention a Dilbert highlighter)

But in the article referred to in today's featured articles, he wrote the following,

"If you look at the history of the world, almost any time we thought we knew something bad was going to happen AND we had years of warning, things turned out okay.

The human population did not outgrow the food supply.
Earth didn’t run out of oil in the eighties.
The Y2K problem was solved.
The Soviet Union didn’t nuke us.
Vietnam did not set off much of a domino effect.
AIDS hasn’t annihilated the hetero population in the U.S."

I really want to accept his point. I don't want to choke on that last line, despite the fact that AIDS has killed 25 million people, and that I can't really see that as "working out ok," just because the people who died conveniently weren't heterosexual or weren't American.

I do take his point. And I don't want to be a jerk. But to me, I dunno', somehow, that's like saying the whole WWII thing worked out okay, 'cause you know, it was mostly Jews who were gassed.

Last year about half a million children died of AIDS; so I'll be the jerk and say that Scott, who I admire very much, blew that one. He was right, we had lots of warning, but he was wrong: AIDS didn't turn out okay.

-j

A new way to blog - non linear

JesseLiberty — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 14:09:00 GMT

I have moved my political blog over to TiddlyWiki which describes itself as a "non-linear personal web notebook."

One limitation of traditional blogs is that each entry is a stand alone mini-article. That can be fine, but for my own blog I'd like a bit more inter-article connection.

TiddlyWiki (silly name, but what can you do?) tie every article to one another with very soft interlinking, allowing the user to roam through your thoughts and ideas in a way that makes the blog (one hopes) more interesting and more connected.

As you click on active words the blog opens a new "tiddler" (a small blog entry) that may itself contain a variety of active words (shown in blue, and often shown as a couple words squished together in camelNotation, though that is not required).

From a technical point of view, it is very impressive: the entire blog is in a single html file, and is very small. From a communications point of view it is very interesting; a new cross-breed; not quite blog, certainly not wiki. Of course content is king, but this is a significant contribution to content delivery.

Thinking about words visually

JesseLiberty — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 01:32:00 GMT

What could be more boring, less innovative than an online thesaurus? But the same kind of thinking that went into ThinkTank (Dave Winer's brilliant outlining program developed in 1988!) has gone into VisualThesaurus

The goal of this software (available on line or as a desk-top application) is to create a word map of associations that can be manipuatled in 2-d or "3-d" space.

The effect is astonishing. You can control the kinds of assoiations shown, the size and distance of the words, and you can hover over the nodes to see a definition.

As you click on a word, it becomes the center of a whole new map of words. The 3-d map allows you to swing the center over top, allowing new associations to take center stage with a dynamism that can only lead to great creativity.

I have no idea who will benefit from this; or what other uses will be born from this technology; but I'm convinced they are doing something exciting here.

-j

Dictation Software Revisited

JesseLiberty — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 18:15:00 GMT

A number of years ago, I entertained the idea of dictating my articles and or books. Dragon NaturallySpeaking seemed to be the most popular and perhaps most effective software at that time.

I foundthat the accuracy was shockingly high. But what was most interesting was that even with such high accuracy, it was almost unreadable. This was very similar to my experience with the Apple Newton and with the voice recognition engine in Wildfire my favorite automated phone system. It turned out that 99.x% may just not be good enough, and it also turns out that proofreading automated dictation is horrifically difficult, because when dictation software makes a mistake, in inserts a word that no spell check is going to flag and your eye tends to see what it expects.

I'm pleased to say however that speech recognition has come a long way, and Dragon Speaking 9 is so much better at context-based recognition that many previous problem have gone away.

While not foolproof. it is so close to what I intend and learns so quickly from my corrections, that I am able to produce a document more quickly using Dragon NaturallySpeaking than I am by typing it by hand. In fact, even though I typed at over one hundred words per minute, I'm able to dictate documents more quickly than I am to type them. Corrections are sometimes more difficult using Dragon NaturallySpeaking but there is nothing that prevents me from putting my hands on the keyboard and making corrections by hand

As you may have guessed by now. I am dictating this blog entry using Dragon NaturallySpeaking and I am working hard and leaving in its natural form without making many corrections, allowing the errors that Dragon NaturallySpeaking may be introducing in their raw form. So that you can see the level of accuracy that is new software provides with literally the level of effort in training that comes two hours after purchasing the software.

Lab Notes

For many years it has been my goal to keep a running set of lab notes while I work. I know from the experience of others and from my own experience that if I would only write down what I was doing while I was programming. I could save myself a great deal of time.

Again and again I had the experience that I will work on something and then I will wish that I could accurately re-create the steps that I had taken, either because I solve the problem and it would be helpful to know exactly what I did to solve the problem or, because I had something working and then I made a change that broke it.

Over the years. I've tried keeping a Lab Book, then a Word document open on another machine, and at 1 point I purchased an HP Jornada and made my notes in it. The problem with each of these plans was that I had to turn away from whatever I was working on to enter my notes. And I found over time that I would get caught up in my work and the note taking would become a distraction or too much effort, and I would give it up

My hope is that I can now take contemporaneous notes as I'm working using Dragon NaturallySpeaking on one machine, while programming on the other. If this works out the program will be worth far more than I paid for.

Dictating articles and books

Using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to go beyond simple notetaking and to use dictation to create articles and/or chapters for books may still be asking too much of the software. Although I'm intriguted by the idea of integrating dictated speech with the keyboard and mouse. It's something I will explore over the next number of months, and report back.

-j

These are a few of my favorite things

JesseLiberty — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 16:51:00 GMT

Holidays are coming, so here is a list of some of my favorite, can't live without 'em software utilities

Exam Diff Pro - best software I know for examining differences in files and directories. Incredibly easy to use, to customize and very reliable.

FinePrint - allows you to do all sorts of fancy printing, but I use it to print pages 2-up and cut my paper and toner usage in half.

Hypersnap DX - screen capture. Virtually every screen capture in all my books for the past 5 years have been done with this software. Saves to virtually any format.

Roboform - For IE (6 or 7). I don't know how anyone lives without this. Fill in your information and it fills forms for you (including, if you want, credit cards, etc.) Can be password protected. Remembers login and password info for sites you visit, can provide password generation. Many more features. Invaluable.

Trillian - Integrates AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and others and the interface and ease of use (and logging of chat records) is superior to the native interfaces.

Times Reader

JesseLiberty — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:27:00 GMT

Have you seen the new Times Reader? This is a beta product from the NY Times that will knock your socks off; it shows what can be done with .NET 3 and it is beautiful (not to mention free).

When .NET 2 arrived there was no push from users to move from existing technology to the new .NET technology, and adoption was slow. Add to the lack of perceived benefit by those paying the bill, the outright resistance from traditional VB programmers (VB.NOT) and Microsoft had an uphill battle.

My prediction is that once Microsoft rolls out Vista and .NET 3 and Orcas (Visual Studio next) , and once new products start to hit with the new look and feel, clients are going to start to demand that their new products have the nifty new look and feel, the better fonts, the cooler features, etc. etc. that you can only achieve with WPF. Add to that the ability to create contract-based web services, integrated work flow for a far more sophisticated business layer and (not coincidentally) the best Ajax library available, and .NET 3 (broadly defined) will, I suspect, see a far faster uptake (read 2-3 years instead of 5-6) than .NET 2.

For a first look at why, see the Times Reader.

-j

Small technological wonders

JesseLiberty — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 22:43:00 GMT

Obviously, of all the technology that has come along in my lifetime (and there is an awful lot of it) the one that has had the biggest impact on my day to day life is the personal computer and all that goes with it.

The crusher, of course, is the web. While PCs changed my career path, and while I was using the Internet back when my address was ...!foo!bar!blah!yowza; the ability today to get answers to virtually any question within seconds is an intellectual luxury unparalleled in history. The signal:noise ratio may be questionable, but the web used properly is one of the most powerful research and learning tools ever invented; arguably up there with movable type and speech.

That said, there have been some very nice smaller suprises, and it is these smaller, little gum-drop bits of technology that I'm interested in just at the moment.

For example, I knew the VCR would make a big change, but I had no idea how much use we'd get out of our DVR. The ability to put live TV on pause, to skip over commercials, to reliably and easily record shows in ways that VCRs never seemed to get right... DVRs were what VCRs wanted to be. Now, if there were only more on that was worth recording.

Books on tape made a huge change to how I think about commuting and doing chores, but the iPod changed books on tape and I'll never go back. The ability to (a) have the entire book with me all the time and (b) to have more than one book with me and (c) to download the book rather than order it ... these small differences add up to a very different overall experience. The nano is fantastic; I currently have over 120 hours of unabridged books (representing 7 good sized books in all) loaded, along with a complete set of lectures on Hinduism, 10 complete CDs, a set of lectures, numerous podcasts and it isn't even half full, it fits in my pocket and is always available when I have to do what would otherwise be an unpleasant task. Clean the dishes? No problem, time to catch up on my reading. Drive into town? Great! Finish that lecutre I was in the middle of.

Cell phones have changed my life in all sorts of ways, not least in how we feel about going out and leaving the kids at home. The knowledge that we can be reached changes everything; the fact that the Treo on my belt has more computing power than was available to the Pentagon when I was a kid is just mind boggling icing on the cake.

GPS navigation systems have changed my feelings about my teenage daughter's driving (and my own!). I know she is an excellent driver, but the assurance a GPS provides about not getting lost, or at least the ability to find your way back makes a tremendous difference. I'd like to see us put a lot more into navigation and safety technology in cars; airplane crashes make headlines, but a hell of a lot more of us die in cars each day than in planes.

Of course, this is all consumerism. The really big news is in medicine and other fields that we don't see every day but where technology is saving lives, making dramatic improvements in quality of life, feeding people, preventing disease and so forth.

I know that technology is a double edged sword, but while we're worrying about our irresponsible use of technology that is endnagering our health and planet, putting us at risk and threatening our ecosystem, let's also remember that only four centuries ago a 40 year old was considered very old and lucky to be alive, a minor cut could be fatal, most children did not survive to adulthood, women most often died in childbirth, dentistry was near torture, more people died of infection than direct wounds during war. Life was, as so often noted, nasty, brutish and short.

Book Review

JesseLiberty — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 14:18:00 GMT

For the moment, my contribution to Simple-Talk is to write fortnightly opinion pieces; thus I'm not quite sure what to do with my blog... so I thought I'd start off with reviewing a few books that I found particularly valuable and that I thought might be of interest to this community.

The clear winner for best introduction to the Agile software process for .NET developer is Robert and Micah Martin's Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C# (Prentice Hall(2006) ISBN: 0131857258).

Here's what I wrote about it on my web site (click on Books, then on Recommendations),

Robert Martin is one of the smartest people I've ever talked with, and he is one of the best technical writers I've ever read. This book is the comprehensive and most valueable introduction and guide to agile programming with a full discussion of Agile principles, the "fourteen practices of eXtreme programming, full discussion of "spiking, splitting, velocitiy, iteration, test-driven development, refactoring, pair programming, five types of UML diagrams, and how to use all of this in real world .NET development. This book is required reading. Do not hesitate.

I'll try to post occasional reviews of books and products that might be of interest, as well as topics related to opinion pieces and articles, and other musings and ramblings as time goes by.

Feel free to take a look at my O'Reilly technical blog and my Political blog as well, if the spirit moves you.

November 22

JesseLiberty — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 14:15:00 GMT

some dates simply should not pass without mention.

In my life those include november 22 (1963) and september 11 (2001).