Alan Gutierrez

From Instanley Great by Steve Levy, a story about the phrase coined by Steve Jobs, “Real Artists Ship”. The project mentioned in this article is the Macintosh.

Jobs’s speeches were punctuated by slogans. Perhaps the most telling epigram of all was a three-word koan that Jobs scrawled on an easel in January 1983, when the project was months overdue. REAL ARTISTS SHIP. It was an awesome encapsulation of the ground rules in the age of technological expression. The term “starving artist” was now an oxymoron. One’s creation, quite simply, did not exist as art if it was not out there, available for consumption, doing well. Was Engelbart an artist? A prima donna — he didn’t ship. What were the wizards of PARC? Haughty aristocrats — they didn’t ship. The final step of an artist — the single validating act — was geting his or her work into boxes, at which point the marketing guys take over. Once you get the computers into people’s homes, you have penetrated their minds. At that point all the clever design decisions you made, all the twists and turns of the interface, the subtle dance of mode and modeless, the menu bars and trash cans and mouse buttons and everything else inside and outside your creation, becomes part of people’s lives, transforms their working habits, permeates their approach to their labor, and ultimately, their lives.

But to do that, to make a difference in the world and a dent in the universe, you had to ship. You had to ship. You had to ship.

Real artists ship.

This is the definition of prudence for the knowledge worker.

I’ve created a sign up form for CHAT. This sign up form is based on software that I’ve developed, primarily Stencil, for those of you who want to look behind the sceens. For those of you who don’t, consider this a general purpose nonprofit or civic organization registration program. Please, help by suggesting features, and reporting programs in the comments of this post.

Today I merged in a branch that I created for Strata. I’m observing some revision and branch discipline, even though I’m the only person working on my code. I do this because I’m looking for techniques to master, rules to follow so I don’t have to think so much about so many little things. The merge procedure I’ve used is decribed in Common Use-Cases for Merging in Version Control with
Subversion.

Crazy Egg is using Amazon S3. I noticed because Paul Christmann said he was going to consider S3 for his application BoxPop.

Found a project outside of GNU that is using the Classpath exception to the GPL. Read the licensing section of Restlet.

I’d seen the warning at StatCounter, that someone was tracking clicks using one of their competitor’s web stats services. Turns out that is was SiteMeter according to Things You Should Know Before Using SiteMeter. I’d assumed that is was they, but I didn’t much care, until today, when one my sites wouldn’t load because it was waiting on a download from an alien server. End of SiteMeter. Need to find a replacement for public stats for my Internet Workshop websites. Maybe Google Analytics if I stat sharing is managable.

A program someone should write. I’ll start a timeslip, start programming, and then get a phone call. If the phone call is quick, then I go back to programming and forget about it. If the phone call takes a long time, then I’m probably providing technical support. When I hang up, I’d like to create two time slips, working backwards. I want to start with the stop. It’s the difference between, “What are you going to do?”, and “Tell me what you’ve been doing.”

I’m going to reinstate Bitter Wednesdays so I have a structure for a screed about Ant that I wrote today.