Alan Gutierrez

I quit coffee once. It was before I moved to New Orleans in 2001. I am going to quit again. It makes me nervous. It is an expensive habit. When I am renting space at a coffee shop, I’ll drink orange juice. This morning, I had half a cup, to stave off any headaches. Now I’m sitting here at Bayou Coffee House with a small glass of OJ.

I’m working in New Orleans on the recovery of lovely, yet troubled neighborhood called Hollygrove. One of the projects that I’ve been working on is creating an interactive map of the neighborhood, simply by uploading geocoded photographs to nifty applications like Picassa and Flickr, that can create a map of the neighborhood.

Which is why I’d so dearly appreciate the donation of Josh Hallett’s Helio Ocean toward this effort.

Hollygrove is not the most digital place in the world. In fact, a lot of people have not come back. Those who have come back are still in their FEMA trailers. What surprises me though, is how often people who never had a use for computers or the Internet before, go out of there way to get online. The problem is always that there is never enough information specific to this lesser known neighborhood.

I ride my bike through the neighborhood everyday. I would love to be able to take pictures and put them online. It’s my understanding that the Helio could put those photographs straight online and directly into maps at Picassa or Flickr. This would make it much easier to create the reports we need to track the redevelopment. I’d love to find that the ability to create a quick geocoded photo record is the sort of think that other neighborhoods could imitate. I want to do something to get them thinking about clever uses of social media. City hacks.

Working with a fancy device like the Helio Ocean would make it easier to implement, but it might also capture the imagination of the people I meet each day. We’re implementing a block captain program, where one family on the a block will great people as they return, and keep track of the houses that are still empty. After I pilot, I could imagine a program to put a Helio Ocean in the hands of the block captains.

Helio Oceans with Picassa or Flickr, and people watching from afar will be able to track the recovery of their neighborhood, with new photographs springing up every day like a garden in bloom.

I hate Ant.

I’ve been thinking about what a real build system for Java will be.

It will be dependency management system. One that does not execute a task unless necessary. One that maintains it’s own tree of dependencies. It knows how to check the expiration of file dependencies and networked dependencies.

Targets are not names of procedures, but artifacts that are constructed. This is how it is done in dependency management systems such as Make. Targets are represented by actual artifacts, such as object files produced by a C compiler, or an executable produced by a linker.

There will be imaginary targets, as well. Imaginary targets will force a build. Programmatic targets are imaginary targets that expire based on application specific logic.

Targets are built using rules. There are specific rules and generic rules. Specific rules might create a specific jar from a collection of class files. A generic rule might describe how to turn a C file into an object file.

It will be Java, all Java. You will invoke it using Java.

java -jar mix.jar compile

A Mix project is expressed in the Java programming language. No XML. No external languages. No property files, except those managed by Mix itself.

Mix will depend on a JDK 1.4 solution at every turn, forgoing the en vogue library, the shinny objects of the moment, in order to reduce the footprint of the build system. (You won’t have to download Commons Logging.)

Mix will be a client/server application. It will create a process that will listen on a port for commands. Commands are sent as serialized objects. Startup times are greatly reduced.

Reporting will be done with standards compliant XHTML that follows a strict set of formatting rules, for the application of the CSS stylesheet of your choice. No XML data dump. No transforms. Direct to something that you can read. Each build will create a website with a dashboard index and reports from each task.

Dependency management extends to external dependencies; libraries. Your build can use a local cache of any remote repository. To add a resource, you fire off Mix at the command line with a name and URL. A checksum will be generated and you will be prompted to add the resource and checksum pair to your build.

The resource now is available to your Mix project as an InputStream that can be read and written to file anywhere you like or you can reference the file in the local cache.

When you deploy the application and someone else builds your project on their machine, the resource manager will pull the resource and perform the checksum automatically.

As noted above, the tasks are written in Java. You can use a default task as the action to take for a target. You can use a chain of tasks that will be performed one after another. You can build write your own task in Java, it will get compiled an executed the next time you invoke Mix.

Thus, Mix is a dependency system for your command line Java applications.

I sent today’s Think New Orleans newsletter directly from my server and it went quick. It took me some time to set it up to run from the server. I’d attempted to do this before, but getting the environment right was a build configuration task. I don’t like build configuration tasks. The messages queued so quickly, I was astounded. Last mail shot was from my laptop using SMTP and TLS. Each message took three seconds. This time it was ten messages a second. So rarely is programming time immediately repaid.

According to this Girl and Cat cartoon Large Mediums found via David Weinberger, television did not become conscious of itself until the Simpsons. I recall a Road Runner cartoon that was oddly self-reflective. Two boys in a Road Runner cartoon watching Road Runner cartoon, eventually speaking with Wile E. Coyote through the screen about his fetish for Road Runners. At seven, it struck me as out of the box.

Read Hugh MacLeod’s post on The Pourous Membrane after Dave Coustan told me that he used the image in a presentation on corporate blogging. Read through the concept, then consider how it applies to Louisiana politics. We talk about transparency, a word that has become as meaningless as empowerment. What we need is permeability. In Louisiana, the membrane between the internal conversation and the external conversation is made of latex.

I want to move my Asides to the sidebar in all my blogs. Little thoughts news in brief. I like having a carefully crafted message at the top of the main channel of my blogs.

“That’s why I don’t read comments. Because of the things that people say about people who look like me. Half of the comments are people saying things about people that look like me. The other half are people defending people who look like me poorly. Only 10% sound reasonable when they talk about people that look like me. At least I hope it’s 10%.”

We were talking about the release of the murderer of Dinneral Shavers. I was proposing the creation of a website that would chronicle the lack of progress of criminals through our court system. People would comment on the reports.

I was showing a friend of mine, who is African-American, the lucid and constructive dialog in the Road Home Questions post of Think New Orleans. I wanted to make that point that you could have a productive conversation about a contentious subject on the web.

Unfortunately, we’d followed a series of links that brought us to a NOLA.com blog post. The comments were ugly.

She then explained why she does not read comments on the web.

The Promise of Social Media

I beseech people to publish their recovery research and recovery experiences on the web. I am a professional beseecher. If you post it on the web, the magic of search will connect you with people near and far, who can help you with insight and information. It just like email, but you put “To Whom It May Concern” in the recipient field, and the search engines deliver. If you post it, when people search for information, there will be an alternative to the punditry and opinions; your own honest New Orleans voice, your experience.

It’s called social media.

With this exchange, I finally felt the long overdue embarrassment at having advocated communication on the web, when it is so obviously associated with racism in the minds of my fellow citizens.

Which is where I’ll start my series on anti-social media.

The Forum of Last Resort

Social media is at a stand still in New Orleans. People equate online dialog with the racist bile that courses through the comments sections of NOLA.com, the affiliate website of the The New Orleans Times-Picayune.

That website is in a difficult position, because they are affiliated with the one major newspaper in our city. If they were to apply strict moderation they would be accused of censorship. They would offend their potential customers.

They do not moderate much. Only the most blatantly offensive comments are pruned. The ordinary offensive comments stay, and ward off anyone who might have something intelligent to say. It does not serve as a model of public dialog.

In fact, it ends up serving as dumping ground. A forum of a last resort.

The Internet is only place in New Orleans where these horrible can be said publicly, therefore people who harbor horrible sentiments make full use of their only public outlet. NOLA.com becomes the voice of racism. New Orleanians think of the Internet as a place where these true colors fly.

The Promise of Moderation

After a year in New Orleans, the people who I beseech have come to understand that there is a value to web publishing. People see my web publishing efforts as worthwhile, but for what reasons exactly, I’m not yet certain. After a year in New Orleans, I have come to understand that the people I beseech have every reason to avoid web publishing.

I counter their objections with a promise of moderation. Since this conversation, I moderate more than ever.

Racism is just the obvious example of unsavory dialog that keeps people from opening their web browser. There are other many reasons to avoid anonymous unmoderated web conversations. If it is a subject you hold dear, such as the recovery of your school or neighborhood, an unmoderated web forum is no place to present your information. It is pointless. No one of consequence reads those comments. All you’ll get in response to your contribution will be either dismissive or vindictive or somewhere in between.

For Your Eyes Only

New Orleans is a blur of information and Internet communication. It takes place in email. The Internet protocol of choice for New Orleans SMTP, not HTTP. The address on the email message assures you that the recipient will be of one of those 10% who has something reasonable to contribute to issues you hold dear.