Alan Gutierrez

Last week, I spoke in a tone I regret to a woman I respect. It is foolish to feel put upon. Don’t do it. I got a message today from a different worman that I respect, where she voices how put out she is. It is a rather poisionous little message. I don’t want to be exchanging this currency. I tagged it “Don’t Be That Way” using Mail Tags. I’m going to create a search folder. When I’m feeling exasperated I’ll read through them, in the hopes that I’ll catch myself, and not say something I don’t mean. It might have the opposite effect. Maybe I need to tag the good things that people say, refocus my efforts on them.

Note: If you’ve forgotten the Series of Tubes speech, Jon Stewart does an excellent job of explaining Ted Stevens’ explaination of the Internet. A classic, you can hear the whole Seriese of Tubes speech on YouTube.

The following story does little for my confidence in the future of Michgian’s technology industries. It is a cause for concern for those of us tracking the decline of it’s manufacturing industries.

A man in Grand Rapids, Michigan was arrested and charged with a felony for checking his email from a coffee shop’s WiFi connection from the comfort of his parked car. The cringe worthy local news story casts it as human interest in Wireless (In)security — A wireless felony, while Ars Technia recongnizes it for the statewide humiliation that it is in Michigan Man Arressted for Using Cafe’s Free Wifi From His Car:

An enterprising police officer looked it up on the books, and based on a year 2000 reivision of a 1979 law, checking your email from an open Wifi hub in Michigan is considred computer tampering. The man is actually going to pay a $400.00 fine and do 40 hours of community service for this Michigan crime.

New Orleans has whole streets covered with Wifi from various providers, plenty of open hubs, and we’re establishing mesh and municipal Wifi networks. Our pedestrian streets have coverage from many different hotspots. In fact, do any of us even know if we’ve connected our current coffee shop’s Wifi, or the Wifi of the bar next door? People put up these hubs and don’t think about it.

The reactions of the denizens of Grand Rapids in the forums of WOOD are very different form the reactions of the savvy at Ars Technia who make such lucid comments as…

> This law needs to be challenged. A wireless access point is a radio transmitter. The Communications Act does not allow broadcasters to place restrictions on who may access their transmissions. The coffee shop cannot pick and choose who can use their public unsecured radio broadcast. It falls upon the shop owner to secure access if he wants only his customers to use his wireless network.

It is enough to make you cluck your tounge and shake your head and think, “Well, at least I don’t live there anymore. I don’t have to worry about this.” That can’t be something that Lansing wants a expatriot native Detroiter and nine year Ann Arbor resident to think.

Regarding the use of open Wifi hubs the Kent County procescutors office is stern.

> The next time you’re tempted, though, think of Sam Peterson. “People need to know that this isn’t legal and if you get caught there are some pretty serious consequences.”

Again, I don’t have to worry about this.

This strange anxiety sets in. It makes my writing petulant, peevish and snippy. It concerns me, because it has been a direction that I’ve been taking thoughout the course of the week. It seeps out into my writing. I was quite content a few days back, feeling in control of the infomration and eager to release new software. It’s slipping. I’m only blogging this, so I can remember it, put my finger on how it feels. I want to have this thread ready when it lifts, so I can think about how it was lifted. It is a feeling from a time past. It is a feeling I associate with isolation.

Cats In Sinks, a Flickr photo pool.

One thing that I’ve come to allow myself in recent days, is this; Strata is designed to support the objectives of Memento.

No longer will I tell the reader to suppose, for example, that a Strata B+Tree is used to implement multi-version concurrency control, when offering up examples.

No. This implies that there are many other imagined uses.

Rather, I will ask the reader to keep in mind that Strata was designed to implement multi-version concurrency control. I will then offer up an example from Memento.

Other applications for this B+Tree data structure will be apparent to other people when it has been released, deployed, and proven.

An Honest Question

> How does your project compare to project X’s feature Y?

It is an honest question, people are looking for a point of reference. Answer the question. You do not need to provide an answer in the form of an implementation of feature Y.

When asked honestly, answer honestly in terms of problem statements and computing concepts, rather than feature comparisons. I’m not marketing a product, but making an open source contribution. Still, if were to consider my market, talking in terms of the code and concepts is going to appeal to the demographic of programmers who think about problems and implementations.

Someone else may come to understand the workings of Strata. They may suggest an implementation of some desirable functionality toward the goal of implementing a different application. That is open source.

More simply, someone may attempt to use Strata in their application, and come forward with a clearly defined problem, a request for feature that they will test and deploy, if a solution is available. That is open source.

A Dishonest Question

> How does your project compare to project X’s feature Y?

It can be a dishonest question.

There are times when I’ve encountered the feature matrix killjoy. They want to engage you in a comparison to a more mature project, or one that has at least published a feature matrix.

These conversations are combative, not collaborative. Implicit the question, what makes you think your project is better than project Y?

The answer is, I don’t know about project X. I have no use for feature Y. I have generously provided the source code under an OSI approved license. You have the source. Please feel free to investigate this question for yourself.

Picture Infinity

It is a pity, a failure point, that when I’ve encountered this attitude, I’ve let it guide me.

I childishly follow every tangent. It has felt compulsive when I so follow. I childishly approach every trade-off as if there were some as of yet undiscovered algorithm that would eliminate compromise. It has felt obsessive when I so approach. It makes me worry about myself.

How refreshing to realize that pathology is not necessary. (For this I owe you, my fellow New Orleanians, for consistently perceiving weaknesses as human.)

It is my sometimes charming (though more often not) character defect, to seek universal approval. It is yet another manifestation. One of many.

Software cannot have universal approval. Software is discrete. Trade-offs are inherent.

It is such a hard truth, that even I will have to come to accept it.

Software may yet save me from myself, once again.

In my new world, the one that I cling to desperately, where every morning I write, the writing begins to feel like physical exercise. I push myself on a topic until my mind starts to turn to jelly. I feel an emotional exhaustion set in. Then I push myself futher. At that point the writing drops off, becomes rambling.

Right now, I’m switching topics. I’m wondering if my mind will not be so gelatinous as the new topic sets in. Indeed, as I begin to think about this new topic, my mind sharpens.

On that last topic, did I push myself to the point where my mind needs to take the topic away from me, back into it’s recesses? Is it now that the process begins, by which the answers will later surface, as they do?

I carry a voice recorder now. Answers come to me when I’m away. When out walking in New Orleans. After I murmur into the device, a decision is taken. My chest rises and and I can feel my lungs fill with air.

I am cultivating the mechanics of creativity. Allowing nature to take it’s course. I am learning to live a life of delayed gratification. The trick is to make sure you are prepared to revel in the gratification when it arrives.

That was to be the title of a wail of anxiety about how it’s the last minute when I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do. Just wrote an excellent little post in Kiloblog about how to use Chip In to raise money for Bayou Boogaloo. Then, before I press save for the first time, I wonder, should I post this at Daily Beta. I’ve not done anything with that site in a long time.

Now, something that was supposed to make life faster, is making it slower. Injecting long term decisions into short term decisions. This is driven by a false sense of permanence. The sense that permalinks mean that one must choose carefully.

The point of this post, and of this theme, Getting Things Half-Done, is to study all the places where I stop. How do you overcome the dead stop? The paralysis of indecision?

In this case, it’s a variation on the fear that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. When I write a post, I have one chance to position it. I had better choose wisely. That is the foreboding nonsense that speaks in hushed tones in the back of my head. How neurotic.

In the last year, I have become more of a programmer. Still not (self-)published, but at the very least plugging away, happy with the foundations, and not turning back for another rewrite. This comes from a way of dealing with the many little murmurs of doubt. I write it down the doubt in the form of a question. Then I wait for it. In a day or so, the answer comes.

This is not always going to work. Waiting for it assumes that you have a the knowledge of the technique necessary to have those moments of illumination. More to the point, am I really going to allow a quandry like, “where do I post my little rant?” to simmer in the background? It’s not really a problem to be solved.

With some problems, stop means wait. With others, stop means nothing.

I’ve spent the last week alone, trying to get caught up with work that is not directly related to Think New Orleans. I’ve not been paying much attention to the New Orleans bloggers, so excuse me if I’ve missed something that is important. There are plenty of comments in the wings of Think New Orleans and Blogometer. Thank you for leaving your comments, and moving away from email.