Alan Gutierrez

A placeholder post, for notes on how to setup a web store lickity split.

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.

The reason the Wiki doesn’t work for me is because of the concept of neutrality. I’m interested in using the Internet to further establish a goverment that is by the people. The concept of a Wiki as the democratization of information doesn’t sit right, because information is ideally passive. Democracy is about opinion, decisions, and comprmise. There is nothing neutral about it.

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.

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.”

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.

The Web Enabled Business Card

I’m talking to folks in New Orleans about blogging. I’d like to make a business of helping business reach new customers through blogging.

I have to start from a strange position, however. People are talking to be because they want a web site, not a blog.

When folks around here think web site, they think business card. To them, a web site is a business card, but on the web. They want a web site so they have a web address to put on their business card.

I’ve noted before that New Orleans has little use for social networking software, since they have so much social networking hardware, the cafes, bars, restauraunts, churches, corkboards, etc.

People here don’t use the web much. They tend to expect a brochure, or if they’ve been sold flashy gew-gaws in the past, splash screens and animations.

Before I can help them with creating a content based web site that will help their business, I have a lot of explaining to do.

A Special Kind of Web Site

You’ve got to start with Google. Blogs are because of Google. Google begat blogging.

I ask a fellow New Orleanian, “what search engine do you use to find something on the web?”

They will say “Google.”

I’ll reply, “So, you don’t type http://plinkityplinkityplonkplinketyplonkplonk.com/ do you? You go straight to Google and type in the first words that come to your head, right? That’s what most people do these days.”

Then we look at were they sit in the Google rankings. Given the web sites most folks have around here, it is usually quite low.

The genernal explaination of the value of blogging is as follows.

Once your web site is attracting Google, it’s going to attract people who might never visit New Orleans, who might never visit your shop, or meet you personally. Google searches information you see, so it needs to search text not pictures and flashy gew-gaws. You need to place more and ever changing text on your web site and you’ll attract new customers, and keep in touch with visitors to New Orleans.

I’ll explain that a blog is a special kind of web site that lets you attract Google. It’s not a diary, although they look like a diary. It’s a format that is easy to update for the author. You choose a subject and write an open letter. It’s an open letter to the people that may stumble across your web site. It’s an open letter to Google.

Over time, if you keep writing these open letters, you’ve got a lot of information out there. People will keep finding that information though Google. With comments in place, they can respond to your open letter.

Then it’s a quick run down of the basics of what Google likes and why.

1. Ever changing text means something going on here.
2. What the links say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.

Google Juice is another word for links, of course.

Here are points that I make in the course of the explaination.

• If Google can’t read you, then Google can’t find you.
• If Google can’t find you, no one can find you.
• Google can’t watch a flashy gew-gaw and say, oh that’s a cartoon hammer, this must be a web site about roofing.
• Google likes what people like, information.

A blog is a special kind of web site. One that is easy to update frequently. One that attracts customers and retains the interest of existing customers.

Life Outside The Conferences

You all know this isn’t shinola. It’s all old hat to you, the blogosphere.

Tell me California, how do you preach when there is no choir?