Appleseed Blog

Zoning off interruptions

2009-05-01T16:07:58Z

While I do almost all of my work - and maybe a little too much of my play - on a MacBook laptop, I keep an older desktop computer in my office for tasks that are better left to sessile machines. I seldom use it interactively, though, and its display - balanced on the back edge of my desk - usually shows only whichever screensaver has most recently caught my fancy. (Was running SurveillanceSaver for a long time, but lately have favored HAL-9000.)

Recently, I discovered, quite by accident, a new use for this arrangement that may permanently improve the way I work. For a project I'm working on, I had reason to comb through some video footage that existed only on one of this machine's two hard drives. It was a time-consuming task, so inevitably the usual forest of Twitter clients and Gmail windows and RSS feed-readers and such sprouted up as I worked. (How strange, yes, as if by magic.) Presently I completed by task and switched back to my laptop, but decided that I liked how all the happy little info-stream windows looked on the larger display, so left them there.

After getting back to work, I quickly realized that the constant Bing! New email and Bong! new tweets and Doink! new news articles interruptions I had going on my laptop were now entirely redundant, as these same activities were also evident on the screen in the background. My background in physical space, recall, running on a separate computer.

Experimentally, I turned off all my laptop's many new-event notifiers. I found myself in a new place: the streams were still present, and I continued to stay current with the outside world, but the sense of constant interruption had vanished.

Now, when I need a micro-break, I need only cast my eyes up at my other display and see what's changed. I do this often enough that I never fall behind; the crucial bit is that I decide when I'm ready to take another sip from my personal external-info fountain, rather than have it splash me in the face while I'm in the middle of a thought.

I realize this exact solution isn't something that everyone can implement, since not everyone happens to have the same computing setup I do. But I do recommend that fellow knowledge workers who share the need to be continuously plugged in, but also feel the constant low-level stress of continuous, clangorous interruptions, re-invent this solution in whatever way works for them. I'm hopeful that, in a small but crucial way, it's changed my life for the better.

More Perl Poetry

2009-04-24T16:19:16Z

My last post contained Perl source code that adhered to the rules of iambic pentameter. An inverse bit of hackery may be seen in these Perlish poetry generators by Nick Montfort. Both programs are 256 bytes in size.

Sample output from the second one:

the sits chit of skin spits a kit skit twins ban a twin & bill kin skins kill fill a spill chits a pit shill sill twills twill skit

Indeed.

Blank Verse via Perl

2009-04-22T21:40:45Z

It's been a while since I have some across any new attempts at Perl poetry, so I was delighted to discover this stanza of iambic pentameter code by my friend jadelennox, written as part of Blank Verse Blog Week. The longer version by damned_colonial in the post's comments is great, too.

Underscores are so 90s

2009-03-29T17:08:24Z

Something unexpected I just learned: to many, it's now considered best-practice to use hyphens ( - ) instead of underscores ( _ ) when separating words in URLs. For example, instead of this:

http://example.com/fun_stuff/my_cats.html

You'd be better off doing this:

http://example.com/fun-stuff/my-cats.html

Why? Simple: Google recommends it. According to Matt Cutts, the big G will do a better job recognizing and indexing the words in your URL if you separate them with hyphens.

This has everything to do with search engine optimization (SEO), a term I tend to shy away from, what with its coming from the sinister realm of marketing versus the practical software architecture tack that I try to stick with. Sometimes the paths cross unexpectedly, though.

For me, this happened most recently as I set up a new Movable Type (4.23) instance for a client. I was surprised to find that, by default, it enforced that all files it created use dashes in their names instead of underscores. Googling on this topic led me to discussions from people asking how to get MT to use dashes in its filenames instead of underscores - the exact opposite of what I sought, but I was intrigued that so many should care. A little more searching led to this post on Google Inside, as well as the articles I linked to above.

I always approach the notion of work-pattern changes due to Google Fiat with a bit of skepticism, but this one's apparently settled into place globally over the last few years without my really noticing. Interesting, anyway.

Ajaxload: A free spinner generator

2009-03-04T21:13:22Z

Ajaxload is a nifty do-one-thing-well web-based service. Poke in a few parameters, and out pops a little animated spinner graphic. It's optimized against the background color of your choice, and free for you to download and use however you wish.

In web applications, you most often see these graphics used wherever there's AJAX. Their sudden appearance and rolling motion help reassure users that something is happening, and they should stand by and await further results. They often look something like this: . (That, in fact, is one I just created with Ajaxload for use with Planbeast, a new side project of mine.)

I somehow failed to find this site when searching on likely keywords via Google, earlier this afternoon; I found it instead by its being linked to from some Scriptaculous documentation. Many thanks to Catherine Roman for this simple and useful service.

ReCAPTCHA: Fighting spam while saving books

2009-03-01T15:39:08Z

I recently finished a project for a client that involved installing CAPTCHAs on their various web forms. You've seen these before - they're the little widgets that challenge you to retype the intentionally garbled numbers and letters it displays in order to prove that you're an actual human, and not a node of some spammer's botnet.

In researching the current best practices for adding a CAPTCHA to an existing site, I found ReCAPTCHA, a project of Carnegie Mellon University. You've probably come across examples of this particular flavor of CAPTCHA before. The image always consists of two unrelated words or word fragments, usually resembling smudgily typed copy with some additional bot-foiling visual artifacts thrown on for good measure. Something like this:

It happens that the two words have a very good reason for looking like they do: they have been scanned out of old printed books and periodicals, part of various CMU-affiliated efforts to digitize old media. As ReCAPTCHA's own About page explains, even the best OCR software is only so-so at recognizing text, and frequently can't recognize words that would be obvious to any human reader of the language at hand.

Now, here's the cool part: by plugging itself into ReCAPTCHA, a computer working in one of these massive scanning projects can submit a word it's unsure about to the global community of people who happen to be filling web-based forms in at that very moment. It will quickly get a response that 98 percent of all the people who saw it thought the word was "doggy" (or whatnot), and that will be enough agreement for the machine's purposes.

The reason there are two words per ReCAPTCHA instance is that one of the words is undergoing this kind of trial, while the other one already has - in other words, the ReCAPTCHA system already knows what word it is. This is how the widget still functions as a CAPTCHA - the entity filling it in must still be correct about at least one of the words, if it wants to prove that it's a human. Meanwhile, bots are foiled not just for the usual reasons, but because all the words on display have already proven to be confusing to computers trying to read them!

I think this is incredibly cool. That slimy spammers have made technologies like CAPTCHAs a necessity of the modern web is quite unfortunate, but the way that ReCAPTCHA has found a way to put a positive, culture-perserving spin on it is ingenious and laudable.

Some cool CPAN stats

2008-10-09T00:51:50Z

My friend and colleague Andy Turner just posted some interesting graphs that measure changes in the CPAN's activity rates over the last decade or so. (CPAN being Perl's distributed, internet-based archive of code libraries and other stuff, and approximately 51 percent of what makes Perl my favorite programming language.)

I'm interested to see that the number of new users started to drop off a few years ago, but the activity of existing users has been increasing so much that the archive's overall activity continues to trend upwards.

If I had to guess a single reason for this, it'd involve the community getting better over the last several years at corralling many hackers together into large, frequently updated projects, which then get stored in the CPAN under a single username (as that's a limitation of the system). I think, for example, of DBIx::Class's recent ascendency, and clear community dominance, over the thousand SQL-abstraction modules that came before it. So you have fewer instances of people creating new CPAN author accounts just to upload their own wheel-reinventions.

Farewell, Hyperarchive

2008-10-03T18:04:59Z

My friend Noah, a sysadmin at MIT, reports that on October 1 he switched off the info-mac hyperarchive (hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu), one of the oldest websites on the internet. It was a web-accessible version of the info-mac archive, an online repository of Mac freeware and shareware, which before then was mainly browsable via FTP. I have fond memories of spending evenings trolling through the hyperarchive's directory structure, looking for neat stuff to fill my Mac LC's 40 GB hard drive, circa 1994.

Several years ago, when I was writing the Nutshell book, I discussed the possibility of being the hyperarchive's volunteer maintainer. Nothing came of it, though, and the server was allowed to coast into electronic senescence. I see from that Wikipedia article that there exists an info-mac website that claims lineage from the original archive and mailing list, but it's now just one more computer-news website in a vast sea. It does sport a mirror of the info-mac archive, where it's quickly apparent how little traffic it got since the turn of the decade; viewing some categories by date shows you software from the 1990s on the first page.

Though the hyperarchive's role was supplanted by better-organized websites years ago (hello, versiontracker), I won't forget its important role in the early history of Macintosh software, the web, and myself as a computer dood. Goodbye, old friend!

Looking for hackerly talent? Post to jobs.perl.org.

2008-09-14T16:20:16Z

I recently had a phone conversation with a recruiter who, after we established that I wasn't interested in a permanent position anywhere, confessed to me that she was having a great deal of frustration trying to find people with my skillset and level of experience who were looking for a new career.

To her - and to y'all - I say: Visit jobs.perl.org, and consider posting a want-ad there. In the few years the site's been up, it's quickly become the center of job-posting in the world of Perl expertise. Almost every client I've worked with independently or via Appleseed I met after they posted a job description on that site.

Gruber on Apple's bad precedent

2008-09-13T17:13:41Z

Excellent essay by Daring Fireball's John Gruber on Apple's poor decisionmaking regarding the App Store. They've had a penchant for kicking out applications due to one reason or another, and the main trouble here is that there's no way to know ahead of time whether or not your application will offend Apple until you actually create and submit its 1.0 release. For any app other than the most trivial, this means a lot of software-development time and energy not just nonchalantly discarded but made permanently unusable, since there are no routes to installing software on the iPhone other than Apple's.

If Apple maintains their current behavior, the only high-quality iPhone applications written with confidence will be published by large companies with enough clout to broker distribution agreements with Apple - with the occasional surprise gem from a hobbyist or other individual hacker. For the wide middle band of independent software professionals and entrepreneurs (such as yours truly), the App Store - and therefore the entire iPhone - looks less attractive as a target each time Apple arbitrarily nixes someone's hard work for unclear and inconsistent reasons.

Crying wolf with ssh

2008-08-05T03:09:35Z

Anyone who has used Unix more than a little has probably seen this message. I estimate I've seen it, oh, maybe as many as one hundred times in my career so far.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@    WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!     @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed.

It appears when you try to use the ssh command, which opens a secure login session with a remote Unix machine, but your own computer detects that something about the target machine's identity changed between the last time you connected to it and now.

In my experience, every single time this has happened, it's because the remote machine changed its IP address for one reason or another. That's not something that normally happens often to an individual machine, but when your normal daily routine involves connecting to an ever-changing variety of computers
via ssh, it's not an entirely rare phenomenon, either. So, I end up seeing this message once a month or more.

Its all-caps, exclamation-point-studded text is clearly meant to convey alarm and urge immediate wariness, but after you've seen it a handful of times, all that stuff is completely invisible. When I see it now, I think: Oh, has this machine's IP changed? Yes, I suppose it has. OK. It's good that I think that, but it has rather little to do with the words on the screen.

More valuable is the fact that ssh will refuse to create the connection until you edit a file containing the target machine's public key. (Typically, you just blow away the old key and let ssh generate a fresh one for the target machine's new identity.) This is correct behavior, and forces the user to think about what they're doing. I just wish that its programmers (or, today, its maintainers) chose a warning message that looks less like screaming paranoia that users will start to ignore the third time they see it, and more like rational admonition requiring a prudent safeguard. Hey, something changed. As a security precaution, I'm not letting you make this connection until you edit your .ssh/known_hosts file. You should only do this if you know why the target machine changed its identity. If you're not sure about this, consult your system administrator. That's all.

Appleseed has a new mailing address

2008-08-03T19:39:01Z

Our office space and mailing address have moved. From now on, please address all written correspondence and other postal materials to:

Appleseed Software Consulting
24 Lexington Ave.
#1
Somerville, MA 02144

This is the only pointer-change; all relevant email addresses and phone numbers remain as they were.

Web-hacker survey at A List Apart

2008-08-03T16:05:29Z

A List Apart, an online magazine about web design (in both the graphical and application-interface sense), has posted a new survey for web professionals, in an effort to construct a snapshot of the state of this young but enormous industry. Anyone who falls under the statement "I make websites" is invited to participate, anywhere in the world.

They did this last year, too, and this is an improved version of the survey based on what they learned as a result. I hadn't heard of that first attempt, but apparently its results impressed plenty of folks, as I've run into several pointers towards this followup effort. (And now you have another one.) I am definitely looking forward to seeing the results.

A bit of behind-the-scenes for you: when I first went independent last year, I gave myself the title "web architect", but wise friends advised me to drop that for being a phrase rather meaningless to anyone outside the profession - and, indeed, when I used it at local business conferences, I found myself having to explaining what it meant to nearly everyone I handed my card to. So I took on "software consultant" as a mantle, and have been trying hard to live up to that since. You can imagine, then, my surprise at discovering that "consultant" wasn't an option, but "architect" was, in this survey's multiple-choice list of job titles! "Other" it is, for me.

Moving into the distributed office

2008-07-07T20:26:05Z

Here is a Making Light thread with interesting commentary, built on an essay by Jon Stokes on "IT consumerizaton and the future of work". Lots of good discussion on how technologies sold directly (or, in Googlish cases, made freely available) to consumers nowadays easily outpaces the technology and work-paradigms typically found in offices and enforced by IT departments, often by a factor of years.

For me, it brings to mind the continually increasing feasibility of distributed work environments, where a professional team doesn't work together nine-to-five in a physical office, but instead works wherever they happen to be, applying their own resources as they see fit, and using the internet to collaborate. I find this sort of discussion serendipitous, as I'm just starting to move Appleseed towards this sort of configuration, slowly and carefully bringing colleagues on-board as fellow consultants. It's a trend I've been noticing among several other newer, information-based businesses like mine.

The goal in our case is to allow Appleseed to serve more customers, without diminishing our level of personal attention to each. But I want to do it without sacrificing the independence I've enjoyed - and which has directly translated into higher-quality work for Appleseed's customers - since I launched the business, nor would I ask the same sacrifice from anyone I work with.

It's not something that's going to work for every kind of business. While a distributed office must maintain a minimal set of IT-style standards in order to keep all its team members synchronized, there's still a need for everyone to serve as their own personal system administrators. This is a lot easier to pull off if the company happens to be in the software consulting biz.

The results so far have proved quite promising. I feel quite confident about Appleseed's continued growth as both a great source of software expertise and a great place to work. (Sorry, though; no "careers" link on our website header just yet. :) )

(A lot of) Perl Best Practices at Google Books

2008-06-18T17:08:42Z

Having apparently mislaid my print copy, I was surprised and delighted to just now find that Google Books has ~~the full text of~~ many pages from Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices online. Edit: Gah, I just realized that it's not the full text; many pages are arbitrarily withheld, and marked as such. My praise for the book still stands, however.

Those who have worked with me over the last couple of years have been subjected to my occasionally holding up this book as improving the way I wrote software faster and more profoundly than any other single influence. It not only made me a better Perl hacker, but changed the way I approach any software project, regardless of the programming languages it may happen to use. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough to my fellow professional Perl people, and suggest that even those who primarily work in other languages have a look.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some well-documented and robustly tested exception objects to throw...