Kent

What I learned on my summer vacation

Kent Sharkey — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 23:52:42 GMT

There are (at least) two truisms when you work for yourself:

You either have too much work, or almost none.

and

You can take a vacation anytime you want, as long as you're willing to spend just as much time apologizing to customers and struggling to catch up, and you're willing to not be paid for that time.

With those two in mind, we[1] decided to take a week off and head over to Yoho National Park. I decided to document this trip using this 21st century equivalent of the old elementary school teacher's favourite, "What I did on my summer vacation."

We have been to Yoho in the past [2], but this time we were finally going to see the Walcott Quarry site: "The world's most significant fossil find of all time. Ever!"[3] of the Burgess Shale. We've been wanting to see these for ages, as – all joking aside – I do think they are incredibly important in understanding how our world (and us) developed. They represent some of the first important multi-cellular organisms on the planet, they are a documentation of early ecosystems in action, and they provide yet more insight into our evolution. In addition, they show examples of all of the major phyla[4] that currently exist (and a few more).

The walk itself was a fairly brutal (for this aging keyboard jockey) 5-1/2 hour trip up, and 3 hours down. It's about a 760m (2500 feet) elevation gain, and – this is significant as I'm acclimated to sea level – that is from a starting point about 1243m (4000 feet) above sea level. There were 15 of us, plus the guide and his assistant. Most of the attendees were university students of various sciences, but there were also a couple of engineers and a lawyer. As with any guided hike, there were the stops to discuss topics related to the area, as well as plant and animal (hoary marmots) identification. The highlight, of course, was the quarry itself.

Opabinia (from Wikipedia)
Anomalocaris (from Smithsonian)Ninety-nine years ago, Charles Walcott was up there to find examples of what the railroad workers had called, "stone bugs". He (or his wife) saw them while riding over the Burgess Pass (thus the name Burgess Shale, despite the fact that they are on Mount Field). This led to multiple expeditions and digging to extract and identify some of the strangest creatures who ever lived. The shale samples represent creatures from the Cambrian (about 500 million years ago), well before we (or the dinosaurs) cluttered the place up. They are believed to have lived on a ledge in a shallow sea, and were swept down by a mud slide into the depths, where they were preserved. In between now and then, they were lifted to their current location in the midst of the Rockies through the wonder of plate tectonics. The animals (and plants) show great diversity in overall body shape: from the sponge-like Vauxia, through various insect-like trilobites and Canadapsis, to the WTF?! of Hallucigenia and Opabinia. Alas, they didn't actually have examples of those last two[5], and only the "headless shrimp" forelimbs of Anomalocaris (those things dangling at the front of the creature in the picture to the right), but we did see great examples of the others. Yes, I'm a biology geek, but touching a piece of stone containing more stone that was a replica of something that once lived was magical. Photos and more to follow as I get the stuff off of the camera.

And now for the obligatory (and gratuitous) link to technology.

During periods of hypoxia, it struck me that the evolution demonstrated at the Burgess Shale was paralleled in the evolution of programming languages. After a slow start involving various machine languages (bacteria), we had an enormous explosion of creativity and experimentation, where multiple language forms and styles came into being. Back in the Dark Ages while I was in University, my friends [6] studied Fortran, APL, COBOL, Algol, Spitbol, Snobol and many, many others. These were just a sampling of the varied and creative languages of the Seventies (for some reason, I don't recall them taking C, Lisp or Smalltalk). Some of these languages continue (at least in spirit) to this day, others mutated into 'something else', while others died out – either completely, or essentially – when was the last time you saw a job posting requiring Pike expertise? After some time, more 'niches' emerged: GUIs, networks, the Web. As each niche emerged, there was a burst of development and experimentation, just as we see when organisms are introduced into new ecosystems[7]. The initial Mac development language of choice was Pascal, and of course Windows was home to MFC [8] and Visual Basic. The first networks really drove the power and joy of C (and its many offspring: C is truly the arthropod phylum of programming languages), although it was fairly dominant before. The Web of course gave us HTML, CSS, JavaScript, VBScript and more. We're now seeing the increasing usefulness and importance of scripting languages, such as Ruby, Python and PHP. Along the wayside we have Rebol, Eiffel, MUMPS, Prolog and many others.

I believe we are now beginning the colonization of new niches, in particular multi-core, parallel development. We've already seen some movement in this area in the form of Map-reduce, Intel's concurrency checker, Microsoft's Parallel extensions to .NET, Erlang, and others. I suspect that we will see much more in the coming years, as various attempts are made (and failed) to create both easy, transparent ways of coding for parallel systems, as well as fine-tuned "know what you're doing" methods.

We can learn much about the future of our favourite languages from what happened to the Cambrian creatures. In particular:

Pikaia: notice any family resemblance?
(from Berkeley's Evolution site)You can't really predict future success from current success. Looking at the Cambrian creatures, many would say that Anomalocaris – the most dominant predator – might rule the future. Or perhaps the trilobites, the most common body form of their time. Few – if any – would have picked a little slug-like creature that happened to have a novel structure: a backbone [9]: Pikaia.
Stuff happens, and bad stuff can easily happen to successful creatures (and programming languages). You may be highly successful, but pile a mound of dirt on you, and you'll still be eliminated (see Delphi), leaving only fossils and legacy code.

[1] By 'we' I of course mean that M decided, planned, scheduled and executed the trip. I was pulled away from my keyboards to navigate and 'enjoy myself.' Bless her soul.

[2] On the previous visit many years ago, I was accosted by a squirrel. While walking through the campground, a squirrel ran up to us, and ran up my pant leg (about up to pocket level). After we matched gaze for a few moments, he finally decided I wasn't a pine, and continued his trek across the campground.

[3] A running gag of the guide's.

[4] Phylum (plural phyla) is a major grouping of organisms within a Kingdom. You can think of a phylum as a "body plan". There are many phyla, but the major ones are: sponges, molluscs, jelly fish (and anemones), worms, insects, stars and chordates (the phylum that includes us). The broad categories that are used to identify groupings of organisms are kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species (if you don't remember – or have ever learned – the mnemonic, it's, "King Phillip came over from Greece, singing").

[5] These have been removed by miscreants and hoodlums from the Smithsonian and ROM gangs. Sadly, they also didn't they have any sample of Pikaia.

[6] Alas, I didn't get a degree in Computer Science, much to my chagrin.

[7] See Darwin's Finches, cichlid evolution in Lake Victoria and Lake Malawi, and others.

[8] Yes, I know MFC is not a programming language, but I see APIs that are as huge and "development model changing" as MFC as different enough from their core language as significant to track as real programming languages.

[9] OK, technically, Pikaia didn't have a backbone, but a proto-notochord. However, this did distinguish it from the other animals of the Cambrian period, and it did eventually evolve into our backbone.

ALT.NET Canada coming soon!

Kent Sharkey — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:46:21 GMT

Are you test-driven? Agile? Are you up on all the latest three letter acronyms (IoC, BDD, DRY)? Or are you just a curious sort who wants to know more about developing using these technologies? If so, you should strongly consider heading to the ALT.NET Canada event. It's not your normal developer event, as it's actually designed by the attendees in a model that has become known as "Open Spaces".

Whoever shows up is the right group. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Whenever it starts is the right time. When it's over, it's over.

The conference runs from August 15-17, 2008 in Calgary. Details at their Web site. I hope to see you there.

Wolverine Frogs and Greek Gods

Kent Sharkey — Wed, 28 May 2008 00:20:11 GMT

(non-technical, non-whiny post)

Like many geeks, I was a big fan of "the new" X-Men growing up (Back before The Beast went shaggy for you children. Now get off my lawn.). So, seeing this opened up some scary possibilities. It seems there are a group of frogs in Cameroon that - when threatened - drives bones through it's flesh to cut up the attackers. No mention if they hang out with toads that control the weather, or salamanders with laser eyes.

On another front, if you're looking for a nice, amusing, light summer read, take a gander at Gods behaving badly. It's a story of "What would happen if the gods of the Greeks were still alive, and living in London?" (I also spent way too much time as a child reading Bullfinch's and every other myth book I could get my hands on). It's a fast read, full of inside jokes for Greek god fans, and it recharged me so that I could take another tilt at The Ancestor's Tale again.

A little Wi-Fi sob story

Kent Sharkey — Mon, 26 May 2008 04:25:06 GMT

I was in a hotel this weekend, and decided to quickly pop into WoW to manage my auctions. Fortunately, like many hotels, this one had wireless. 15 minutes, and I was out. The rest of the weekend was unconnected, until Sunday morning, where I saw this in my Inbox:

World of Warcraft - 5/25/2008 Character Transfer Complete!

Sure enough, when I tried to log in, the password had been changed. I changed my password, and sent off an email to Blizzard, and hit the armory to see to my characters. The character that had been moved (to Bladefist, for the curious) was gone. Not just gone from the server, but gone-gone. One of my other 70s was now nekkid, and left without his hearthstone, deep in Ogre territory.

Another had his body left in a dungeon, his spirit deep in a river half a map away. Again with very little equipment, and having his professions deleted. Banks of course had been emptied. I'm not that good or active a player, so there were only a few blues, and mostly greens, but I think it's the principle of the thing.

What's to learn from this little adventure? Well, I guess it's my fault for using a public Wi-Fi network. I only want to warn others so that it may not happen to you. Don't log in while you're on an unprotected network, or perhaps run a NetMon scan to find out if anyone is listening for passwords.

To whoever did this: Congratulations. You pwned me, you are so l33t. I bow to your superiour abilities to run WireShark and/or NetMon. You must be proud.

Just in case anyone at Microsoft reads this, and you have contractors who are staying at the Homestead Inn on campus this weekend (May 24, 2008). Do me a favour and ask them if they like to grab passwords from the WiFi, I'd really like to thank them in person.

Updates to come, if Blizzard ever replies...

Update 2008-06-02: Well, after getting nailed with a 72 hour suspension for whatever else they did (fortunately, I only suffered through 48 or so of the hours), I got my stuff back. Gold came a few days later, but it all came at once, to my first character on that server. Unfortunate as I have characters in both the horde and alliance and my main is still cashless. I still had to do a couple of corpse runs (they had destroyed my hearthstones), and one character is currently profession-less. Ah well, it certainly could have been worse.

Brian pointed out that I may have been wrong and that it may have been the current Flash exploit. So, if you haven't yet, download the current version of Flash to save yourself.

So

Kent Sharkey — Sat, 17 May 2008 07:21:15 GMT

So, the word, "So" (at the beginning of a sentence) was a point of discussion today (on Twitter), and I felt it deserved a broader audience. For those who care, there is a lovely article explaining everyone's favourite Microsoftism (that isn't really a Microsoftism).