Matt O’ Rama

Mobius Sliced Linked Bagel

Mathematically Correct Breakfast — Mobius Sliced Linked Bagel.

This isn’t exactly programming related but it’s very geeky. Next time we have bagels at work the keyword will be: Awesome.

A New Theory of Awesomeness and Miracles

A New Theory of Awesomeness and Miracles, by James Bridle, concerning Charles Babbage, Heath Robinson, MENACE and MAGE.

My Persona and The Other Matt Grommes

Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman

This is a very interesting data visualization art piece from MIT. You enter your name and it looks for everything online it can find about you. For reference, here’s mine:

Although I should say this is different than the first time I put my name in a few days ago so I’m not sure what they use to determine that picture. There’s nothing behind the scenes I can see about it either. I’d like to be able to click on the bar and see the inputs but that doesn’t appear to be possible.

There is one weird thing about this project though, and it illustrates the problem with googling for people for job interviews, dates, etc. A few months ago another guy with the name Matt Grommes was involved in a car accident where the other driver died. This has nothing to do with me but it shows up in this bar and in any searches for my name, if you go past the first page of results. The legal section of the bar is not about me at all but it shows up pretty prominently. As we use these type of tools (I can see something like this being regularly attached to resumes by the HR department in the near future) more and more, they’ll have not only include more data, but be able to filter out “other” Matt Grommeses. My name is not very common and I still have another guy’s data in my Persona. Imagine what he thinks if he were to put his name in.

Tr.im and The Short URL Conundrum

I had been writing a post about how my new favorite URL shortener, Tr.im, was shutting down and stranding all my precious links when just this evening they apparently decided to keep the service running. I should be happy about this but I still feel weird about the whole thing. So in place of the original boohoo post about Tr.im, I’m going to think out loud about the URL shortener business/ecosystem for a bit.

I’ve been thinking for awhile that Google should play a role in this URL shortener ecosystem. They’re big enough not to go away and they maintain such a central role in the web anyway I think they’d be a good default choice. But they’ve shown no interest in getting into the shortener business as a competitor to Tr.im, Bit.ly, and the rest so I was thinking they should take the role of a shortener warehouse. If a service like Tr.im goes away, they transfer the list of links and short codes to Google and the URLs keep working at a minimum. Apparently Bit.ly is trying to get something like this going but I have a feeling since they’re in the business, their competitors aren’t going to sign on. And I fear Tr.im has helped sow some amount of distaste for Bit.ly with their blog posts about Bit.ly’s favored status with Twitter so that isn’t going to help.

But narrowing this down to Tr.im, I’m trying to decide if I should start using them again. I like them much more than Bit.ly, but this incident hasn’t helped them at all. They said originally they couldn’t make a business out of Tr.im if Twitter was going to explicitly favor Bit.ly. This is obviously still true. They’re not on firmer ground now than before, they’ve just made a bunch of noise. The tempest-in-a-Twitter they caused with their frankly somewhat offensively curt shutdown messages may end up causing Twitter to rethink their One URL Shortener To Rule Them All stance but if the favoritism really comes from their VCs and board members personal connections, I doubt it. They have to know if they starve out Tr.im and the rest, people will grumble but in the end we’ll all move on.

According to some stats I saw, Tr.im was a minuscule percentage of the number of links on Twitter. I think the brouhaha about Tr.im shutting down was really a reaction to the realization that one of these services could just evaporate almost overnight. And that isn’t going to help them survive but it may kick some kind of warehousing service like I mentioned above into gear. They may have been tricked by feelings of importance when really they were just the canary in the mine, in the end serving only as a warning to everybody else.

So Tr.im hasn’t been saved by this, the creators just caved and the service will limp along not making money like it wasn’t doing before. And on top of this, their willingness just to shutter the service with very little notice doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Until people start hearing news about money coming into the service or of a buyer swooping in where one hadn’t been willing to swoop before, users like me are going to switch if just to minimize the number of links a shutdown would endanger. They may have just doomed themselves to a more public death later with this resurrection.

Is The Digital Age Stamping Out Serendipity?

WE’VE gained so much in the digital age. We get more entertainment choices, and finding what we’re looking for is certainly fast. Best of all, much of it is free.

But we’ve lost something as well: the fortunate discovery of something we never knew we wanted to find. In other words, the digital age is stamping out serendipity.

via Ping – The Digital Age Is Stamping Out Serendipity – by Damon Darlin in NYTimes.com.

Sometimes I read something that’s so far out of my experience that I have a hard time processing it. This article is one of those times. I can’t decide if I’m misunderstanding the point of the article or if it’s really not a problem. The author of the article, Damon Darlin, is saying that the internet and ipods and in some weird way, Twitter, are taking the “randomness” out of finding new stuff. Balderdash, I say. :)

First, he says for some reason finding stuff on a friend’s bookshelf or album collection is “serendipitous” but finding new music on a blog or Twitter is “group-think”. Somehow if people online say something is cool it’s been “filtered and vetted” but finding the same thing via a friend isn’t. I don’t get it.

Not only does his argument not make sense, he’s looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope. It doesn’t matter where you found something new because it’s new to you. No matter if you find something through a friend or via a review linked on Twitter or on a Top 10 list, it’s new to you. It’s still serendipitous if you like it.

Every year when the Top X Of The Year music, book, and movie lists come out I go through some of them and see if there’s anything interesting looking. I usually download whatever looks halfway good in the Pitchfork top albums list, then delete anything I don’t like and buy what I do like from Amazon’s MP3 store. I’ve found an unbelievable amount of great music this way. (Seriously, try it.) I don’t pay attention to radio or music blogs or magazines so this is my way of finding new stuff. Is this worse than finding an album though a friend? I can’t see how it is. But it’s still filtered in the strongest way, being a Top 10 list or whatever. When I first saw The Knife as the #1 album on the Pitchfork list a few years ago I thought it was them being willfully weird until I listened to the album a few times, then a few more times, then a few dozen more times until it became one I still listen to regularly. I found my favorite band, The Hold Steady, completely randomly when somebody on a podcast recommended I listen to some teenage girl’s music podcast long ago and Your Little Hoodrat Friend was one of the songs she played. I was hooked from the first 30 seconds of that song and if that’s not serendipitous I don’t know what is.

I really can’t even see what the heck Mr. Darlin is talking about, even if you cut out the mostly pointless but seemingly required paragraphs about Twitter. The internet / digital age has brought so much serendipity to my life this just seems like he must be talking about something else. But like I said, I don’t really care (and I don’t think it matters) where something new came from as long as it’s new.

(During this post I mentioned 2 bands you really should try. There’s some serendipity for you. And if you listen to them, you’re welcome. :))

The Coefficient of User Innovation Friction

In February 2007, Mike Adams, who had recently joined Automattic, the company that makes WordPress, decided on a lark to endow all blogs running on WordPress.com with the ability to use LaTeX, the venerable mathematical typesetting language.

<snip>

Since then, as reported by observer/participant Michael Nielsen (1, 2), Tim Gowers, Terence Tao, and a bunch of their peers have been pioneering a massively collaborative approach to solving hard mathematical problems.

via Jon Udell, who is The Man

This story is cool in at least 2 ways. First, it warms the cockles of my hacker heart to hear that someone decided “on a lark” to add LaTeX to Wordpress. I never used LaTeX for anything only because I’m not a math person and I didn’t make it far enough in school to go beyond plain text. But deciding you’re going to add support for a beloved but extremely niche typesetting language to the blog software you work on is an impressive thing no matter what.

The main reason this story is cool is the collaborative project that emerged due to this niche feature. Sure, mathematicians could have, and I’m sure did, collaborate on sites before this but from what I read in the comments, adding formulas into websites previously was time-consuming at best. A long time ago there was talk about an addition to HTML called MathML to do just this but I’m not sure what happened to that, and in any case LaTeX is an accepted standard people are used to. So having support for this kind of thing is just the perfect reduction in friction that can help something new emerge. Having to learn a new standard or go through a whole process to display formula is enough trouble that most people won’t participate. If people can re-use existing skills in a new place, more people can contribute and do new things.

When Mike Adams added this feature, I’m sure he thought he helping a few mathematicians add formulas to their blogs and that was it. But the important thing was the removal of friction. If you can remove just a little friction from a social tool that a lot of people use, you’re opening it up to allow people to create new things you never thought of. When a new tool like Twitter or Google Wave comes out, I never pay much attention to the uses the creators come up with. What I really watch out for are the things the users come up with. It cost nothing for users to add hashtags to Twitter, but it’s incredibly useful and cool and will probably end up being part of how they make money. Whenever Google Wave comes out, the important things will be the ones people add later. If the friction is low enough.

How Physicists Build a Bridge

How Physicists Build a Bridge « Joe Doliner

This is a short story and well worth reading.

It reminds me of a story I heard about Neils Bohr:

“Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer.”

One student replied:

“You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building.”

via the almighty snopes

I love this kind of thing.

I’m Number 1(96)!

Top 200 Blogs for Developers (Q2 2009)

My former fellow co-author on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com, Jurgen Appelo, periodically compiles a list of top blogs for developers. This time around, he did a Top 200 and I was surprised to see this very blog at #196! If you clicked over here from there, welcome! Since the list came out on the day I did my first post in a month (!), I’ve been self-shamed into posting more. :)

I’ve been working a bit with JavaFX so I’ll be posting about that and we just started on our next big project at work so I’ll probably be posting about that as well. On top of those topics I’ve made a list of important books I need to work through to help my Java programming so I’m planning on writing about that process. All in all, lots of geeky goodness to come I hope.

Geek Humor

1936 – Alan Turing invents every programming language that will ever be but is shanghaied by British Intelligence to be 007 before he can patent them.

1936 – Alonzo Church also invents every language that will ever be but does it better. His lambda calculus is ignored because it is insufficiently C-like. This criticism occurs in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.

1940s – Various “computers” are “programmed” using direct wiring and switches. Engineers do this in order to avoid the tabs vs spaces debate.

from “A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages”

hahahaha. Except for the part about Perl. :)

FizzBin!

We need a word that says “I know tech” when you’re on the phone with tech support, you’d just say “Fizzbin” and they’d know.

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – FizzBin – The Technical Support Secret Handshake.

Yes, I fully support this idea. I hate having to call tech support and sit through the first 5 pages of the support script but I also feel like a jerk when I have to say “I ran an ISP for 5 years, I know what I’m doing”.