Year: 2010

This is just a quick post to say that I have accepted a job offer! I'm going to be working for ITA Software in Cambridge, Massachusetts as (as my offer letter puts it) a Technical Consultant / Implementation Engineer in the Implementation & Technical Services division. Basically I'll be helping new ITA customers (airlines, airfare search sites) deploy ITA's airfare pricing and search product. It's a bit of a departure from my last job, a much more customer-facing role, and I'm really excited about it. I start in about a week. Eeeee!

I spent this evening playing with using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to transcribe (often very badly-photographed) business cards for me, and then wrote some software to turn those results into various useful formats. It was a mostly-successful experiment, but I'm not quite ready to throw open the code and talk in detail about it — hopefully I'll have it ready for next week — so instead, have some links and ramblings.

• This is a fascinating if curmudgeonly interview with the founder of New Urbanism, who seems to think us Millenials are destroying his cities with our techno music and our cheap food.
• GNOME Accessibility UI fail: I turned on Accessibility features to play with the on-screen keyboard. Now if I hold Shift down for too long, it asks me if I want to turn on 'Slow Keys'. When I click 'Cancel' it turns them on anyway. Great job, guys.
• Twitter promises a user-level streaming API Real Soon Now.
• In the meantime, Twitter support is moving into core BarnOwl for 1.7!
• Will the HTC Vision be the full-hardware-QWERTY-keyboard, Android 2.0 G1-killer, the phone I want to move to when my existing contract runs out in October? Stay tuned! (Warning, image is Photoshopped.)
• Fellow web developers: we need to stop building these sites right now. (Another thing we need to stop doing: forcing a usability survey on our users in the most annoying fashion possible. Really. Stop it.)

That's all for now, folks!

My brain, as the Far Side cartoon says, is full.

(Sorry about the lack of posts for a month. School happened. It's winding up now.)

In lieu of actual content, here's the reading list for 6.824, MIT's distributed systems course, which is what's been occupying a large number of my waking hours for the last four months. We built a distributed filesystem for it. Whee, Paxos.

It's frustrating when academic papers don't list their date of publication. I usually end up going through the sources and taking the maximum of the publication dates there as a rough estimate of it, for mental calibration purposes, but that's annoying. It's kind of depressing how many of these project are nominally open source but have been like "we're going to post the source Real Soon Now" since they were published. It's really depressing how few of these projects have obviously become something "real people" (by which I mean developers) actually use. I know other academic papers build on these ideas and closed-source commercial software probably borrows the ideas a lot but we never know, but still, the projects themselves seem like such… dead ends. Without doing a literature search it's hard to get from the paper about project X to all the things which have used it or built on it, except in the relatively rare occasion where the research project has gone on to commercial or open-source success, eg. TOR. It took me a decent bit of digging to figure out that anybody still cared about CoralCDN, for instance — the -announce mailing list last saw substantive traffic in 2006. I kept feeling déjà vu — I'm pretty sure I'd run into the Chord routing model before, for instance — but I couldn't figure out whether I'd read or been told about it in 6.033, or if somebody like OpenFT had picked it up (which I paid attention to when I was in high school, but which is another project that may or may not be dead). My biggest random take-away from this course is that I need to read up on AFS and Zephyr and whatever other distributed systems I use a lot and figure out how the concepts we learned about get applied in those systems.

Ramble ramble. Anyway — I find distributed systems an interesting, if sometimes maddening, area of study, which continue to be relevant with mumble cloud computing mumble peer-to-peer mumble stuff. I want to play with them more.

Since I have it right here and I can't concentrate on anything more complex tonight, here's the capsule review of the April/May 2010 double issue of Asimov's.

• "The Union of Soil and Sky", by Gregory Norman Bossert (novella) — As mentioned previously, I don't usually read the novellas, but the description of an archaeological dig in the first couple paragraphs grabbed my interest, and I found myself reading it in spite of myself, so that should tell you something. The resolution felt a little clichéd to me, though I'm not sure how many resolutions the "alien archaeological dig" story really has, and it was also spoiled a little for me by something that has nothing to do with the story itself. But there's a nicely consistent alien civilization that the archaeologists are exploring, there's a nicely-realized alien character and (to my eye) an alien sign language that displays knowledge of real-world sign languages. The archaeologists are interesting characters without needing to be action heroes, and are obviously intellectuals without needing to prove it to us every other sentence. I felt like they were scientists like the scientists I know, which is to say, people I'd like to get to know and hang out with. In the end it's not a groundbreaking story in the "alien archaeological dig" sub-genre, but I'd still highly recommend it.
• "Mindband", by Pamela Sargent (novella) — This one didn't grab me after a few pages, so I skipped it, but I might go back to it. It has an interesting hook — a bridge collapse mixed up with some kind of memory-erasing something.
• "Jackie's-Boy", by Steven Popkes (novella) — It was clear from the first couple paragraphs that this was going to be another post-apocalyptic story, and I'm kind of running thin on interest in them right now, so I punted it. Wins points for evoking its world with an economy of words, though, to wit: "The Long Bottom Boys had taken over the gate of the Saint Louis Zoo from Nature Phil's gang. London Bob had killed in single combat, and eaten, Nature Phil. That pretty much, constituted possession."
• "Alten Kameraden", by Barry B. Longyear (novellette) — An interesting story of the last days of the Third Reich, and it doesn't pull too many punches.
• "Unforseen", by Molly Gloss (short story) — A story about an adjustor for a company that insures against freak coincidences resulting in death, ie. "Remediable Death". It took me a few pages to get into it, but it turned out to be an interesting premise, and well-executed.
• "Adrift", by Eugene Fischer (short story) — A story about human trafficking. For all that the subject matter is barely SFnal, it's a well-written, affecting, and humane story.
• "They Laughed At Me In Vienna and Again In Prague, and Then In Belfast, and Don't Forget Hanoi! But I'll Show Them! I'll Show Them All, I Tell You!", by Tim McDaniel (short story) — The long title is cute but could be abbreviated to "The Mad Scientist's Daughter". Despite the boringly conventional gender roles on display, it's a cute story.
• "Malick Pan", by Sara Genge (short story) — Less interesting than Ms. Genge's earlier stories, though set in the same universe as "Shoes-To-Run". Post-apocalyptic, about a little boy who doesn't want to grow up (and has a bit of nanotechnological help with that).
• "Pretty To Think So", by Robert Reed (short story) — Apocalyptic fiction, and an undifferentiated entry in that genre.

I don't usually comment on the columns, though I do usually read the book reviews, which are often useful, and Robert Silverberg's column, which is consistently awesome. I got a couple pages into Norman Spinrad's review column, "Third World Worlds", though, and got fed up with his defensive reviews of white men writing books about the so-called Third World. It read like another entry on the side of white privilege in RaceFail 2009 (warning: addictive in a trainwreck kind of way), and I don't need any more of that stupidity in my life right now, thank you very much, so I skipped it.

Conveniently, I just picked up the June issue of Asimov's. 🙂