ben brown bounces back bearing a box:
“happyNETbox will very shortly be a open platform, open development browser assistant and information
management system.”“While there will be some functionality overlap with my former company’s product, Deepleap, this is an
entirely new code base based on different technology, and with a different focus. This is not Deepleap, version 2. This is something new.”
[it’s nice that ben hasn’t completely succumbed to the dark side]
“look ma! golly, it’s action item!”
“no, no jimmy. the resemblance is uncanny from a distance, but it’s actually the geek superhero -captain perl! oh jimmy, watch him obfuscate those evil ne’er-do-wells.”
[ geek superhero link via moodswings]
joel spolsky is merging the spirit of the cluetrain and opensource with his open blueprint companies proposal:
“I’ve begun to notice a variation on Open Source, where people share code, which I’m going to call Open Blueprint, where people share plans and ideas for creating companies.”
“It’s just like the open source process, but it’s not code I’m creating: it’s a company blueprint. I get patches from all over. I get a few wrong, dumb patches from people who suggest that I should pay everybody what they demand, which I don’t add to my blueprint. I get a lot of bug fixes, like the person who gracefully pointed out that I misspelled both Torvalds and Stroustrup. I get a lot of smart discussion about the hard questions, like equality within levels. I apply the patches that are good and ignore the ones that aren’t with a polite “thanks for sharing”.
Not a lot of companies have their compensation policies on the web. (ArsDigita does). In fact most companies seem to make it a secret; telling other people what your salary is can be a firing offense. That’s outrageous. Fog Creek is an Open Blueprint company: the “code” for running our company is up there for anyone to see, copy, enhance, and tweak.”
interesting that his first ‘app’ is the company’s compensation policy.
maybe you’ve got some extra time on your hands and you’re interested in <cheap joke>how to be a guru</cheap joke>
[via dack]
in the process of chastising linus about his lack of discipline, eric raymond makes some of the most lucid comments i’ve ever read regarding the “curse of the gifted” [it’s amazing to me that he just tore this off in an e.mail]. i certainly think the particulars of this e.mail can be generalized. i’ve got the bruises to prove it:
“When you were in college, did you ever meet bright kids who graduated
top of their class in high-school and then floundered freshman year
in college because they had never learned how to study? It’s a common
trap. A friend of mine calls it “the curse of the gifted” — a tendency
to lean on your native ability too much, because you’ve always been
rewarded for doing that and self-discipline would take actual work.You are a brilliant implementor, more able than me and possibly (I say
this after consideration, and in all seriousness) the best one in the
Unix tradition since Ken Thompson himself. As a consequence, you
suffer the curse of the gifted programmer — you lean on your ability
so much that you’ve never learned to value certain kinds of coding
self-discipline and design craftsmanship that lesser mortals *must*
develop in order to handle the kind of problem complexity you eat for
breakfast.”“But you make some of your more senior colleagues nervous. See, we’ve
seen the curse of the gifted before. Some of us were those kids in
college. We learned the hard way that the bill always comes due —
the scale of the problems always increases to a point where your
native talent alone doesn’t cut it any more. The smarter you are, the
longer it takes to hit that crunch point — and the harder the
adjustment when you finally do. And we can see that *you*, poor damn
genius that you are, are cruising for a serious bruising.”“I used to worry about what would happen if Linus got hit by a truck.
With all respect, I still worry about what will happen if the
complexity of the kernel exceeds the scope of your astonishing native
talent before you grow up.”
[via genehack]
well, shoot. i need to hang out in the blogger discussion groups more often. it looks like i can now do something useful with my cassiopeia because i think it’s a bit overqualified for it’s current role as glorified paperweight:
“So, imagine: you’re at the deli. You order a salami and turkey on a roll. The turkey? Perfectly moist. The salami? Wonderfully spicy. The roll? My gosh, it tastes just like a tender, sweet, soft pretzel! You have to blog this fine dining moment! But you’re at a deli! What do you do? What do you do?
Well, now you can whip out your handheld and blog away, my friend. The AvantGo Client for Blogger lets you do a handful of the same operations available to you on Blogger.com–
create, view, post, and publish. ”
[required explanatory aside – some may be surprised that i own a cassiopeia. “you?” i can hear you saying. “sweet jesus, man! you just landed in negativeland as far as credibility is concerned.” ” well, hah!” i say, ” it was f – r – e – e!”]
well, whadya know. AOLiza passed the turing test. or at least aol users ruined the curve for everyone:
“”I noticed AIM [AOL Instant Messenger] had a robust script library,” says Fox. “If you could hook it into a program, which would it be?” The answer he came up with was Eliza, an AI Perl program that responds to text messages with psychoanalytic-styled questions. He dubbed his new hybrid “AOLiza,” and set “her” loose on August 15.
Once AOLiza was up and running, it wasn’t long before she was fooling unsuspecting AOLers who messaged him by mistake. Now, AOL may not exactly be the digerati hangout that, say, The Well is, but its members aren’t stupid either — or at least all of them aren’t. AOLiza was working, and working pretty well. Users began carrying on elaborate conversations with AOLiza.
One person — who Fox dubbed “five” — even entered into a drawn out conversation about his ex-girlfriend with Eliza”