Tomorrow I’m off to Boston for the Business of Software conference, organised by Neil Davidson of Red Gate software and… hosted? Branded? In some obscure way connected to? …the inimitable Joel Spolsky. I’m particularly looking forward to meeting those two characters; I was lucky enough to sit next to Neil at a Cambridge dinner earlier this year, and had a very interesting chat, and Joel is someone whose blog I’ve been following since before I knew the word “blog”. For added fun, Alex Papadimoulis of the Daily WTF will also be there - I have to wonder whether he’s looking for ideas for further commercialising that site, or if he’s building up the business that is his day job…
So, good attendees - and a fantastic set of talks, with speakers ranging from Seth Godin to Richard Stallman. It should be great.
Jonathan Hartley, a friend who is also a developer at Resolver Systems (the company I run), has contributed to the set of Python Success Stories at Pythonology.org with a description of how we’ve benefited from using Python - in particular the .NET variant of the language, IronPython. It’s well worth a read, especially if you’re interested in how a Python-based Extreme Programming team can use the language for both its internal systems and its public product.
When I run certain command-line tools from a command prompt in Windows Vista, it displays the results in a separate window. This separate window disappears when the tool exits. This is the most mind-bogglingly stupid behaviour I have encountered so far in an operating system famed for its mind-boggling stupidity. However, there is a workaround - you need to start a shell as the Administrator user (not just as an Administrator).
Here’s some more detail:
If you are not the Administrator user (even if you are a member of the Administrators group) then when you run a command-line tool that requires admin privileges, you need to click on one of Vista’s never-ending stream of “this program wants access to your computer” messages. This is pretty sensible, annoying though it can be.
It then opens a new command-line window in which you can interact with the program. I can see no value in this whatsoever; the window is not highlighted in any way, so it’s not to make it clear to you that this is a potentially dangerous program. Potential reasons welcome in the comments.
The real stupidity, however, shows itself when the program exits. Because then the window closes - taking with it all of the information the tool displayed for you. foo /help suddenly becomes totally useless. Error messages? Forget about them.
And to make it worse, if you try to redirect the standard output or error of the program to a file or to more or anything else, you get nothing - it still goes into the disappearing window.
After spending quite literally hours trying to debug a problem with the Python easy_install script, which was quite sensibly logging the details of the problem into a window that Vista promptly closed, I discovered a workaround:
H:\>runas /user:Administrator cmd
Enter the password for Administrator:
Attempting to start cmd as user "DRX\Administrator" ...
H:\>
And up comes a new command prompt. Anything you run in there will put the standard output and error into the command line it was started from, just as any sane user would have expected in the first place.
Klomp’s primary argument rests on what he calls the ‘Quickening,’ an imagined point somewhere in the future when the advancement of ‘culture’ occurs so rapidly that its pace will far exceed that of biological evolution. In his own words,
“There will come a time when within a single generation we will develop one or possibly even two new ideas… Current advancements in the ‘bow’ and ‘arrow’ industries suggest an exponential trend in the expansion of our technological capacities. We are able to perform hunts in a fraction of the time it took our ancestors, thus freeing up valuable time to ‘think’ of new ideas. In the post-simian world, we may develop into a species that is not only intellectually superior to our current state, but capable of feats beyond the comprehension of a contemporary simian.”
On the Business of Software Blog, Neil Davidson recommends using your fear of making yourself look stupid by failing publicly as a way to motivate yourself to work as hard as you need to work on your startup. Sounds right to me. When I was in my early 20s I saw the mortality rates for smokers and decided that I would give up at the age of 30. In order to make sure that stuck to that, over the years I told pretty much every one of my friends that I was going to quit then, which meant that I really could not back down. The result is that on the night of my 30th birthday party I quit, and (bar one or two particularly drunken evenings) I’ve not touched a cigarette since.
I’ve been building up my collection of classical music recently, not least because Lola gave me a copy of Aaron Copland’s excellent What to Listen for in Music for my birthday. It’s interesting, poking around the different recordings by different musicians, and I was reminded of how hard it was when I first started buying classical music to understand the importance of getting the right recording of a particular piece.
It’s silly - because obviously I understood intellectually that one musician can play better than another. For people who’ve always loved the classics, whose parents brought them up on Beethoven, it seems ridiculous that someone might think that a collection of cheap recordings (like the Naxos ones I got at Uni) might be worth having. Why on earth would you want to listen to a second-rate recording? I think that the problem is that for someone brought up on pre-recorded pop music, it can seem like the recording is the composition. Or, to put it another way - the original version, the version released on CD or iTunes or whatever, is the original version. The score, as it were.
For people like me, who grew up with pre-recorded music, let’s spin that the other way; in classical music, obviously there is normally no original recording by the composer. Less obviously, this means that everything is a cover version, and just as with any piece of music, there are good covers (think, Jimi Hendrix playing All Along the Watchtower) and appalling covers (think, the Fratellis playing All Along the Watchtower). There is no original, no Bob Dylan version (which in the case of All Along the Watchtower might be a good thing, but that’s a whinge for another day
I’m not saying anything even vaguely ground-breaking or new here, but if someone had made the Watchtower comparison to me back in the mid-90s I probably could have saved a few quid on bad recordings of Prokofiev…
Mahesh Prakriya at Microsoft was kind enough to suggest that I give a talk at the Lang.NET symposium, and so tomorrow I’m flying to Seattle. It looks like a fantastically interesting meetup, and I’m really looking forward to it.
The one hiccup for me was trying to work out what to put in the talk.
Having been on so many client and potential client visits, and done marketing material for non-technical users, it was very hard to switch over to thinking again about what Mahesh had clearly realised, and Jon Udell touched on back when he did a screencast with us: that a lot of the power behind Resolver One comes from the way it treats spreadsheets as just another .NET language.
This doesn’t mean that our marketing and sales efforts are wrong - our users and users-to-be don’t really care about how the program does what it does, they care about what problems it solves for them. But it’s useful reminder to me that I need to keep both sides in mind.
[Update] The talk went well! It was videoed and I’ll link to it as soon as they put it online. In the meantime, here are the slides.
[Update, later] Darryl Taft has written about the talk in eWeek.
Spent some time today on another screencast; this one’s also up on YouTube, and looks pretty nice but isn’t as clear as the last one. You can only just make out that my fake Web 2.0 startup has cashflow projections that would make a Bubble 1.0 e-commerce portal blush
This article (via /.) is meant to discuss whether space exploration is worth the cost, but discusses government-funded space exploration almost exclusively. This makes sense; the discussion as to whether whether commercial and other private space exploration is worth the cost is more one for the boardroom, not the New York Times. And it’s an interesting question; I’m pretty libertarian, and government-funded anything tends to raise my hackles - and to be perfectly honest, many of the arguments mentioned by the contributors to the article sound pretty weak.
But one does stand out.
I asked guests on The Space Show, students, and people in space-related fields what inspired or motivated them to start a space business or pursue their science education, over 80 percent said they were inspired and motivated because of our having gone to the moon.
When I was a kid, like most boys then, I wanted to be an astronaut. I grew out of it, but my interest in science - which eventually led to my career in technology - started then.
It’s hardly scientific to point at the decline in space exploration in the West and the decline in the number of science graduates, and the contrasting rises in both in - say - China - and claim some kind of correlation. But it does make you think.
If space exploration increases children’s interest in science, and causes long-term benefits to the economy that are not directly captured (or, I think capturable) by the explorers, then perhaps that’s a good reason for state spending in that area.
Of course - as you might have realised by my use of the word “West” above, it’s not directly captured by the funding country either. British children like me were inspired by American space exploration. Would they be inspired by Chinese space exploration?
