Sanjiva had this to say about Geir's PowerBook upgrade/migration:

Wow, this is amazing. I don't want to even start to describe the migration pains for the rest of us .. :(.

I couldn't help thinking about some dialog from The Empire Strikes Back:

Luke (after Yoda lifts an X-Wing fighter out of a swamp using the Force): "I don't believe it!"

Yoda: "That is why you fail."

This fall in our Bainbridge Island reading group, we are going through the Ruby on Rails and Ruby (Pickaxe) book. At our last meeting, one of the things that we discussed was Ruby closures, and I was trying to help people understand what was going on. Turns out there was one area where I didn't quite understand what was going on: the ability to pass an existing function as a block argument. I thought that you'd be able to do that, but apparently you can't.

A few days afterwards I finally got around to reading this post by Dave Thomas on the Symbol#to_proc hack, which I've excerpted:

The Ruby Extensions Project contains an absolutely wonderful hack. Say you want to convert an array of strings to uppercase. You could write

result = names.map {|name| name.upcase}

Fairly concise, right? Return a new array where each element is the corresponding element in the original, converted to uppercase. But if you include the Symbol extension from the Ruby Extensions Project, you could instead write

result = names.map(&:upcase)

Now that’s concise: apply the upcase method to each element of names.

Ouch. My idea of concise would have been:

result = names.map(upcase)

Or am I missing something here?

Last weekend after Mind Camp, I stopped by Glazer's Camera in Seattle. I've stopped in a few chain photo stores here and there (there aren't many in Kitsap County), but haven't had the opportunity to stop in a store aimed at more serious photographers. Since I was already in Seattle and had a car with me, it was a good opportunity to stop in. I spent a while poking around at various bits of photographic equipment. I was also able to mount a few lenses on my camera to get a feel for what they'd be like. I looked a several telephotos in 70/75-200/300 range, and a 100mm macro lens.

I definitely felt the lack of a telephoto when trying to photograph the girls at soccer this fall, and there are a ton of choices. The lenses I was most curious about were the new 70-300mm image stabilized lens versus the 70-200mm F4 L series lens. The L lens focuses *really* fast, which seems like a big plus. However, the salesman had me turn off the image stabilizer in the 70-300mm lens, and that was really an eye opener. My hands shake a lot -- granted I'd had some coffee and not much sleep due to Mind Camp, but that whole episode gave me a lot to think about. I'm still undecided on what the best choice would be, but I feel fortunate that we are now well into the winter season, which means there isn't much need for me to shoot sports action of the kids.

The Canon kit lens has been pretty good for close ups, but I wanted to see how much difference a real macro lens would make. Results of that experiment:

Seemed pretty good, although my shaky hands made it hard to get a good picture. This seems more practical to me than the telephoto, but I'm a little concerned about the length -- I should have tried to 60mm macro while I was there.

If it wasn't for the (potentially) massive Canon rebate, I'd probably just stick to working with the 50mm and the kit lens - who know, maybe I'll end up doing just that. This weekend I took some photos of Julie (with the 50mm) for her SXSW headshot, and it seems clear to me that I've still got plenty of room to learn how to work with that lens.

[via HREF Considered Harmful ]:

Best quote I've heard from a Seattle Mind Camp roundup:

my favorite was from Ryan Davis, giving a presentation on Rails, who said something like

I defy anyone to come up here and use any other framework to duplicate what we’re doing in Rails as quickly. Except Avi.

[via The Seattle Times ]:

Good advice from Paul Andrews:

Hardly a week goes by that I don't hear from a friend or colleague with a monumental Windows problem.

I tell them I'm glad to help, on one condition: Next time they buy a computer, they agree to consider a Macintosh. A year ago, after a particularly trying week of spyware, adware, viral attacks, lock-ups and reboots, I changed my primary computer to a Mac. I've dabbled with Macs since the late 1980s but never felt a need to change from Windows.

Where to start?

A big thanks for everyone who took time out of their schedule to come this weekend. These sorts of events depend entirely on the people who attend, so if it was good (and I think it was), then the credit goes to all those who showed up and participated.

I was pleased to see a number of people from Bainbridge Island, including some folks that I was unaware of. Steve Sivits, Michael Gerlek, and Todd Blanchard also made the trip. I had never met Steve or Todd before, and its great to discover more people on the island.

A number of folks are posting their reactions to the event, and much of has been positive. The thing that is most important to me is that during the closing session/wrap-up, I heard a lot of people say that they had met cool and interesting people. The reason that I got involved with Mind Camp was because I wanted to see technology people in the Puget Sound get connected to each other. One of the things that I miss about Silicon Valley is the sense of connectedness, which seems to facilitate people knowing who's doing what, and which is a facilitator of a culture of innovation. I wanted Mind Camp to be something that would contribute in some small way to improving that sense of connectedness, so nothing could have pleased me more than to hear that people met other cool people that they were unaware of. Of course, it would be great if several years from now you could point to a project or company that got started because of Mind Camp, but we'll have to wait several years to see if that happens.

About the only real problem that we had was with internet access. The SeattleWireless folks tried to deploy a mesh network across all the laptops at the camp, but this turned out to be problematic, so that the network was flaky for the early part of the event. Once it was obvious that the mesh wasn't going to work, it didn't take that long to rig up an more conventional network (which still used the mesh to connect the access points -- the problem turns out to be a bad interaction between the mesh network, mobile clients, and Window's wireless networking support). Unfortunately, we discovered on Friday that there was much less bandwidth coming into the building that we expected, and by that time, it was too late to fix that problem. That was not SeattleWireless's fault at all. During the wrapup, several organizations volunteered to make sure that we never have this sort of (backhaul) problem again.

I actually didn't even open my computer until a few hours before my session, and I didn't bother to try to blog something while the event was going on. After all, if I came meet people, why spend the time with my nose buried in e-mail, etc. I didn't even get the pictures out of my camera until tonight.

While we were waiting to get started, I met Scott Laird, and Eric Sooros (who I had met previously), both of whom are camera geeks. Acutally, I would put Scott in the major camera geek category, due to the L series lens and the external flash. Both of the had apparently read my post about the nifty 50, and immediately offered to let me try out lenses from their arsenals. Unfortunately, I got so engrossed in other things that photography took a back seat, so I never actually took them up on it. But I loved it that these guys were so willing to let a relative strange bolt several hundred dollars worth of glass onto his camera. Very much in the spirit of the weekend. I did post some more photos to my Flickr photo set for Mind Camp 1.0.

Here's a brief run down of things that I did, some on the program, some off.

I attended a discussion on women in computing -- the session title might have said technology but Liz Lawley pointed out that computing is the only field in which female enrollments are declining as opposed to increasing. It's been interesting to hear these discussions in different contexts, with different participants. Apparently I missed out on really good session on Engelbart style augumentation.

I attended pieces of Julie's talk -- Elisabeth and I were in and out of the room several times, but as far as I could tell people resonated with the issues that she raised. We may even have found someone who can help make a full multimedia version of the presentation available.

Information overflow was a big theme. There were two (unwittingly, I think) competing sessions, one explicitly on information overload, and another, led by Liz Lawley on the difference between information networks and social networks. I never really considered that these two might be different, and I'm still not quite sure that I think that they are, but there was a lively discussion. If nothing else, the discussion reinforced for me that it's all about trust when it comes to information flow/networks/attention. And for me, that's one reason why blogs that have a personal, not only professional voice, will continue to be important. It's hard for me to really develop trust without a sense of a person. One other surprise for me was the amount of consensus that something like My Yahoo will become the predominant method of getting information via RSS. The argument was that it's easier to get someone to use a new webapp than it is to get them to download and install a new app. More pondering.

Julie and I took a break in the middle of the afternoon to build some howtoons derived marshmellow shooters. Early Saturday I took a sidetrip to the Home Depot in Tukwila to get the materials. Unfortunately, I didn't notice that the T-Joints that I got we threaded in the shaft, which made it much harder (but not impossible) to get the things working.

My session on Chandler turned into what I can only call the worst demo ever. I had intended to demo a recent version of Chandler including read/write calendar sharing, timezone support, and a few other things, but moments after I plugged the machine into the project, it froze up solid. Waiting for a machine to reboot when you are supposed to be demoing seems like an eternity. I was able to get through most of my demo, but I couldn't get the sharing part of the demo to work, despite the fact that I carefully tested it out before at home. With all the hitches, I didn't have time to go through the slides that I had prepared that discussed some of where we are trying to go. Mercifully, not that many people left, and people had lots of questions about the software, the process, and more. But boy, did that smart.

Apologies to Andy Edmonds for falling asleep during the attention.xml session. Highly ironic. By the time this session rolled around, my body had reached its limits, and Andy happened to be the one in the fatal timeslot. Fortunately, a summary of the session made it onto the Mind Camp wiki.

Shelley Farnum, formerly of Microsoft Research had a fascinating session on her experiences with Groove during the aftermath of Katrina. Shelley accompanied someone from the Groove team to help anyone who wanted use Groove to facilitate Katrina recovery operations. There were lots of interesting observations both about recovery operations and about software/technology in this context. Nancy White mentioned that this session went on till 1AM (after starting at 10pm). Sadly for me, I had to leave to go to another session.

And what was so all fired important that it was worth missing the disaster recovery for? Well, sitting down with
Scott Laird, who among other things, is a contributor to Typo, a Ruby on Rails based blogging system. I learned quite a bit about Type, but I also learned some interesting things about Rails and about the Ruby community.

I've long been an admirer of Avi Bryant's work, and I was looking forward to the opportunity to meet him this weekend. Avi and I sat down and he gave me a demonstration of Dabble, which is a very cool web based database app. The data modelling capabilities of Dabble look spiritually similar to what we are trying to do in the repository for Chandler. Avi also gave me a very nice demo of Seaside, a continuation based web framework for Smalltalk. Other useful things that I learned about Avi: he's from Vancouver, not very far away, he plays mean harmonica, and the he did hack some Ruby for a while.

Preventing me from getting to bed last night (of my own free will) were Brian Rice, his security geek friend Paul (whose last name I forgot), my friend Sarah, Eric Butler, and one more person whose name I never got. It all started innocently enough, when I wandered over to a conversation where I had overheard the worlds "Lisp Machine". From there on out it was downhill. Lisp, Squeak, Slate, and more, culminating in a full bore "let me show you why Squeak is cool" demo that lasted till 3am, which is when my body gave out the second time and I went to sleep.

Sunday morning I went to Todd Blanchard's presentation on Objective CLIPS, which is a clever job of gluing together CLIPS, F-Script, and Core Data. It was an eerie experience watching all the CLIPS rules firing while Todd manipulated the GUI. Just more evidence that everything that was old is new again. At least here, there are no wheels being re-invented. Todd also brought a copy of the book that he recommended to Julie. Lots of Squeak going on this weekend.

I was sitting on the floor using the power outlet, minding my own business, when I overheard the words Blue like Jazz in a conversation between Justin Martenstein and Bryan Zug. Having read the book, I invited myself into their conversation, which turned a bunch of interesting dimensions. I'm looking forward to unpacking some of those in the coming weeks.

Eventually, we wound up with a few more people and the beginnings of an impromptu post-mortem of Mind Camp, which was good preparation for the scheduled one at 11AM. Brief (and I think) incomplete notes on the wiki. I heard two big themes (as well as several smaller ones) during the feedback. The first was that we could have done a better job of communications, in terms of setting expectations for people. A lot of people said they had no idea what to expect, several people said I wish I knew that we could bring XXX gadgets, and some people thought that we were focusing on the blogging/Web 2.0 space. The second theme was that people want to get together and actually make stuff, whether that's software, hardware or whatever.

Since I've been somewhat vocal, a number of people asked if Mind Camp turned out the way I wanted or or met my expectations. It easily did, even with the caveat of it being the first time and so forth. The most important thing isn't what I think, but whether or not people get more connected as a result of what happened this weekend.

I just got back from helping to set up for Mind Camp 1.0. I'd never been to the space before and it is huge! We'll have plenty of space for whatever people want to do. I've put up a few pictures in this Flickr photoset, and I'll be posting more, including (I hope) some shots from my new "nifty 50", the cheap but good Canon 50mm f1.8 lens.

For those of you tag searchers, the "official tag" is mindcamp1.0

The aggregator is always good for some serendipity. Here's today's.

Sam Ruby wrote about Bruce Tate's new book, Beyond Java:

In particular, I agree that in the next few years we are likely to see a shift from a small number of dominant languages/platforms to a plurality of solutions focusing on approachability, community, and metaprogramming.

It was interesting to me that when Sam analyzed Tate's list of alternative languages, there was a little discussion of metaprogramming/DSL's, but not much on approachability or community. Earlier in the aggregator session I had read Ian Bicking's post Friendship and hand holding, which gets at the community side of approachability (versus the approachability of the language), and adds some thoughts on the Python community, mostly from the point of view of friendliness. But there's more to a community than friendliness, as Ian points out:

Now I'm not saying comp.lang.python is a mean-spirited place. But Python has calcified in certain ways that Ruby has not. Just like a child is more flexible than an adult, the Ruby community is more flexible than the Python community. I think there's more open space in Ruby than Python, there's more openness to some new ideas, there's more acceptance of the opinion of outsiders. The barriers to contribution are smaller. Backward compatibility? Not as big a deal with Ruby. Add new syntax? Suggestions along those lines won't be dismissed for Python, but all new syntax is met with extreme suspicion; all the moreso if you aren't aware of past conversations on the matter. And there are lots of past conversions on just about any new syntax you'll think of -- which makes it hard to jump in and contribute ideas on that level. So I suspect you'll get a more friendly reaction from Rubyists on syntax. But then, the cutting edge of Python hasn't been the core language for a long time (by design).

When looking at Python, Bruce and Sam say that it needs a "killer app". Bruce dismisses Smalltalk (and I would assume Lisp, which didn't even get a mention), because they haven't been adopted after 30 years or so, which kind of sounds like it also needs a "killer app". Arguably, Ruby has a "killer app", Ruby on Rails. So my question is: What is it (if anything) about these three communities that results in only one "killer app" amongst the three? Rails could have appeared in Python, Smalltalk, or Lisp. But it didn't. Some people will say it's just the timing, that it's just iteration n+1 of web frameworks. But I'm not so sure. Look at what iteration n+1 of the Java web frameworks look like. The culture of a community is a powerful influence on what it chooses to pursue, and the means by which those pursuits are undertaken.

It seems a little bit odd to me that I'd have to find out about support for additional digital camera RAW formats from some blogs rather than the Mac OS 10.4.3 updater release notes... At least Rob Galbraith thinks that things are promising for Aperture's RAW conversions.

I have an affinity for long (and sometimes long-winded) science-fiction and fantasy books. A few days ago, I accidentally discovered that the 11th book in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, Knife of Dreams, was released. I would love it if there were a way to get an RSS feed that contained announcements of new Robert Jordan titles. Bonus points for a 1-click kind of interface that takes me to my favorite library or bookseller when a new entry hits the feed. And we're at it, do the same thing for musical artists and movies. If content producers want to sell it, they need to tell me about it, and RSS would be a lot more direct than TV.

The other end of this is that I use the local public library a lot. Jon Udell's library lookup bookmarklets are useful for checking to see if books are in the library, but I would love to have support for the entire "discover a book, get it from the library, return it" lifecycle. A web service that let me access my library account information would be great.

This afternoon I took Abigail to a recital to benefit student scholarships for the local piano teachers association. The performer was Dr. Jody Graves, and the program theme was "The Romantic Piano". We had a very enjoyable time listening to some excellent piano performances. Unfortunately for us, we arrived only a few minutes early so we ended up with seats where we couldn't see Dr. Graves' hands. Nonetheless, the music was gorgeous, and I learned about several composers that I was unfamiliar with, including Edward MacDowell, Carlos Guastavino (I'll definitely be looking into this fellow some more), and Alexander Scriabin.

There were lots of piano students in attendance, and there was some educational and entertaining commentary on the various pieces. One of the best came because we were going to run a little bit over, so Dr Graves gave the audience it's choice of what we wanted to hear. A girl around Abigail's age was sitting in the row in front of us, and her hand flew up immediately. She wanted to hear Rachmaninoff. When she was asked why, she curled her lip in thought, and then announced, "Big Dynamics". And Big Dynamics she got, by way of the Prelude in D Major, Op. 23, No 4.

As we drove him, I was talking with Abigail about the concert, explaining a few things about concert etiquette (standing ovations and encores), and trying to gauge her reactions. It's very important to me that she really be enjoying music and having opportunities to hear live performances, because I feel that the appreciation and enjoyment of music is a powerful inspiration, especially during those moments when music study is more frustrating than enjoyment. Her favorite (as was mine), Debussy's L'isle joyeuse - The island of joy.

A long time ago I posted about the travails of finding clothing that would fit me. The change of seasons always brings the question, "do I have enough good clothes to wear", which inevitably leads to another round of me being disgruntled about the experience of shopping. Julie dug up some links that have some pretty good ideas for clothing for small men. Just in case there are any more of you out there feeling aggravated.

On the first night of Foo Camp this past summer, I was wandering. Julie had decided to go to sleep, since she was talking the next morning. Night owl that I am, I was in no way prepared to go to sleep. So I headed back down to the common areas, looking for, well, I wasn't exactly sure. I ran into a number of people along the way and by the time I got back to the ground floor, it was fairly late.

As I came out of the building I saw a fellow with a big digital SLR taking flash photographs of the boards containing the Foo Camp schedule. Being fascinated, or rather, intimidated by flash photography, I walked a bit closer and asked "Did they come out?". The fellow and I started talking, and it wasn't long before I discovered that I was talking to Stewart Butterfield, one of the founders of Flickr. After I realized this, I waited for an appropriate pause in our conversation. I held up my (still pretty new) Canon Digital Rebel XT and said something like "I don't know whether to thank you or to blame you". Which then took us off onto a different vector of conversation.

One thing I do know is that Flickr truly was instrumental in reigniting my interest in photography to the point where I went from a non-pro account to a pro account, from sharing an economical point and shoot to wanting my own digital SLR, and from taking an occasional picture to hauling that camera just about everywhere. I've become a passionate user. You start spending money. Cameras, lenses, tripods, books, prints, Aperture, Photoshop, etc. Somebody is going to be making a ton of money off the spark that Flickr helped light. Except that Flickr isn't going to see any of that money. Most of it's going to go to Canon, Bogen, Apple, whoever. Maybe Flickr should open a photo equipment store or some kind of affinity program.

Anil Dash and Caterina Fake are having a discussion about whether or not companies like Flickr should be paying the users that put their content up there. It's an interesting discussion, to look at it that way. But it does seem a little strange. I pay (paid) Flickr for a pro account so I could put my content up there (Unfortunately, I'm in no danger of generating enough traffic to get paid for), so it seems a little odd to me to expect that I would then get paid if I generated a certain amount of traffic. But maybe I'm just not thinking straight about all of that. At least for now, I feel that I've gotten quite a bit more than my $29 worth of value out of Flickr, whether I get a reward for traffic or not.

[via Mind Camp Seattle Mind Camp: Sold Out! ]:

There you have it - we officially have 150 people registered for Seattle Mind Camp. Registration is now closed, and we can move on the focusing on planning now that we know that the event is fillwed to capacity. It was a worry, being that this is the first even of its kind here in the Seattle area, and that I am not as well connected as some of the other Seattle locals being that I just moved here. The credit goes to everyone who talked about and blogged about the event, starting from the planners and branching out to the early attendees. This is going to be a blast.

If you are attending, please go to the Session Ideas page and add your ideas. We are looking for panels and interactive discussions as well as regular old presentations. The point of doing this is for people here in the Puget Sound to mix it up and find out what each other are up to, so keep that in mind as you think about your session.

CreativePro posted an interview with Aperture product manager Joe Schorr. A bit more information than has appeared to date, including:

It depends on what you do with Aperture. I mostly run it on my 15-inch PowerBook. That's not to say that I don't enjoy the refreshing wind-blowing-through-my-hair feeling when I sit down in front of a G5 running Aperture. But a PowerBook is fine for what a lot of photographers do in the field with their laptops: browse images quickly and step through the thumbnails. Maybe tag the images they like, maybe zoom in closely on one. The photo edit stage. For that, a PowerBook does take a speed hit, but it's totally usable.

I've put a brief review of Karl Fogel's fantastic Producing Open Source Software up on the OSAF Group blog. I don't want to plaster that blog with a bunch of quotes, but I like to do that with my book reviews, so I'm putting those here.

p. 29 Stability in a project does not come from formal policies, but from a shared, hard-to-pin down collective wisdom that develops over time

p. 65 group-based governance is more "evolutionarily stable"

These two are why I like Apache style communities

p. 68 Think of a veto as somewhere between a very strong objection and a filibuster

A great and succinct description of veto.

p. 84 The ability to write clearly is perhaps the most important skill one can have in an open source environ-
ment. In the long run it matters more than programming talent. A great programmer with lousy commu-
nications skills can get only one thing done at a time, and even then may have trouble convincing others
to pay attention. But a lousy programmer with good communications skills can coordinate and persuade
many people to do many different things, and thereby have a significant effect on a project's direction
and momentum.

It's all about leverage.

p. 103 The more a project grows, the more important this sort of consistency becomes. Consistency means that
everywhere people look, they see the same patterns being followed, so they know to follow those pat-
terns themselves. This, in turn, reduces the number of questions they need to ask. The burden of having
a million readers is no greater than that of having one; scalability problems start to arise only when a
certain percentage of those readers ask questions. As a project grows, therefore, it must reduce that per-
centage by increasing the density and accessibility of information, so that any given person is more
likely to find what he needs without having to ask.

Consistency enables scalability

p. 131 Delegation is not merely a way to spread the workload around; it is also a political and social tool. Con-
sider all the effects when you ask someone to do something. The most obvious effect is that, if he ac-
cepts, he does the task and you don't. But another effect is that he is made aware that you trusted him to
handle the task. Furthermore, if you made the request in a public forum, then he knows that others in the
group have been made aware of that trust too. He may also feel some pressure to accept, which means
you must ask in a way that allows him to decline gracefully if he doesn't really want the job. If the task
requires coordination with others in the project, you are effectively proposing that he become more in-
volved, form bonds that might not otherwise have been formed, and perhaps become a source of author-
ity in some subdomain of the project. The added involvement may be daunting, or it may lead him to be-
come engaged in other ways as well, from an increased feeling of overall commitment.
Because of all these effects, it often makes sense to ask someone else to do something even when you
know you could do it faster or better yourself. Of course, there is sometimes a strict economic efficiency
argument for this anyway: perhaps the opportunity cost of doing it yourself would be too high—there
might be something even more important you could do with that time. But even when the opportunity
cost argument doesn't apply, you may still want to ask someone else to take on the task, because in the
long run you want to draw that person deeper into the project, even if it means spending extra time
watching over them at first. The converse technique also applies: if you occasionally volunteer for work
that someone else doesn't want or have time to do, you will gain his good will and respect. Delegation
and substitution are not just about getting individual tasks done; they're also about drawing people into a
closer committment to the project.

Delegation builds trust, which builds community.

There are also some great ideas/wishes for tools on pages 40, 44, and 173. The whole topic of tools is good for another (series) of posts.