Over the falls

When it comes to open source, I don't know if I'm Arthur or Martha . Part of me thinks that all software should be free and available to anyone who wants it. I love software. I don't love paying for it. I love things like mambo and apache and subversion . I love that Brazil is finding all this extra money for her citizens by not giving it to Microsoft. And then part of me asks why people in my industry should be denied the ability to trade the fruits of their labour in the same way that countless yak farmers have done for centuries. The company I work for, TOWER Software is a traditional proprietary software vendor - you pay for the software, you don't get the code. All things considered, I think that's fair enough. We do a lot of hard work turning brainwaves into money. Giving it away seems crazy. Now, I've read the giving it away mantra from Mr Red Hat, and I know that it's possible to make a viable business out of open source software. But the reality i...

Hey! Thanks in part to chance, payday, the delightful geeky toy overloaded Still Family, and the Linksys WRT54G , I'm on the couch! Bring it on, Winter. No more shivering in the study for me!

In the wake of Paul Hester's demise , and a few friends I know who are having trouble with depression and stuff, I thought I'd share my experiences of being a crazy person. There's a lot of pressure on people to be sane all the time. I don't know anyone who's quite sane all the time. (Well, maybe a few. But generally it's pretty rare. ) When Alison and I found out that we were having our first son, I'd just turned 20. We'd moved into a government flat with the aim of trying to save some money to one day buy our own house. The block of flats was in the middle of the city, was very tiny, and had a lot of, well, seedy horrible skanky slimeball junkies living in it. That may sound harsh, but when you have people knocking on your door at 2 AM scratching their arms and asking you if maybe you'd like to um , like, buy their fridge or something for fifty bucks, It's kind of hard to have respect for your fellow man. Anyway, it was in this homely environme...

So me and my gorgeous wife ended up squished in between a throng of giggling teenagers, crammed up the front to see Jack Johnson on Monday night. I declined seats in favour of being able to get up close to the band. Personal space solely consisted of the space you physically occupy. Must be like living in India... G-Love and Special Sauce , Jack's old buddies opened the show - played a nice selection of new tunes, and some older stuff - Blues Music went down pretty nicely. Garret's freestyle rap where he called us all a "bunch of cranberrys" and fell over the mic stand was pretty amusing. Xavier Rudd , a weird furry looking teddy bear guy with the most bizzare kit I have ever seen played next. I'd heard his Solace CD and to be honest I was a bit underwhelmed, until tonight I realised that Xavier single handledly plays every instrument himself all at once. Three didges, lap slide steel, (6 and 12 string) kick drum, glockenspiel, two splash cymbals , harmonica and...

Busy busy gumdrops. In a moment of lucid stupidity, I demolished a fireplace and a chimney in my house. (I actually had to dismantle the mantle, which was the most appropriate use of that word I've ever encountered) Anyway, if you're tempted to do the same, a little foresight will reward you. For starters, if you demolish something that runs from below floor level to above the roofline, you end up with a hole in your ceiling and a hole in your floor. Aha! It's true. Anyway, I've spent the last few days away from the office busily replacing walls, floorboards, ceilings etc. Lots of fun. And man, I may be the most untalented handyman in the galaxy, but it's still fun. My approach to handyman work is much like my approach to programming - a series of small hacks: Hey - that thing doesn't quite fit... um, what if I wedge this lump of chewing gum and straw in that hole... hey that seems to sit right.. okay, looks good - glue the whole thing together, shove the remain...

In response to Fuzzy 's post on accidental architecture, I couldn't help but think about a wonderful concept that Cam coined once called "Legacy Theory" Legacy applications are applications that you have to work with because they're part of what I call the "solutionscape" - the list of systems that assist a business to function. Typically, in any given solutionscape, there's a couple of systems that are old and weird, and you have to architect your sexy new systems around them, because they are so precious to the business that the business can't imagine life without them. When I worked at the ATO, there was this enormous legacy overhead of the massive DB2 mainframes that have been processing Australia's tax returns for the last twenty years (sometimes properly!). Suggesting an architecture that didn't involve these systems was crazy - it would never work - because nobody would ever let you build such a system. That was "The way we do...

So, after reading Steve Pavlina's article on how to triple your productivity (Yeah, his eyes are too close together. Yeah, the whole thing smacks of icky self-help Christian nerdliness. But I can't help reading his posts because they are disturbingly accurate), I started taking stock of how much actual work I do. Now, much to my dismay, I discover my eight hours a day largely consists of yacking to people and reading blogs and mail. On Tuesday, for instance, I did Three hours of what I would call productive work. Three Hours! Now, I suppose that some of the yacking is actually productive - and that some of the blog reading could be described as productive by a skilled lawyer. But the fact remains that I'm not actually producing much for the bulk of my day.. Being the project manager guy who's tracking everybody else's performance, the one key question Fuzzy and I sit down with on a weekly basis is this: "What are we kidding ourselves about today?" And no...

Lindsay's post makes me sad, but also adds weight to the theory that the blogoshphere is more about social psychology than journalism. In fact, as a journalist, Lindsay has what I personally consider to be a soberingly depressing view about journalism in general. I always thought it would be all high ethics - but she'll happily concede that a story of Britney looking fat in a swimsuit , is more interesting to most people than the fluctuations in interest rates . (c'mon, which link did you click?) and journalism isn't history, right? So why is Robert Scoble considered influential? Because the social dictum that he's speaking to have elected to make him so. Again, the meme-centric view simply doesn't feature. It's not content-value that determines power, it's arbitrarily assigned by the people themseleves. The popularity of the various trashy media outlets (like here and here and here ) is sadly, not driven by content. It's driven by people's ge...

I could just be taking the bait again, but Quinny's blogging about blogging (man, is there anything else bloggers love more?) Got me thinking. Why would you conclude that having a blog gives you some kind of authority? Just becuase it's written down doesn't mean it's true! The fact that Michael is unimpressed by blogs is essentially the same as saying: "Conversations suck. I've spoken to all kinds of people, and none of them have anything interesting to say." Which maybe true, but no amount of blogging will ever change that. Generally, people post what they care about. I post things that I think aren't particularly interesting to anyone but me. If somebody else find them interesting, well whatever. I think it goes to the question of why do people blog? I think you'll find the answer lies not in journalistic integrity, but in social psychology. Having said all that, if anything, I think that the diversity of information leads to a more democratic k...

I remember being a young loser working in the retail industry, stumbling home after a long day and collapsing into one of our saved-from-the-garbage-airport lounge chairs. For some weird reason, my housemates were out. (I say weird, becuase back then nobody actually had anything to do...)and so I pressed play on the Super Acoustic Turbo (SAT) Cassette Player. (The SAT was a button that, when depressed, made the tape player sound really shit. What a feature.) Anyway, it started blaring out Miles Davis - ESP . The track was "Eighty-One". I lit a large spliff and just soaked it all up. At some point, I must've been inspired (for some brain addled value of inspired) to write something down, because towards the end of the album, Chris came over from next door and I remember him saying a big cheesy "Y-eee-aah Man...!" over my shoulder, looking at my notebook. There writ large in my handwriting, was the scrawl: "Thank god for Mull and Miles Davis!" I still fe...

On our product team at work, we have our own way of dealing with stress - Read A Spam. When people are peaking out for one reason or another (usually me) you'll often hear somebody suggest that you read a spam. It's surprisingly soothing. Stupid office politics and other stuff seem somehow less important when you are confronted with the reality that somebody sent out 150,000 emails on how to "1ncrease the v0lume of your 3jacul4te" (hang on - even creepier is the concept of measuring it...) But, the folks over at spamusement have taken it one step further. Some of these cartoons made me laugh so hard I had to reach for the vicodin.

In response to this whole blogging-about-work-in-public thing, My favourite site to check out what google thinks of you is googlism . For instance, checking up on Ian Gay isn't that exciting, but Google really likes Michael Quinn. My favourites: " michael quinn is a director of gibbons" and: "michael quinn is slowly waking up from a very sexy dream as this video opens"

Psychiatry. The immediate and involuntary repetition of posts just posted, often a symptom of autism or some types of schizophrenia. Glad to welcome Quinny back* to the blogoflogosphere. Also glad to see that he's back in form and doing what he does best. Starting Fights ;^) *Reviving an old blog that he and I started out of frustration a few years ago.

Glad to see that Cam finally joined the blogoflogosphere. Oh - and I'll see those Jazz Bagpipes , and raise you one Gregorian Chant Jazz. I mean really. What was weird before the internet existed?

Whew. Sore arms and a little sunburnt from the beach on Sunday. I spent a whole 8 hours, and drove over four hundred kilometers, all for about 25 seconds of surfing a 4-foot left break. The weird thing is, when I go over those three waves in my head, (as I frequently do) it all seems worth it. The other 6 hours of paddling and duck-diving, and numerous failed attempts at trying to catch a wave don't feature. I came back to town bearing a very cheesy grin on my head, and with that kind of chattery talk-too-much demeanor that I get when I'm really happy. The other thing that produces that feeling is playing music. Every Monday, Alex, and Ian and Cam & I have been getting together to jam, and generally mangle a varied collection of music. And it's the same feeling when we pack up and go home - a pleasant kind of inner glow that comes from doing something that totally owns your time. As a stoner teenager I once scrawled "Be active if you can't be productive" o...

This animation of John Coltrane's Giant Steps has to be seen to be believed.

Isn't it wierd how your emotional state goes in waves? If I could supress the inherrent nuttiness behind the whole Life-based-On-the-day-you're-Born thing, I could almost believe in Biorhythm Theory . (Following that link taught me that I'm 11113 days old tomorrow. That's neat.) The last two days have been so useless from a productivity angle - all this stuff has happened that's warranted my attention, and I've been content to let it all slide - It 's really hard to care for some reason. I Think maybe I've got some kind of PMS from not surfing....

A really, really useful tool for capturing strcutured data and note taking is TreePad , by FreeByte Software. (They also have a really horrible website.) The freeware edition is awesome - it's basically just notepad with a treeview, and I like it much better than say OneNote (but I don't have a tablet PC) - you can have hyperlinks, and the automatic paste feature is great for harvesting content as you go along. Wierdly, the full featured, please-buy-me version suffers terribly from feature bloat, and is so packed with crap as to be nearly unusable. I wonder if I can pay them for the free version?

When I first learned to surf, somebody once commented to me that "it must give you plenty of time to think". While that seems like a congenial pleasantry that might be appropriate, to me it struck me as a pretty odd statement. In reality nothing could be further from the truth. Surfing brings a calmness of mind that comes through connecting with the present. What you are doing at any given moment is all you concern yourself with. There's simply no time for living outside of the instant you're in. Cultivating such a frame of mind leads you to appreciate truly beautiful things. And Jack Johnson's latest CD, In Between Dreams (Brushfire Records) captures this beauty with plenty to spare. Jack is a former pro surfer and moviemaker who grew up surfing pipeline in Oahu, Hawaii. He tends to write music in his head while he's out surfing. Like he says, "There's a lot of songs out there" The collection Jack brings together on this record vary from more ...