Down to Seeds and Stems Again

So twice in this past week I dated myself by using the term "Down to seeds and stems". The first was with Lynn (and I forget what the context was), the second was just now with a co-worker referring to the fact that the issues I have left for the next release are 'piddly' ones.

So I looked up the song and it's one by Commander Cody here's the lyrices at CowboyLyrics.com

I won't quote 'em all, but the last verse is representative:

first line spoken, not sung]   
Well my dog died just yesterday and left me all alone.
The finance company dropped by today and repossessed my home.
That's just a drop in the bucket compared to losing you,
And I'm down to seeds and stems again, too.
TAG:    G                 F           C
Got the Down to Seeds and Stems again Blues.

Of course it's been close to 30 years since I've been literally down to seeds and stems, but it's curious that I'm still using it as a figure of speech...

Social Networking Services - myspace vs facebook etc...

So Microsoft invests $240 million in facebook and makes its 23-year old founder worth $3 billion: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/technology/24cnd-facebook.html?hp

The founder says "MySpace is not based on authentic identities. Facebook is based on who you really are and who your friends really are. That is who marketers really want to reach, not the fantasy you that lives on MySpace and uses a photo of a model”...


However, the first article I had noticed a couple months ago about "myspace vs. facebook" was this one: Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

Note: this is a little 'dense' so you can skim it (like I just did). You can find comparisons by googling "myspace vs facebook". The top hit (as of 10.24.2007) is Facebook Hammers MySpace on Almost All Key Features. I have sites on both: the bob-i-lynn band on myspace and my own personal site on facebook. For an old-time band, myspace works well - the calendar is smart - and we know a lot of fellow musicians with sites in it. We've actually gotten a few gigs directly because of it. One of these was the Stone Arch Festival ; in fact I joined facebook when the woman who booked us for the festival invited me. I now have a total of 17 facebook friends - mostly nieces and nephews and 20-somethings from a folk camp I go to (plus Al Franken - the one friend who is almost as old as I am;-))

In an attempt at viral marketing, I've added a few music apps to facebook ReverbNation and 'Entertainment' which have entries for the 'bob-i-lynn' band. The RevebNation has 3 fans, while Entertainment is stuck at one (me). However, I may be approaching it wrong - the 'Hammers' article says:

Music: MySpace wins, but only just - we all know that every band ever has a MySpace account . However, with the new Facebook apps you can add your data from music tracking sites like Last.fm and iLike: in fact the top app on Facebook at the moment is the iLike app.

I suppose I'll check out 'iLike', but I don't think it will function as a web site in the same way as MySpace does. Even if you are not a MySpace user, you can view most of our content (schedule etc) - for facebook, you actually have to join to see anything but a name and picture.

In any event either site works as a time sink and I'm sure total productivity for the US is suffering for it (but then most of our 'productive' time produces too much crap anyway).

The importance of a rapid compile/build/test cycle

So this is strictly a software engineering topic; but the fact that I am dealing with an extremely long compile/build/test cycle means that I have plenty of time to post to this and probably my other blog today.

Just as some people say 'you can't be too thin or too rich' (I'm neither); the computer a software engineer uses cannot be too fast (or have too much disk space or memory for that matter). For normal programming I use Eclipse and have learned to use it well enough to maintain a pretty short time between making a change and testing the results of it. For Java, Eclipse checks my syntax as I go, sort of like this editor checks words that are mispeled [sic]; underlining mistakes in red and listing all compiler errors and warnings. In same cases I can run unit tests within Eclipse and get results in a few seconds. For other things I might need to run an actual ant build, but that is usually well less than 20 seconds - even a clean build is done in a minute.

However, today we are preparing for a new 'total' build and I need to make and test a change in the InstallShield script. We used to have a build engineer to do this but he left about a year ago and I haven't been given the means to replace him. This particular fix involves updating our software which InstallShield determines based on the GUID of the previous install. If I forget to update the GUID before I build I don't hit the code I want. Of course the build takes over 10 minutes; and if you forget to change the GUID (like I just did), it can take about a half hour between the time you make the change and the time you 'test' it. Testing is actually doing the install which takes at least 5 - 10 minutes (even thought I'm skipping as much as I can). Thus I spent all morning and will probably spend the rest of the day implementing something that probably represents a half-an-hour actual coding time. Although I could theoretically multitask, my past experience shows this to be usually counter productive.

If I thought I would be doing a bunch more InstallShield work , I could create some test environment but at this point that would take longer than to finish the thing I'm working on. AND I don't need InstallShield for my resume - I need a build engineer! 'cause once I finish this, I will actually do the build which is another long (and boring) task.

We should get paid for sleeping

According to an article in the New York Times, one of the purposes of sleep is to help you think:

Now, a small group of neuroscientists is arguing that at least one vital function of sleep is bound up with learning and memory. A cascade of new findings, in animals and humans, suggest that sleep plays a critical role in flagging and storing important memories, both intellectual and physical, and perhaps in seeing subtle connections that were invisible during waking — a new way to solve a math or Easter egg problem, even an unseen pattern causing stress in a marriage.

Read the rest here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/health/23memo.html?8dpc

This is no news to most software engineers and computer programmers: on countless occasions, I have ended the day 'stuck on something' after spending hours banging my head on a (metaphorical) brick wall -- the next morning I come in and solve the problem within minutes.

During the dot-comm era it was common for programmers to work 60-80 hour weeks (I'm sure this culture persists at many companies now); however, I always maintained that this was counter-productive: I preferred the concept that 'the best programmers are lazy programmers'.

Of course now that I have scientific proof that leaving a problem at proper quitting time and 'sleeping' on it is the best strategy, I will start logging my sleep time as productive time and get my 60-80 hours in that way.

My two sons

I always hesitate to reference a column by David Brooks as he is one of the NY Times 'conservative' columnist; however, his piece on The Odyssey Years yesterday struck a chord. According to Brooks the Odyssey years are a new phase of life:

There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. Of the new ones, the least understood is odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood.


We have two sons: Alex is 28 and Tommy just turned 22 (Oct 10th). Tommy is definitely going to have many Odyssey years - currently he is a bike messenger in San Francisco and lives on a sailboat. Alex may be running against type. He completed College in 4 years and started working a software Engineer at Adobe right out of college. Of course he has delayed marriage, but there is now a serious girl friend in the mix.

I'm not sure of Brooks' experience, since he writes:

Yet with a little imagination it’s possible even for baby boomers to understand what it’s like to be in the middle of the odyssey years. It’s possible to see that this period of improvisation is a sensible response to modern conditions.

When I was coming of age in the late 60's and 70's there were plenty of baby boomer's committed to an Odyssey life style. (Has he never heard of hippies, woodstock, back-to-the-land movement?). Lynn and I were married right after college but neither of us started a traditional career until our thirties (arguably I was 40 before I had a 'career').

So I guess all-in-all this is nothing new to me.

Here are some pics of Tommy and Alex:

Captian Tommy:



Tommy at the 2007 National Bike Messenger Races in San Francisco (he placed 14th out of 400):



Alex and Beth:

Note: I googled 'The Odyssey Years' and as near as I can tell Brooks may have coined it. There appears to be a fair amount of traffic in on-line forums on the topic so I guess I'm just adding to it.

After I wrote the title I looked this up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Three_Sons

Hacking Roku with Alex

Before I started working as a software engineer, I used to spend a lot of my free time inventing games. These were usually abstract board games for two players. The best of these was Roku (invented circa 1984) which has similarities to the Japanese game of Go. (That part of my brain now no longer needs exercising so I've really invented nothing new since). At the time I was working at the Black Forest Inn as the 'front end' manager and there were a couple of customers who learned and played it. (That was over 20 years ago so I have know idea where they are now and I don't recall their names - maybe they'll read this posting sometime ;-)

In the late 90's I spent some time creating a computer version of the game using Java. Around the same time my son Alex did a project for a college computer science class using Roku to demonstrate AI (Artificial Intelligence). His version was written in C++. At some point I 'refactored' my java version and added a way to store and restore games using XML. Alex also rewrote his code to simplify it.

In August I took a two week vacation from work. Our plan to take a long trip was derailed because of our son's Tommy's hip injury, so I ended up with almost a week at home. I started to look at the current state of my Roku code and got it running using Eclipse and the latest Java. (The code I started with was last touched in 2001). I told Alex about it and he ended up saying we should set up a time to 'hack' it. Today we hung out at his place for 4 hours today and had a look at what we'd each done.

We made the decision that using Adobe Flash made the most sense; since Alex works for Adobe, he knew which pieces to install (we're using the public versions)l. The 'product' is called Flex 3 and since it is based on Eclipse, I was happy to find out that the viPlugin works with it. We discussed some project goals and set up a Wiki on a server that Alex has access to. We've made notes on the Wiki with 'goals' and 'priorities' (but no timeline!)

Alex started working in Flex and by using some of the Java code as a model, he was able to create the graphics for the Roku hexagonal board. Because Flex is vector-based the image scales well (you can make it larger or smaller - Alex understands the math involved .. as I could if I cared...)

At this point he'll work on it a bit more and we'll make a decision on where to host the software. Since we are both professional software engineers, the first step is to establish source code control.

Of course, since the end of my vacation and my return to full-time coding at work, I have not really felt the need to 'code', so I'll still be spending most of my free time doing music.

But I am curious to see what develops.

Hey Jack Kerouac

So in this morning's New York Times, David Brooks writes a column about 'On the Road' turning 50. His main point is how the viewpoints of critics has changed over the years. He writes:

In the Times review that launched the book, Gilbert Millstein raved that “On the Road” was a frenzied search for affirmation, a book that rejected the ennui, pessimism and cynicism of the Lost Generation. The heroes of the book savored everything, enjoyed everything, took pleasure in everything.

However, Brooks says that that was "before the great geriatric pall settled over the world". Now critics are consumed with " the gravitational pull of the great Boomer Narcissus", and write things such as:

“Kerouac was this deep, lonely, melancholy man,” Hilary Holladay of the University of Massachusetts told The Philadelphia Inquirer. ”And if you read the book closely, you see that sense of loss and sorrow swelling on every page.”

Brooks goes further:

Students are taught “On the Road” in class, then must write tightly organized, double-spaced term papers on it, and if they don’t get an A, it hurts their admissions prospects. The book is still talked about, but often by professional intellectuals in panel discussions and career-building journal articles...

If Sal Paradise were alive today, he’d be a product of the new rules. He’d be a grad student with an interest in power yoga, on the road to the M.L.A. convention with a documentary about a politically engaged Manitoban dance troop that he hopes will win a MacArthur grant. He’d be driving a Prius, going a conscientious 55, wearing a seat belt and calling Mom from the Comfort Inns.

He concludes with:

The only thing we know for sure is that this ethos won’t last. Someday some hypermanic kid will produce a moronically maxed-out adventure odyssey that will spark the overdue rebellion among all the over-pressured SAT grinds, and us grumpy midlife critics will get to witness a new Kerouac, and the greatest pent-up young-life crisis in the history of the world.


'On the road' is a book I haven't read, at least to completion (I owned a copy at one point, and it may still be on a book shelf somewhere). I was both too young (10 in 1957) and too old (never on a curriculum that I studied).

Not sure if Brook's prediction will hold, although this is pretty much a non-political column, he is one of the Times' conservative editorial columnist, so I'd hate to agree with him -- but my 21 year old son Tommy may be a precursor of the next Jack Kerouac. Currently living on a sailboat and working as a bike messenger in San Francisco -- he already has many stories to tell and I am always curious as to what will happen next. He is not like the other Dixons: his older brother Alex, like his parents, completed college in 4 years and we all have had more-or-less convential middle class jobs and lifestyles (and yes, Virginia, Alex drives a Prius).

Tommy may never write the next great American Novel, but he may be living a version of it. Since Lynn worries about him, I'll close with Natalie Merchant (b. 1963, so maybe she had to studied it in college):

Hey Jack Kerouac
I think of your mother...