11.28.07
Posted in musings at 1:56 pm by JohnB
I was playing Blokus today, where competition is driven by the scarcity of space on the game board, and realized that the perception of scarcity is often more prevalent than actual scarcity – and thus we needlessly hobble ourselves by limiting things that are abundant. Similarly, our fear that something might happen to us (crime, identity theft, terrorism, etc. – whatever monsters we see on the evening news) forces us to add locks and protections that mostly just result in making it hard for us to access our own belongings and data and websites.
The context for this discussion is a website (nameless, sorry) that I’m interested in working on. The startup site, yet another type of social network, holds the promise of allowing for some very interesting and powerful interactions – but unnecessarily limits its users as it guards scarce server resources and data security. Furthermore, and I’m going out on a limb here, I suspect that these mis-perceptions are one of the reasons this startup has had difficulty in raising much-needed funds. Some examples:
- Users are automatically logged out after a few idle minutes, with no option of changing the time period before auto-logout (or choosing “Keep me logged in” for single-user computers). This seems a bit draconian given that there is nothing accessible on the site that couldn’t be gathered in other ways – no bank statements, social security number or mother’s maiden name.
- A PDF document containing the public profile data for your social circle can be generated for off-line access, but only by a subset of the social circle and only for a short period of time. I think this is intended both for security and to guard scarce resources (such as server time and bandwidth). The former concern is misguided – anyone receiving the PDF can circumvent security by immediately sending it to bad people – which is unstoppable once you provide off-line access). The scarcity of server time or bandwidth can be overcome by delegating it to someone else such as Amazon’s ECC or S3 services.
- New people can be invited to the social circle, but only by a small initial set of users – and those invitations expire relatively quickly. Its unclear why this decision was made, but I suspect it was due to some perception of scarcity or security. All it appears to do is add yet another unnecessary barrier to entry.
In spite of these issues, and others, I’m still captivated by the underlying ideas that it represents and by what it could become in the future. Hopefully I can rapidly prototype my vision for an improved site and use it as a starting point to land a dream job.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 1:41 pm by JohnB
The success of the Ruby on Rails web framework is somewhat based on its ability to soothe the pain caused by the not-so-rapid development process of other, so-called “enterprise-ready” frameworks. But Rails is not the only Ruby web framework, and not the fastest one for initial prototyping(*). The faster (more rabid?) ones I’ve looked at:
- Camping. From the the quirky mind of why-the-luck-stiff (no other name given) it inspires absurdly fast development (and absurdity!).
- Sinatra. Some people who have tried Camping have moved on to Sinatra – it has a clean syntax and a simple metaphor (Sinatra attends events) and is supported by a larger team.
Its hard to imagine what faster development would look like – maybe a web interface for defining Camping or Sinatra event handlers? Code the app directly from the browser!
(*) Footnote: Note that I use the word “prototype” because that is all I have done with them – I see no reason they couldn’t scale as well as Rails or any other web framework.
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11.18.07
Posted in health at 11:16 am by JohnB
I’m learning how to use my body, with the help of Amira, my Alexander teacher. The Alexander Technique has a number of techniques for reminding us that (a) we are usually working harder than we need to and (b) what we think we are doing is not always what we are actually doing. This latter aspect is known as “Faulty Sensory Awareness” because, although we may think we are standing up straight, any observer (or ourself looking in a mirror) can tell that we’re leaning one way or the other.
This became very clear to me last week as I was swimming laps. When kicking a length on my back, I tend to believe I’m looking straight up at the sky. Although I don’t really need my goggles in this position I usually have them on anyway – I can see the beautiful sky better. A side benefit of wearing the goggles is that, if I splash, I don’t get water in my eye. Last week I happened to be kicking on my back with my goggles off and noticed that my left eye was getting a bit of water in it, while my right eye was dry. Just to verify, I made sure that it happened in both directions down the lane – that it wasn’t due to my neighbor’s wake in the next lane. Nope. Unless the pool was tilted, it was me.
Although I thought my nose was pointed straight up, and it certainly felt “normal”, the water was telling me that I was ever so slightly tilted to the left!
So, if you’ve ever wondered about whether your body could work better than it does, give Amira (or any Alexander teacher) a try. As I always say: “She hasn’t killed me yet!”. (BTW: that is an inside joke with Amira – she wouldn’t allow that quote on her website so I had to come up with a different one)
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