A Tribe Called Quest (Documentary)

I just saw the A Tribe Called Quest documentary. Wow, besides all the beef or non-beef or whatever from Q-Tip I was getting wind of…. I enjoyed the movie. The movie spoke to me because it was my time, my music. Soul was my parents music that raised me, but it was hip hop that I claimed for my own. It was hip hop that was home to me. A Tribe Called Quest was a part of my growth and coming of age as a youth in NYC.

I’ll have to come back to this post, I am just too amped on the resurfacing of my formative years to sit still to write this.

“Shortly let me tell you ’bout my only vice…. It has to do with lots of lovin’ and it ain’t nuthin’ nice… it ain’t nuthin’ nice… it aint nuthin nice”

MME: The Story Of Stuff…

I just watched and read through the site The Story Of Stuff and basically it is awesome! It is very very well done. This is not “new” information, but information that has been well put together to provide a whole view of the system that we are in. I for one think this should be compulsory viewing for everyone participating in this system. Well over 6 million people have viewed the site already, so if you haven’t get on it.

There should be something like that for teaching people how to use, or better yet, NOT USE credit. Credit (specifically, credit cards) is such a key part of this whole consumption society (the golden arrow). If people were educated about money and about their roll in this system then people would not behave the way they do. (Yes, I hold out faith that people will do the right thing once armed with the right information.)

I feel we need to return to a responsible, more thrifty society. When I was a kid, I knew that I could not afford to get something and break it or loose it or be irresponsible with it, because quite frankly there was not another one where it came from. Well, first of all we couldn’t afford to replace items since things that we had were so hard to earn, as we were not well off. We had to be thrifty. Perhaps the fact that the economy is going down the shitter is a ‘correction’. It is the uber wound up economy going through a natural metamorphosis to get us all back to it’s lower energy state (can you tell I took college physics and chemistry ). These days we should be extolling the virtues of conservation and thrift. We should be holding teachers in these venerated positions now occupied almost exclusively by entertainers and athletes. Education is truly the only way we are going to save ourselves. With emphasis on education, accountability and the Golden Rule we may be able to get ourselves out of this mess. We should not be told how to feel and what to do and how to be by corporations through their advertising mind fucks. Along those lines see if you can get your hands on the DVD “The Century Of The Self (1-4)”. It is a great documentary.

Those that know better must do better to demonstrate to others how to walk the path. Teach by example, and never be ‘too smart’ to learn from anyone. Some folks that I talk to, that feel that same way I do, and share this truth with others get discouraged because they don’t see their audience “listening”. Please don’t be. You can’t change people, you can only give them information. Don’t get hung up on changing people, or at least having them change in some way that is demonstrable to you, for you to feel validated that they heard you. If you said it, if you walk your path, you will be heard and seen. If we all do that, hey, before you know it the world gets closer to a true more perfect union.

Anyway, I have to return this soap box now. All the best.

Tech: In The Fray – Distributed Computing et. al.

So okay, I have been really rolling up my sleeves, digging into the distributed computing world again. I took a break from the subject briefly as I was hemmed up being a company’s code whore, rabble rabble rabble, chomp chomp pachewy chomp . “But that’s alright, cause now I’m back so kill all the rumors and straighten the facts”. I broke out of that place and joined an upstart little startup search engine that could‽ . They had the hubris to go up head to head and play with the big G. I was enamored with the place and the idea and the people and as it turned out, I learned a lot about search and building ‘internet scale’ systems. I was turned on to map-reduce and learned what it took, from A-Z, to make a big distributed system serving petabytes of data, and how make it fast and scalable. It was not without it’s trials and tribulations, but that’s where most of the good learning happens, right‽ . I have since parted ways with said company, but the fire that they rekindled in me as a big systems developer is burning bright. I have been immersing myself back into the state of distributed computing reading paper after paper and blog after blog and loving it.

I have decided that I would start my own company. I have a service/product that I want to build that I think will be HOT (read: fun and lucrative). I have been thinking about it for years now. The question at hand is, okay smarty… how do you build it right? At least make the rightest first steps I can make. So, here are the questions that goes through my mind when starting from tabula rasa.

Questions:
What platform? (Linux)
What source code management system to use? (GIT)
What language(s) do I use? (Java and Python)
What web server should I use? (Apache or Lighttpd – not decided)
What build system should I use? (ANT)
How am I going to store the data? (Schema-less dunno which one yet)
How am I going to process the data? (Hadoop MapReduce)
What will I use to build the front end? (HTML/CSS/JavaScript – (JQuery))
What will be the engine for the front end? (Web.py)
How can I keep learning and having fun!? (Don’t work for anyone anymore!)

So, I started with the easy things first. Pretty much 99% of my development over the past 14 years has been on a *NIX platform, primarily LINUX so… I’ll stick with what I know, the good stuff – Plaform = LINUX. That was easy. Okay so as for what scm to use; well I was using Mercurial (Hg) at the last gig which was a refreshing change from CVS that I was using up until that point. I remember seeing a Google presentation about GIT it sounded great so I tried it… and fell madly in love! Regarding what programming language to use; well that was an interesting one. I have been coding in Java since June of 1995, it is my home language and I think it is pretty freakin’ awesome, so then Java is my primary choice of language. But Java, as great as it is at most things, I always found it il-suited for the quick changing, desultory world of web development (IMHO). I was introduced to Python in this context over the past year and a half and have seen it’s merits as a front-end / rendering engine language and platform. So I decided that having the best of both worlds would leave me with Java in the middle and back-end and Python on the front-end, using Thrift as the over the wire glue. Thrift essentially hedges my front-end language bet, being able to wholesale replace the rendering engine language if necessary. Okay so cool . Next: Hmmm… as for web servers, the jury is still out on that. Apache and Tomcat are great and tried and true, but I have been hearing lots of good stuff about Lighttpd (lighty) especially in the context of Python. As the front-end stuff is my weakest skill set I will wait to see how that shakes out. Moving on; the build system, well, as the child of Java that I am, I am going to have to with ANT. IHMO it is the only way to go. So okay, so much for the easy questions …. Now the harder ones.

As I have been observing, the word on the net is that schema-less databases are in and the concept and implementations are hitting their stride. Well I am not one to go with fashion, so I took a really good look at the issues and arguments to be made both for and against schema-less solutions. It turns out that there are some strong salient points to be made for using schema-less databases ( Ex: great post from FriendFeed etc…, I can get into that in other posts but for now, trust me ). For me, I have never been a fan of elaborate data schemas nor the copious SQL that went along with them. I always felt that the SQL query language was conflating data storage with data manipulation and forcing you to forecast data decisions and relationships too early in the software life cycle instead of simply capturing and persisting the data, allowing for it to be manipulated as necessary as the evolution of the program dictates; not leave you going through code and mental gymnastics on how to fit a round peg (once square), into a square hole. Besides I feel that schema-less is the better way to go for scalability and indeed simplicity. So that answers how I am going to store my data, but then what would I use? I came across a really nice blog post “Anti-RDBMS” that did a break down of a few front running candidate systems… it got me spinning off digging into these offerings. At the moment the front runner is Project Voldemort but I have not ruled out HBase or Cassandra. As I have been researching these tools I read the Dynamo paper and fell in love with it. It is one of the best papers that I’ve read in a long time. It lead me down a rabbit hole of papers (will list in a future post) that have kept me fascinated and wide eyed and eagerly learning. And pretty much that is where I am… reading and learning and excited!

Thus far, I have proven the path with respect to my nascent project. I can go from the front-end, in Python served up by web.py via lighttpd – talking Thrift – to the middle “business logic” layer – to… a the faux back-end yet to be determined. I can build and deploy it from ANT and it’s in GIT and all is well. Now I just need to settle on a back end and then get back to coding. Oh by the way, I have had to teach myself JavaScript as I have surrendered to the webbies. They win, I guess (I’ll rant on that in another post). These days you can’t do a damn project without them ! So I am having to have to become a bit of a webbie myself. After much investigation I decided to use JQuery as my AJAX toolkit. There is a good blog post from Mike Miles that was good reading and has some good links fleshing out this issue.

Okay, more on things distributed in future posts, I have lots to add and things to share, but I’ll stop here for now. I’ll also try to be more informational and objective so that I don’t sound so opinionated…. I’ll try .

Slush: Cuil Theory…

It never ceases to amaze me how creative people on the internet are. Here is this site I found about “Cuil Theory”. It was derived by the interesting characteristics of the results from one of the new search engines named Cuil. Anyway, I have to give these people credit for creativity and an A+ for execution. I wonder how the big dawgs at Cuil feel about this?
Here is the sight CuilTheory

Politics: President Obama – History

I am so filled with pride and hope to be witness to the ascension of Barack Obama to the presidency. Okay, okay he’s president-elect now, but let’s not mince words. I am so proud. I will be there at his inauguration on Jan 20th (the day after MLK day!). “Yes We Can”

-humbly proud

Tech: My Comment on NY Times Article “Microsoft’s Vista Problem, by the Numbers”

The times had an interesting article discussing the issues with Microsoft’s slump in Vista sales and where they are not addressing the needs of the global computing zeitgeist w.r.t. netbooks et. al.
here

The thing is, Microsoft has been able to enjoy deep market penetration at the zygote of the business computing age. But let’s be clear; they have never innovated. They were born from the theft of the desktop from Xerox Parc. They have done a great job of copying or ‘buying out’ good ideas and watering them down and regurgitating them back to us. It can be argued that the only two things they got right were Excel and PowerPoint. The thing is, Mac “just works”. When people ask me what to get, I say get a Mac, because it just works. But that’s not the only thing. Mac IS UNIX. It is a Mach kernel accompanied with BSD style servers. It is essentially the NeXT workstation under the Apple. I used to own a NeXT workstation. I write software for a living so I know what I am talking about. The beauty of what Apple has done is that it took the power of UNIX and wrapped it in a beautiful user interface. On a mac you can go arbitrarily deep under the hood (just short of source code). I also use Ubuntu, and regardless of what anyone would tell you… LINUX *is* an operating system. Ubuntu has it’s flaws but it is a great LINUX distribution. And the price is great! FREE! So if you want the spit and polish of a great UI wrapped around a proven solid UNIX core (Mac), or if you are the more do-it-yourself type (Ubuntu or any other LINUX distro) then do that. But essentially this leaves not much room for Windows. The fuse is lit, people today are more sophisticated and computer savvy and don’t need Windows to tell them how to live their computing lives. We can make a choice. Windows…, no matter how many names they give themselves… Like it’s been said, “Just because you put lipstick on a pig….”

Your friendly neighborhood coder
— Max G Faraday

MME: Working From The Home Office…

So, I set up the home office. Actually I decided that I should work from home at least a day a week and figured I should probably have a dedicated place to do said work. I have my computer here, I am all VPN’d in and everything. I have installed my tools, everything is set up and I am ready to get down and dirty. It is actually a refreshing thing to have a work place at home. My set up is sweet; I have two 23″ cinema display, flat panel monitors (put side-by-side vertically, like all the cool coding kids are doing these days). I have a huge desk, nice space, and my machine at home is virtually identical to the machine I have sitting at my desk at HQ. (uhmm… “home office”: read – garage… Hey, that’s how everyone does it out in Cali).

The first thing I noticed was that I am able to think a bit more clearly and my bandwidth for learning and looking up things for myself has increased quite a bit. It is all too easy to ask ‘that guy’ at work that knows a bunch of stuff, questions. But when you are at home you have to take the moment or two to actually RTFM and *learn* the information. It is true what they say, that something earned is something learned. I am feeling quite accomplished with my newly set up work environment. When I work in solitude I work more steadily, with fewer interruptions. I can take my breaks but only when I am at a good place, a cadence, in my work… not just because I am pressured to because everyone else is taking a break now. I look forward to going into the office and picking up where I left things at home and also being able to participate in company ‘stuff’ and necessary face time… the interesting thing is that working at work is now an extension of the work that I thought about and pondered and laid out at home!

I highly recommend folks working from home. It takes discipline but, actually not that much. For the unruly folks out there, take it from me, the novelty of not being in the office wears off quickly… so no matter what, you’ll be working. The upside is that you get to poop in your own toilet and make lunch for yourself in your own kitchen and maybe even step outside and go down the street in your neighborhood. These little things really do make a difference to the quality of life. Also, you get a better feeling of ownership over what you are doing… the kind of ownership you wish you could feel at work every time you disgusted by your boss taking the credit or actively not appreciating your hard work from two doors down. I used to work almost completely from home a few years back. Now that I am working sometimes at home and sometimes at the office it strikes a nice balance.

Things to beware of: Don’t stay out of the office too much and when you are in the office don’t let on how much you enjoy being at home. It turns out when you are not in the office that things may tend to happen, opportunities may miraculously make themselves available. So you have to always keep one eye open. I recommend not having a specified work from home schedule. Keep them guessing, this way it will take just a bit more energy for folks to try to screw you over. Hey, perhaps it’s the Brooklyn in me but, I never put it past people to try to screw you.

Anyway, those are my observations and recommendation. And hey, by working at home, you are being pretty darn GREEN (and you save on some gas money).

FEM: Sophie Howard is amazing…

There is this one model that has been on my mind a lot the last several months. Her name is Sophie Howard. She is a Brit, and I think finally she is getting some love state side. I know she has my lust, aaalll of it. I am just, well… I guess… yup, I am a fan! I don’t know what it is about her. It is not just her body (though it’s amazing)… but she just radiates sexy. I love her… um, style.

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Tech: Damn that iPhone…

Yeah yeah yeah… the iPhone, that’s all my geek pals have been buzzing about. A bunch of my buddies got the iPhone, but though it is sexy as all hell; oh, and did I mention it is sexy as all hell, I didn’t cop one. The main issues I have with the phone is that it would pull me away from my kick butt T-Mobile plan. It turns out that ATT sucks, compared to T-Mobile regarding coverage and cost (at least for my old grandfathered plan from 1998). So, how can I reconcile my need to get this phone, AND my need to stay on T-Mobile, that all my “buddies” are on? So… I am stuck. The thing is Apple has me wrapped around their finger, and the only reason I am sitting here not pulling the trigger on a purchase is because I can’t!!!! What the hell!? How long does it take them to re-up on the iPhones already!!!? Yeah, I’ll get one… it’s just to sexy. Yes, I am proof… good marketing and a good product can’t be beat. Actually the best would be to wait for some of my fellow hackers to unlock the phone (hint hint hint).

MGF aka sour grapes man.
(iPhone)

TV: Project Runway…

Okay… I know that a lot of my boys are going to want to clown me on this one, but…. I LOVE PROJECT RUNWAY. Out of all the “reality” shows that got vomited onto our television screen this show stands head and shoulders above the rest. The thing about the show that really sets it apart is that it is a show of skill. There aren’t a bunch of disjointed, hokey challenges that leave you, pretty much saying “so what!?”… The show at it’s core is a demonstration of skill. The show also has legs (pun intended). The show can be translated into many other disciplines not just fashion. As a viewer it is truly awesome and rewarding to see these people grow and change and challenge themselves. The constraints that they are under and yet then still come up with something *fabulous* week after week. Wow! I am excited for this show, I am excited for the people, and the drama is 100% home grown from the crucible of stress and triumph. I may not always agree with the judges. I mean really I think that they are so full of shit some times but regardless the human drama is so beautifully captured. I feel rewarded and enriched as a viewer. And last but not least… Heidi Klum… c’mon, to see her step out and address the designers week after week looking AMAZING is a very welcomed plus. Yes, the Project Runway people got it right.

The thing is; fashion is universal. We are all… er… well most of us… captured by fashion, in some way or another. Whether it is a bangin’ pair of kicks that you just copped or a timeless sweater that you keep rockin’ year after year and people still give you props on it… fashion is a very big part of who we are because it is how we show ourselves. I know I got this OLD corduroy jacket, looking like an original black cowboy, and it still gets comments and tall props from the ladies when I rock it . Even though I am a jeans and T-shirt guy… you better believe that the right jeans and the right T-shirt (with the right kicks of course) is what really lays the foundation for the day.

I know people remember back to high school. You know you had to rock the LEEs with the pin-stripes with the razor sharp crease, with your bone white Stan Smith, shell toe, Addidas. You know you were the hotness when you had that butta Kangol with your Addidas suit. And the fashion was functional too, cause really, what is better to back spin on your square of linoleum in? I rest my case eh ehm… I digress…

So keep up the great work Project Runway… I am in your corner. Maybe the show taps into the New Yorker in me, which is pretty much all 99.89% of me (since I am from BROOKLYN!!!! What!?)

P.S.
Heidi… My girl is German too (reppin’ Giessen) and she would probably give me a pass to make sweet love to you… or at least have you join us. Call me .