Brett Morgan

gah

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:39:56 GMT

Window's 255 character path limit is totally lame in this day and age. Sigh.

Whither Google?

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:38:18 GMT

I've just been catching up on the last six months of business news with respect to the pending Google Anti-Trust lawsuit. I've lived through two rounds of the US Government taking on technology companies, IBM in the 80s and MS in the 90s.

IBM, as a result of the anti-trust threat being held over it's head became incredibly afraid of innovation, so much so that they are a consulting house these days. MS lost their dictator in chief, and have drifted listlessly ever since.

Unlike both IBM and MS, Google is not a technology company. Both IBM and MS made their money in their respective heydays by selling IT solutions. In IBM's case, it was turnkey hardware, in MS's, software suites. Google, for it's thirty thousand brilliant software engineers, doesn't make money selling IT solutions.

Google is a rent extraction company, living large on the firehose of money that goes by the rubric of "Advertising Spend." Advertising is huge, in the US it hovers around 2% of GDP, and has done for a century, give or take.

I suspect the current round of increased visibility of Google's internal processes is an indirect result of this Anti-Trust threat. We are seeing more google open source software, we are seeing more talks about how google builds it's data centers and more interaction with the linux kernel community. The flow of knowledge out of google's tech centers will have a massive impact on the future of technology use in industry.

So while an anti-trust shakedown of Google is imminent, and will do untold damage to Google the company, like it did to MS and IBM before them, I think the increase in knowledge in the widespread community will be a godsend.

Ugh, brain hurts

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:11:04 GMT

I'm going to understand this code base if it's the last thing I do.

ps: I didn't make it out for halloween. So no pics of me tradgoth'd. Does that mean I'm banned off my own journal? =)

Definitions of "smart" ?

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:33:28 GMT

A very interesting reply in a comment thread on MetaFilter answering the question "Does math have big scary teeth or something?"

This reply draws out something very interesting. It seems the traditional working definition of "smart" is "being able to memorise lots of trivia." A more interesting definition of smart, to me at least, is "being able to work things out." Trouble shoot. Be creative. Find a way.

I suppose this is why i really dig creatives of every stripe, be they graphics geeks, font nerds, musos, photographers, etc. I respect people who can see something before it is built, and find a way to pull it into existance, kicking and screaming the whole fracking way.

Another thing starts to make sense as well. I've heard many stories where in, say, a group of doctors are having a conference to figure out what illness a patient has, and after hours of deliberation, come to a conclusion. (It's not lupus.) Then as they go about their duties, a nurse pipes up with "Was it X?" Dumbfounded, the doctors ask, how did you know? "I googled the symptoms" is the reply.

Google is destroying the value of being able to memorise facts.

And another thing...

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:50:41 GMT

The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell: A wired article that talks about content made to order based on search data and adsense predictions. In short, cut the price on content production until it matches what you can reap from adsense. Pulp.

So this is why the internet is dying. It's becoming a wasteland of cheaply produced crap.

Mmmm.

Compare and Contrast time again

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:13:18 GMT

First, this breathless Google is evil post talking about Garmin, TomTom et al tanking now that Google have built their own maps from their streetview data: Google and the Deadly Power of Data.

Second the slide deck of Jeff Dean, presenting at the 3rd ACM SIGOPS International Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware: Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems.

These two articles are actually talking about the same thing, using bulk data, lots of computation and a lot of smart engineers to calculate your way out of any problem. Admittedly, Google's bulk system are being paid for by Advertising dollars, and thus they can cross-subsidise their engineering efforts in other areas, and thus under price everyone in which ever tech field they choose to enter.

I think the secret here is to not try to compete with Google, but to leverage the tech Google provide to do things Google itself isn't good at.

Most interesting new toy i've played with all year

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:31:31 GMT

Google Ad Planner.

Look at the Daily Uniques curve for any website you can think of. Facebook and Twitter are the only two that haven't halved in the last two years. I think this puts a very real picture on what i've been feeling for ages.

The Internet is boring. Like, get the fuck out, give me something new already, this shit is old. Ancient. Fucking bored already.

And that, my friends, is both scary, and a challenge. We need something new.

Oh god, I'm getting too old for this...

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:14:10 GMT

So, I'm going to a halloween partay... and I want to do tradgoth. So where the hell do i find black lipstick, black nail polish, and someone with a steady enough hand to draw eyeliner all over my mug? It's been years...

=)

GWT 2.0 milestone 2

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:11:44 GMT

GWT 2.0 is shaping up to be the release where GWT finally becomes fun to use. Being able to debug AJAX apps in running in chrome and firefox from my java debugger? Fracking finally. I can see this is going to lead to many long nights of me beating canvas into a myriad of odd looking shapes =)

It's that time of year again...

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 09:22:01 GMT

Mmm, spring is in the air. The natives are coming out of hibernation, shaking off the shackles of winter, and figuring out where to from here. I like this time of year. You could say it has become a bit of a yearly ritual. Yep. You should be scared, it's going to be messy. It always is. =)

DrunkMaus

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:06:07 GMT

Another Google Wave User Group down. We had fun tonight. I had people editing my presentation while I was presenting it. Very distracting. But we did have thirty odd people in a room of sixty odd actually using Wave.

And as always, the best bits at the pub afterwards. Admittedly I've now had three beers, which as everyone knows, means I'm two beers over my limit. Ahh, amusement.

Off to write emails =)

Compare and contrast

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:45:59 GMT

Peter Day, of the BBC, has a half hour program where he explores his fears of the media evolution being caused by the combination of global recession and technology upheaval in Media Mayhem.

Google releases their results for the last quarter, revenue up 7%, year over year.

DHJ Polymath

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:27:36 GMT

Nature has an article on massively collaborative mathematics, going through the story of a discovery of a new proof in mathematics using wikis and blogs as the collaboration environment. I think this points to an interesting potential future of work as collaboration.

Getting used to using Wave

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:29:12 GMT

It's fun watching people getting used to using Wave. The feeling of Wave is so very different to everything else on the web, most of the comparisons I see are with IRC and (Y)Talk. My own feelings are that it resembles Usenet, pre-greencard lottery, or Asylum, the lpMud that sucked a year of my youth.

You'll notice that everything people are likening Wave to is pre-web. There is a reason for this, the Web was actually a massive step backwards in interactivity. We went back to 60s era green screens, just with prettier colours. We needed to step backwards to get the scale we needed to serve thousands, then hundreds of thousands, of people using our products.

Building out Wave is an extreme example of building for scale. One that is going to give the admin teams inside Google lots of sleepless nights. The fun part is that this is now the new new normal, I'm already typing shift enter everywhere, and the Gen Y's are already hungering to see everything happening by the keystroke.

The biggest change that Wave will impart is massive increases in effectiveness of teams. The companies that hold back on implementing Wave adoption strategies will be swamped by their competitors who jump on and ride this baby to shore.

Omission of Abstraction

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 01:02:20 GMT

HTML and CSS were both designed for beginners to pick up quickly, they were explicitly not designed for professionals to use. This has lead to a glaring omission in both specifications, one that has taken all of us on a ten year detour.

Neither specification includes the capacity to abstract out details. You cannot group a section of HTML, and create a control out of it. You cannot take a set of CSS styles and create a style grouping out of it.

There is some noise about introducing variables into CSS. Variables have to be the weakest form of abstraction, leading to spaghetti code. But even the thought of introducing variables into CSS has lead to howls of protest from some corners.

The one part of the web world that does support abstraction - JavaScript - is slowly but surely being co-opted into making up for the omission of abstraction in HTML and CSS. Google Wave is but the first in a long series of experiments in abstraction over HTML and CSS that will emerge over the coming years.

More Wave-y goodness

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 04:38:08 GMT

The next Google Wave meetup at the Sydney Googleplex will be held Tuesday week, where in I will get a bunch of people to all use said Wave in a collaborative fashion. We're still pondering what to get a group of geeks to write about. Maybe that could be the first collaborative task - figure out what to write about. Heh.

Information and RSVP over here. Bound to be an amusing night. Always is when we are projecting the hijinks on the wall for everyone to see =)

Bob Cringely on Apple saving the Old Media

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 07:57:35 GMT

Bob wrote a piece about Apple and the Future of Publishing, in which he is setting up for expounding on what Apple has to do to change the Publishing World as he has changed Music. Punditry with a hook, love it.

There is a couple of things that spring to mind from Bob's piece. Firstly, Steve didn't set out to change the music industry, he set out to sell MP3 players. The fact that he gutted the current music industry in the process wasn't part of his focus, just collateral damage of giving the customers a more effective platform.

If, as hinted by Bob, Steve is lining up the traditional Media's big names for paid content on the much rumoured upcoming mac tablet / phat iphone / thingey, then I suggest Steve's intent isn't to change the publishing industry, but to sell kit. If he changes the publishing industry by changing the economics, then *shrug*. Steve is, first and foremost, about designing and selling good hardware.

And more than that, Steve aims to sell his hardware at the trailing edge consumers. I say this as a raving mac fanboi - I purchased my mac because i was sick to death of having to twiddle knobs to get X11 to display right on each and every different lcd I own. Steve lined up an iTunes store so that he could get trailing edge people to buy iPods, without having to teach them how to rip music. So getting WaPo and NYT lined up for his iTablet will, again, be about getting people to see the value in buying his kit without having to teach them about RSS and 4chan up front.

I really wish more software designers and developers would work as hard at walking in the shoes of their customers as Apple.

WDS09

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 07:18:35 GMT

WDS09
Originally uploaded by Halans.

Who said that I'm not a scary mofo? =)

A new way of organising...

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:55:54 GMT

I was reading over a Steve Yegge classic yesterday - Good Agile vs Bad Agile - and I got to thinking. As I do. Firstly, if anything, the transformation of Agile into disguised whip programmers until the project ships has gotten more true, not less, since Steve wrote that post.

I think there is an interesting alternative starting to take form. Google Wave, at least inside Google, is being used as a way of running meetings, and according to the engineers in them, they are more effective than face to face meetings.

I can understand why they would be more effective - for a starter there is a written record of the decisions made, whom they were made by, and how the reasoning worked out. The next reason is that a group can split itself and work on threads, then when appropriate they can jump thread, and catch up on what other sub groups have decided. Suddenly the global thread lock that face to face meetings need is eliminated.

The interesting thing from my point of view is that every time a technology is introduced that changes how people organise themselves, society itself changes. The introduction of telegraph lines allowed companies and armies with global reach, for instance. The reason is simple, new technology favours some behaviours over others.

One of the after effects of the discussions of a meeting becoming permanently recorded is that management styles that rely on hiding what is happening at different levels of an organisation will flounder - the evidence of the deception will always be visible to everyone.

I believe that Wave, and the technologies that Wave spawns, will change how society gets things done.

Another presentation

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 06:27:04 GMT

I've put together a presentation for a client. The intent of this presentation is to explain to a team of C#/.Net developers as to why us Java developers use Spring. There is a code base that goes along with this talk, based off of Spring's Web MVC tutorial that shows that a web application can have 100% test coverage.

Achieving 100% Test Coverage with Spring

Heh

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 22:52:53 GMT

Letting go of the Fairytale and Taking Personal Responsibility by Brooke Ferguson.

I love it. =)

The link between creativity and depression...

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:22:15 GMT

There was an article in Scientific American showing that depression is a evolutionary selected for trait, as depression is part of the rocky path to creative brilliance. It is continuing to do the rounds of the blogosphere, showing up on SpaceCollective in a post by Olena with some wonderful supporting material.

I hope that one day that those of us who live with the cutting duality of creativity and depression will be openly proud of who we are, and what we can achieve in appropriately supportive environments. Truth be told, we need support systems that can deal with the reality that we spend weeks, sometimes months, at a time barely functioning, followed by creating something new and sometimes even brilliant.

Supporting creatives requires new management styles and structures. Long term investments as opposed to ADD style short termism.

Talking about up-coming explosions...

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 05:10:04 GMT

It looks like the US Military is going public about the threat to it's carrier fleet.

Truth be known, this threat to the carrier fleet has been known in mil-geek circles for quite a few years by now. Actually, the submariners have been pointing out that since WWII there have been precisely two kinds of naval craft, submarines and targets.

China's new toy is apparently capable of targeting the US's carrier at 2,000k and hitting at Mach 10. The talk is of single strike disable capability. A fleet without air cover is basically dead in the water, which means that all of the US fleets must stand a fair way off China. The US can no longer defend Taiwan, militarily.

I suspect this is the US Navy looking for funding to get weapons capable of stopping this weapon. The truth is that there is no way of stopping one of these. This makes the insane amounts of money that the US spends on it's military pointless. China has successfully de-fanged the US. The only option the US has left are tactical nukes, but I hope that even the war crazed GOP wouldn't willingly start a nuclear war with China.

For our children's sake, I hope so.

The upcoming explosion of tooling...

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 06:44:10 GMT

It's often said that programming is still in the guilded age, and that the major step forward for society will come when we figure out how to build software factories. There has been an awful lot of research on how to do programming on an industrial scale, everyone from IBM to Google to every second outsourcing house in India is trying to figure it out.

I'm going to argue that we have the wrong metaphor. Us programmers aren't at the guild stage, we are at the flint axe stage, chipping our way slowly to arrowheads.

The greatest advance in human society, and one of the advances that made industrialisation possible, was the lathe. A lathe, in it's simplest form, consists of a bow, an axle, and some carving tools. From this humble basis you can create turned goods, leading all the way up to the gear. And the gear is what allowed the industrial revolution to run, well, like clockwork.

In computer terminology, the lathe is a meta-tool. It is a tool with which one can manufacture other tools, and thus bootstrap an entire industry.

In the world of programming, building tools to build tools is considered wizard work. Those who understand the incantations to make ANTLR and it's ilk - flex, bison, yacc, etc - work are considered strange folk, best avoided. Too academic for the duct tape crew.

This is about to change - the master wizards have started building the equivalent of the early steam powered lathes. Real industry. Intentional Software has supplied Capgemini the tooling required for Capgemini to build tools for people in the Pension industry to rapidly evaluate pension plans in an excel like environment. This tooling spins down development time from months to minutes, and gives massive advantage to those who wield this advanced tooling.

The IntelliJ team have released their own entry in this race - MPS - which has succeeded in breaking my head for the last year. It is lisp style macroing for Java, embedded in an editor / interpreter / compiler hybrid environment. Understanding this beast requires a lot of background in compiler theory, spelunking AST trees, compiler pipelines, generating text, etc.

Mastering these tools, like mastering a lathe, is a long term project. The payoff for the investment of time and intellect will be the ability to produce software artifacts the like of which we have never seen. In short, we are finally getting to the point where we can start on matching the marvel of the industrial age.

The fob watch.

Business Apps, in Real Time

brett.morgan@gmail.com — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:14:54 GMT

I'm noticing a pattern of belief, that the Real Time Web revolution only applies to Social Websites. That the focus of revolution will only be on FaceBook and Twitter, but the rest of the web world will sail on, untouched.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Real Time Web revolution is happening in the social web because their data models are simpler than enterprise data models - I mean how much workflow is there in Twitter's data model exactly? You post a twitter, and it appears on the screens of a bunch of people who have chosen to follow what your random thoughts.

Business Apps can, and will, become Real Time. The bringing of Real Time into the business domain is going to give companies who adopt it first a massive advantage over everyone else, because they will be able to gather data, make decisions, and enact them across their organisations in a much more fluid and adaptive manner.

In business, time is most definitely money.