David Albert

What we’ve learned from Hacker School

2012-02-01T00:00:00-08:00

We’ve now run two batches of Hacker School and we’re about to start the third. We’ve learned a lot and I want to take some time to write down the most interesting and surprising lessons.

First, some background: Hacker School is a three month writers retreat for programmers located in New York. There are no teachers or classes. We spend our time writing free and open source software and discussing our work with each other.

Hacker School is good for experienced programmers. This was one of the first lessons we learned. We designed Hacker School to be the best place for less experienced programmers to become great. We also designed it for ourselves because we were far from where we wanted to be. We weren’t really thinking about more experienced programmers, but we wanted to make sure that we’d want to continue doing Hacker School as we improved.

What we quickly learned is that the focus on becoming a better programmer is exactly what attracted the best programmers to us. In retrospect this should have been obvious. The best programmers become the best because they always want to be better. Also, great programmers enjoy spending time with other great programmers.

A bit of structure is important We’re big believers that you can’t force people to learn what they don’t want to, and we designed Hacker School accordingly. Loving programming is the most important quality that we look for in Hacker School students.

When we started, we decided that we were going to give our students total freedom to learn as they saw fit. Halfway through last batch, we spoke with each student individually about how they thought the school was going and how we could improve it. Almost everyone said that they wanted to pair program more. This surprised us because none of our students had asked each other if they wanted to pair. When we probed further, we found it was the obvious social issues: shyness, fear of looking stupid, fear that no one else would feel the same way.

After hearing this, we told everyone about the feedback we got and set aside a few days to get people pairing. That turned out to be a significant positive turning point in the batch. We started adding a bit more structure like weekly ship days where everyone had to ship some piece of code, no matter how small, and the batch continued to improve. We’re being cautious about the structure we add and still have a lot to learn, but we’re very satisfied with what we’ve done so far.

There are programmers around the world who feel isolated. This is our most recent lesson. For the first two batches, we didn’t do any publicity. All of our students were friends of friends. We wanted to make sure we got it right before we told anyone about it.

At the beginning of January, we told the Internet what we’ve been working on. In the past three weeks, we’ve gotten to speak to programmers from all around the world, and again and again we’ve heard the same thing: even with all the great hacker communities and websites on the Internet, being the only programmer among the people you know in real life is isolating. This is very foreign to us. It’s easy to forget how good some of us have it, having real life friends who are programmers. We can’t fix this in a day, but we think we’ve got a start.

You can read more about Hacker School here. We still have a couple of spots left for the upcoming batch, starting February 13th.

Hacker School is a Shuttleworth Funded project. We don’t charge for Hacker School and our space is donated, so the grant money went towards paying our bills while we figure out how to create great programmers.

A hacker’s guide to college

2011-08-25T00:00:00-07:00

In most professions, a college degree is a prerequisite for a job, even if doing the job doesn’t strictly require one. Your degree is used as a proxy to figure out whether you’re qualified because there is no better measure: “Oh, he went to a good school, he must be smart. Let’s bring him in for an interview.”

Hackers are lucky because our profession is much more merit based. We can be judged on our code rather than our degrees: “Oh wow, her code is really slick. Let’s interview her.”

So why go to college then? Presumably to learn to code right? The problem with this is that college doesn’t teach you how to be a good programmer. It might teach you about Computer Science, but there’s a big difference between Computer Science and programming. Without a whole lot of outside work including internships and lots of self study, you won’t become a great programmer in college. I know many great programmers who didn’t study Computer Science and some who didn’t go to college at all.

Given that college doesn’t prepare you for your career, the logical thing to do would be to separate your career training from your education.¹ For your career, you must become a great hacker on your own. Doing this probably deserves its own post, but the short version is: spend lots of time programming, learn many programming languages, read lots of good code, contribute to open source software, start your own open source projects that scratch your own itch, and take interesting internships.

What to do about your education is a harder question to answer. You could skip college all together. It’s expensive, and if you’re already good, you may just want to move on to real life. On the other hand, college can be a wonderful experience if you can afford it. I met all of my best friends in college, did fun things, expanded my mind, and grew up substantially. There might also be outside forces making you go to college even if you don’t want to.

Because you’re taking care of your career training yourself, use college to learn things you’re interested in. Pick a school with a flexible degree system and hack it so you have as few required courses as possible. You might want to consider a BA rather than a BS because BAs generally have less requirements. If you can get away with only doing a minor, so much the better. Take only classes you’re interested in. Music, Art, Literature, History, Computer Science. It doesn’t matter. If you’re taking a class for any other reason than “I want to,” you’re doing it wrong.

Education is valuable for its own sake. Just don’t feel constrained by the traditional definition of “a good education.” We learn the best when we learn for ourselves rather than for others.

Discussion could happen on HN if you’re inclined: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2925865

1. Be careful! This only works if you’re really dedicated to your career training. If you graduate college with no code to show for it, you will be judged on your degree just like everyone else. ↩

Apple is professional, the web is amateur

2011-06-03T00:00:00-07:00

It’s common knowledge that Apple doesn’t get the web in general and social in particular. I’ve been thinking a lot about the social part recently and I think Apple’s failure to execute there can shed some light on their failure with the web in general.

The web is about amateur content. Apple, on the other hand, is all about content created by professionals. Let me explain: Apple has a culture of craftsmanship. Every piece of hardware and software they create is beautifully crafted and blemish free. Even their website feels more like a glossy brochure than a normal site. They also respect craftsmanship in others and generally excel at making software that helps professional musicians, photographers and movie makers do their jobs.

“But wait a second,” you say. “What about iLife? Isn’t that all about amateur content?” Not quite. iLife helps normal people create things that feel professional. Take photos for instance: iPhoto makes it super easy to enhance your photos to make it look like a professional took them. Instagram makes it easy to destroy your photos to give them character. Even iPhoto’s filters are subtle and geared towards making your photo look more professional.

In iMovie, you can take your professional looking photos and stitch them together with the Ken Burns effect. The name says it all right there. Youtube on the other hand, lets you upload your personal rants right from your webcam. They didn’t even add video editing until last year. GarageBand’s loops let you create studio quality music. iWeb helps you make websites that look just like Apple’s.

And then there’s Ping. Ping epitomizes Apple’s failure at the social web. When Steve introduced Ping last year, he explained how you could follow artists and follow your friends. Again, the separation between the amateur and the pro. The creator, and the consumer. On Jack Johnson’s Ping page, Steve showed some photos that Jack had posted. Jack didn’t take any of the photos! They’re all taken by professionals. What makes celebrities on Twitter so compelling is that they have the same kind of accounts as we do. Seeing them and interacting with them unfiltered makes them more accessible. We think, “Hey, Lady Gaga’s a bit like me,” (ok, maybe that’s a stretch). Compared to Twitter, Ping feels like an advertisement to get you to buy more professional content from the iTunes store.

If Apple’s going to succeed at the web, they have to unlearn a lot of what makes them Apple. No more pixel perfect web apps that feel like desktop apps, no more sites that look like glossy brochures, and embracing chaos and amateurism over order and professionalism. It is going to be very hard.

There’s a pretty good discussion about this on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616883

When should you start a startup?

2011-03-24T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve met a lot of people who tell me they want to start a startup, but they’re not sure when they should do it. My answer is always that they should do it right now. In response, I usually get a range of excuses, almost all of which are invalid. There are only two valid excuses for not starting a startup: debt, and not wanting to start one.

Here are the excuses I generally hear and why they are wrong:

It’s too risky. Now is actually the least risky time for you to start a startup. It will only get worse from here. As you age, you naturally accumulate things that will make it harder for you to start your startup: a spouse, kids, aging parents who need care, an expensive lifestyle, a career, respectability. The more of these you get, the more risk averse you become. Start your startup now, before it’s too late.

I want to get more experience first. There is very little you will learn in your current job as a {consultant, lawyer, business person, economist, programmer} that will make you better at starting your own startup. Even if you work at someone else’s startup right now, the rate at which you are learning useful things is way lower than if you were just starting your own.

I want to get my MBA first. See above. Business is easy: make things people want; make more money than you are spending. The hard part is making sure you are actually solving a real problem. You will not get good at this in business school.

I don’t have a good idea yet. The idea you have now probably isn’t very good and it’s probably not the one you will succeed with. If you don’t start now though, you’ll never end up with a good idea. Good ideas only come through trial and error.

Here are the only two acceptable reasons you shouldn’t start a startup:

Debt. Debt sucks. Running a company means making risky decisions and having significant debt will make it harder for you to do that. It really weighs on you. For now, live like you were doing a startup (very cheaply) and pay off the debt as quickly as possible. You will thank me later.

You don’t want to start a startup. This is totally fine and acceptable! Nothing is for everyone and startups are no exception. This usually manifests itself as not leaving your current job because you’re actually really enjoying it. Don’t fret. If you have found something you love, keep doing it. You are luckier than most people in the world.

If you want to talk about this, you can do so on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2369102

An Open Letter to Business People

2010-11-11T00:00:00-08:00

So you have an idea for a startup? Awesome! The world needs more people like you. You’re going to have to start by finding a technical cofounder. This is hard because you’re not a programmer, so I’m going to teach you how to do it.

You’ll notice I said “technical cofounder” and not “developer.” That’s important. If you decide to pay someone a few thousand dollars for a web app made to your specifications, you will probably fail. Why? Because your idea is not very good yet. You’re going to have to iterate a whole bunch of times before your idea succeeds. You need someone who’s going to be in it for a long haul. You need a technical cofounder.

Now that you’ve decided to find a real cofounder, let’s get started. For the time being, I’ll play the part of your cofounder to be. We’ve already decided that you’re not going to be paying me in cash. Instead, you’re going to be paying me in equity. This is easier for you anyway because equity doesn’t cost you anything.

How much were you thinking you’d give me? Ten percent? That’s way too low. Lets bump it up to 50%. Yeah, I know, it sounds like a lot. After all, you’re the vision guy. All you need is someone to build your vision for you, right?

Unfortunately, it’s not really that simple. The truth is that your idea is worth practically nothing and someone’s probably tried it before. Execution is everything. You haven’t really moved past Square Zero yet. After all, “If you were the inventor of Facebook, you would have invented Facebook.”

Walk in my shoes for a minute. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Right now you look like a lot like dead weight. Don’t take that the wrong way. When our startup takes off, I’m not going to want to deal with all the business stuff. That’s what you love and what you’re good at. I’ll want to keep working on the product. It’s just that right now I feel like I’m the only one who can really contribute and you’re just doubling our burn rate.

Don’t let this get you down though. A startup without a business plan isn’t a business. It’s just some code. In the end, I need you just as much as you need me. You’re just going to want to understand what’s going through my head when you decide what kind of relationship we’re going to have.

Ok, so we’ve settled on 50%, but there’s still something else that you’re going to want to give me: input. My half of our newly minted company is worth nothing if we fail, and I’m not going to feel good about our prospects if I can’t help shape our product.

Just because I’m the technical guy, doesn’t mean I’m some sort of Marxian means of production. I’m a real person with a great logical and analytical mind. Even if you have some specific detailed domain knowledge that I lack, I spend all my time evaluating every new web startup that comes my way. I have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t, and as they say, “Two heads are better than one.”

Now that you know what you want, you need to know how to find me (or someone better than me, I’m nowhere near the cream of the crop). The first thing you should do is learn to program. You don’t have to make the site, just learn enough to be able to understand my world. It’ll up my respect for you a great deal if you can speak my language.

You can find me at tech meetups or on GitHub. When you meet me, don’t pitch your idea. Get to know me and be my friend. Remember, I’m a person, not a means of production and if I’m good, there are a lot more people coming to me with ideas than there are engineers for you to talk to. Have lunch with me and shoot the shit. Tell me what you’re working on and listen to my feedback. After we’ve gotten to know each other, we can start working weekends and see where things go.

I’m super excited. Our startup is going to be great!

There’s a discussion on HackerNews: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1894961

Tell me about yourself

2010-08-22T00:00:00-07:00

I was recently asked to tell someone about myself via email. Here’s what I came up with.

In fourth grade we had a mock 20-year reunion. Everyone came dressed as who they thought they would be when they grew up and we each got to present to the class about our future selves. I said I was a computer programmer. I had the book “Computer Programming for Dummies,” but I had crossed out “Dummies” and written “Experts.” I said I went to the Michigan Institute of Technology. I knew it was MIT, I just guessed the wrong state.

In hindsight, I wasn’t that far off. I didn’t go to MIT (I didn’t even apply). I wanted to be at a school where I would interact with liberal arts students too, so I went to Columbia. My proudest academic moment was the year I spent TAing an intro electrical engineering class. I would love to be a teacher later in life.

I’ve been programming since fourth grade, but the real thing that I’ve learned is how little I actually know about it. I only really understood this after I graduated from college and got a job. I like to think about the four stages of knowing:

You don’t know what you don’t know.
You know what you don’t know.
You know what you know.
You don’t know what you know.

I am currently at stage two and I’m learning things as fast as I can.

In high school I saw the film Startup.com with my mom. I think that first seeded the idea to start a company in my head, but looking back, I don’t think GovWorks was a particularly good idea. I also enjoyed Pirates of Silicon Valley and have read Insanely Great by Steven Levy at least two times.

At 16 I started riding on ambulances and at 18 I became an Emergency Medical Technician. All told, I’ve spent seven years working on ambulances, four of which were in New York City. I’ve never had anyone die on me, but that’s more luck than skill. Emergency medicine is a rough business.

I’ve been playing guitar since fourth grade and trumpet and a few other brass instruments since high school. I’ve played in a few bands and still harbor dreams of being a rock star. There are lots of similarities between starting a band and starting a company.

I also love the outdoors. My friend Steve and I are going to stand on the highest point in every state. We’re currently 3/50. It’s more of a long-term goal.

I am a life-long New Yorker. I have dressed up as a washing machine for Halloween on multiple occasions.

Is Android the new Eclipse?

2010-03-13T00:00:00-08:00

I want to get rid of my iPhone. Just about every move Apple has made in the last 3 years with the exception of making absolutely gorgeous products has pissed me off (think DRM issues, closed App Store, removing apps months after they’ve been approved, the Google Voice fiasco). I want desperately to vote with my wallet and buy something new, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.

The obvious choice for me is an Android phone like the Nexus One. The code is open, the platform is permissive — you can install apps from other sources besides the Marketplace — and it has a soft keyboard (this takes WebOS out of the running for now), but it’s not enough. My apps aren’t holding me back. I can drop most of them, although I think I’d miss Tweetie. It’s the little things like scrolling that mess me up: Android’s friction coefficient is all wrong and for some reason the lack of spring back when you reach the end of a scrollable area really irks me. These things just work better on my iPhone. Despite my philosophical misgivings I chose to use my iPhone because my smartphone (or should I say, my [com][2]) is such a big part of my life. I can’t live with anything less than beautiful.

Enter iPad

I think the iPad is the future of computing and I want one desperately. Even my Dad wants an iPad. I don’t want to buy one though. I have to draw a line in the sand somewhere (This doesn’t mean I’m not going to get one, I want to leave room to compromise my principles later). What I really want is a tablet and phone made by a company with as much design sense as Apple, but without the need to lock it down. I don’t even care if it comes locked down as long as the company that makes it provides a way for me to set it free (props to Google for doing this with the Nexus One).

Now let’s imagine a company wants to make one of these imaginary tablets. What platform do you think they’re going to use? Duh, Android. It is a well supported, free OS with an existing install base, platform support, and apps. Except I don’t think an Android tablet would be any better (and possibly worse) than an Android phone. You’ll notice that Apple designed a whole bunch of new interface elements for the iPad that the iPhone won’t have.

Android as the new Eclipse

I recently saw Code Bubbles. I think it’s the coolest and possibly most game changing development tool in a long time. Then I heard it was based on Eclipse and my heart sank just a bit. Eclipse is the de facto open source IDE (an application used to help develop software, for all you laypeople). In fact, it’s not even just an IDE, it’s a platform for creating other IDEs. This is presumably why Code Bubbles' authors chose to build their project on top of Eclipse. So much is provided for free: syntax highlighting, debugging, build system integration, cross platform GUI libraries. The works. There’s just one problem: all of these freebies are only good enough. I develop in Eclipse at work and have no problem doing so, but there are a bunch of little quirks that get to me. It feels as if it were designed by committee and it shows.

When you go to develop a new IDE, do you start from scratch? No, you start from Eclipse. When push comes to shove, it doesn’t matter about all the quirks, it just matters that you get all those free features. A couple of people can execute their new IDE idea in a reasonable amount of time by basing it off of Eclipse. To build a whole IDE from scratch, you need many months, if not years, and a huge team. The same is true of Android. If you want to make a new piece of mobile hardware, Android’s a no brainer. It takes enough resources to get your hardware, ID, mechanical, project management, and manufacturing teams executing together. If you decide to start from scratch, you need a gaggle of software engineers as well as graphic designers and interaction designers. Oh, and you’re expected to come up with at least a few new UI ideas if you really want to be considered a serious player and not just an iPhone or Android clone.

The Upside

So what of my iPad competitor? Will I have to chose between a beautiful device that I am philosophically opposed to or a device that is just adequately designed but allows me to sleep soundly at night? I don’t think the picture is that grim. I’m intrigued by Windows Phone 7 Series (yes, a gross name). There has clearly been a lot of good thought put into its design, and competition always drives the market towards something better. There are also important differences between Android and Eclipse. At this point, as I understand it, Eclipse truly is designed by committee. Android, on the other, hand has a strong captain in Google with a firm hand on the helm. Google’s design philosophy might be skewed too far towards the logical and analytical for some, but it has created some absolutely beautiful products. Gmail has set the standard for how webmail, and frankly all email, should operate, and Chrome blows Safari (and everyone else) out of the water in terms of design and usability (its [tab closing behavior][6] has been lauded and its tab to search feature is the number one thing I can’t live without in a browser).

While Android isn’t exactly where I want it to be, it has improved in leaps and bounds since it’s 1.0 release just one and a half years ago, and sooner than later, an Android device will be ready to replace my iPhone. The only question is, what will Apple be making then?

Oh, also, I want an iPad now.

[2]: http://gizmodo.com/5061705/smartphone-is-a-dumb-word-we-need-a-new- name

[6]: http://www.theinvisibl.com/news/2009/12/08/a-piece-with-a-lot-of- screenshots-about-the-close-tab-behaviour-in-google-chrome/

*[IDE]: Integrated Development Environment

*[OS]: Operating System

*[ID]: Industrial Design

On The Internet, _Everybody_ Knows You're a Dog

2009-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

↓ Updated: September 25th, 2009.

I care about my privacy, and I try to take reasonable steps to safeguard it. Every once and a while however, I am reminded of what little difference that makes.

A year ago I saw private investigator Steve Rambam give a talk entitled “Privacy is Dead, Get Over It” at The Last Hope. The talk is available on YouTube, and although it’s long, I’d highly recommend watching it. Steve gave a great lecture on what type of info is available to him as a PI, and how much of that is contributed by us. After that, I stopped twittering.

That didn’t last long. No more than a week later, I was back to broadcasting the various happenings of my life, having gained only a bit of perspective on what type of information I wanted to contribute. A year later, while thinking about this talk, I decided to do a little audit of my own privacy online. Here’s what I found:

What I Have Going for Me

Let’s start with the good. Where’s the first place you used to go to find info on someone? The phonebook. I don’t have a landline, so I’m not listed. That’s a good start. I’m also not particularly settled down yet. I move often, so info becomes stale quickly. I don’t own a house, run a company, or do many other things that would create public records.

I’m also lucky. A quick Google search will reveal that I’m not the only David Albert on the internet. Not only that, but there happens to be a rather famous and more accomplished one generating a bunch of noise that might help drown out what I generate.

These, as we’ll soon find out, are small comforts in the face of a very grim reality.

The Search Begins

Let’s say you got an e-mail from me, and wanted to know more about me. Maybe you even want to find me in person. The place to start would be my signature, which is pretty much standard at my office:

David Albert AdaptiveBlue – Software Engineer http://getglue.com http://twitter.com/davidbalbert

From here you already know where I work, and you have my Twitter account. From my twitter page, you’ll find a link to my website. While I might not be in the phonebook, I’m in the internet equivalent. WHOIS is a system where you can look up the owner of internet resources, including domain names. When you register a domain, you’re required to enter your name, address, and e-mail address. These become public and are available via WHOIS search. You can pay extra to have someone enter their info as a proxy, but you have to pay extra, so very few people do it. This service is also not available in every case (like mine). I’m not going to hand it to you on a silver platter, but if you know how to use WHOIS, you have my address. At this point I’m already screwed.

Look back at my Twitter account for a second. My latest tweet is about my Greyhound ticket. Seems pretty benign, right? Think again. With this info, you can infer that I was away for the weekend. If you had the means and desire, this would have been a good time to break into my apartment and snoop around.

Facebook

I use Facebook. I don’t use it as much as the vast majority of users, but there is still an obscene amount of info that has been put up there by me and others. I don’t link to my profile from anywhere and I have all my privacy settings as stringent as they can be, so this might seem like a bad angle of attack, however not all is lost. If you know a little bit about me, like where I live (available on my Twitter profile), or where I went to school, you’ll probably be able to find my profile pretty quick. If you’re so inclined, I’m sure you could find a friend of mine with access to my profile or be able to access my info via other means.

Even if you can’t find a way in, there is a nice little tidbit that you’ll probably be able to use. Facebook recently introduced usernames, and if you can find mine, you might notice something juicy. I use the same username on Facebook as I do on Twitter. A quick Google search for my Twitter and Facebook username reveals that I use the same one everywhere I go on the net. A lot more fruitful than searching for my name. From here, you can find forums I’ve used, companies I’ve worked for, accounts I’ve created, services I’ve used, code I’ve written, e-mails I’ve sent, the school I went to, photos I’ve taken, my interests, and people I’ve interacted with who might provide some sort of info about me or way to find me, just to name a few.

Twitpic

For the sake of brevity, let’s just take a look at one of the results. Twitpic is one of many services that allows you to post photos from Twitter. You can find my account from our most recent Google search, but you don’t even have to look because it uses my Twitter username and info. Browsing through my recent photos, we find a picture that looks interesting. While there’s no description attached, the page says that the picture was posted August 15th. While the date is apparently wrong, you can find the relevant tweet from the 14th. It says I’m on my balcony watching the sunset. Take a look at the picture again. The quality is not great, but given that you know my address, it’s probably good enough for you to pinpoint my window from the street.

You can do this stuff all day. Keep clicking on those links from Google, and you’ll be able to find all sorts of stuff on me. In an hour, you’ll probably have a pretty complete picture.

The Takeaway

So what is there to take from this besides every bit of personal information that anyone has ever posted about me? Steve Rambam was right, privacy is dead, and it’s our own damn fault. No matter how little info you put online about yourself, people who want to find out about you will be able to (remember, we only looked at public info that I put online myself. We haven’t even considered other private databases available to PIs, various public records, and government databases available to the Police and the Feds). Furthermore, if you’re thinking about taking it down now, don’t bother, it’s too late. Everything on the web is archived in some form or another. If you publish it, it’s there for good. No ifs ands or buts about it.

You can, however, begin to consider these things going forward. What types of info do you really want to share? Twitter just announced a geolocation API. Do you want people to know where you are all the time? How about who you’re hanging out with? Think about this the next time you share something on Facebook or checkin on Four Squre. If you make conscientious decisions about these things, you might not be able to stop interested parties from finding out all about you, but you might just make their jobs a little bit harder.

Update: There’s a great [article][16] by Jacqui Cheng on the subject that is totally worth your time. ↑

[16]: http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/09/which-user-clicked-on- viagra-ads-ask-myspace-and-facebook.ars

*[PI]: Private Investigator

Etiquette Algorithms

2009-04-13T00:00:00-07:00

↓ Updated: September 2nd, 2009.

Elevator Etiquette

I have spent a fair amount of time in elevators over the course of my life. Elevators are awkward places to be. You look at the ceiling, check your watch, and you definitely don’t make eye contact. If you know someone in the elevator it’s probably just as bad. Odds are it’s someone you don’t see often, which means you are forced to make small talk for the remainder of the ride. No fun.

There’s another thing that happens on elevators. You move around to maintain your personal space as people get on and off. Its an algorithm that’s pretty well defined, and everyone seems to know it, although no one ever talks about it. Because I think about this stuff a lot, I’ve decided to try and codify it. This is what happens when a person (let’s call him person a) enters the elevator:

if (elevator is empty)

    stand anywhere on the perimeter

else

    if (distance between people along the perimeter > perimeter threshold)

        person a stands on the perimeter

        everyone else moves along the perimeter to equalize distance between people

    else

        person a stands near entrance

        everyone else moves along the perimeter to maximize the approximately

          circular area surrounding them

The algorithm is pretty simple. The idea is to maximize the area that surrounds you with a caveat. That caveat is that it seems desirable to have everyone stand on the perimeter, to a point where that can be more important than maximizing your space. This is done until some threshold distance between each person along the perimeter (let’s call it the perimeter threshold) is crossed and everyone in the elevator begins to spread out over the entire area. This seems to happen pretty regularly and accurately and everyone just seems to know how its done.

Urinal Etiquette

There’s another etiquette algorithm that I know about. This one is exclusive to men and involves deciding which urinal to use in a row of urinals. Here’s how I see it:

if (bathroom is empty)

    pick a urinal close to the ends of the row

else if (urinals have dividers)

    if (urinal use ratio < 0.2)

        pick a urinal at least 2 spaces away

    else

        pick any urinal, with preference given to urinals are flanked

          by at least one empty one

else

    if (urinal use ratio < 0.2)

        pick  a urinal at least 6 spaces away

    else

        if (there are urinals that are flanked by two empty ones)

            pick one

        else

            if (you really have to go or you have little shame)

                pick any urinal

            else

                wait it out until there is a urinal available that is flanked by two

                  empty ones and then use it

Send me your corrections and comments. I bet the algorithms are a bit more nuanced than this. Are there any other algorithms that we all just know? I can’t think of any more off the top of my head, but I’m sure there are some.

Update: Randall Munroe of XKCD fame has a rather thorough discussion of the urinal problem that is really worth reading. ↑

A New Project

2009-03-22T00:00:00-07:00

So I need a project. I mean, I really don’t need a project. I have a lot on my plate including a mobile phone virtualization project on top of Android which I’m quite a bit behind on (more on that at a later date), but I still feel like I need a project. I want to learn board layout, which is something that isn’t really taught in school. It’s a shame that it isn’t because the more and more I think about it, I realize I didn’t become a Computer Engineer to learn how to design components, but to learn how to use them.

The Plan

What I’d really like to do is design an arm board and get Linux running on it. Unfortunately, I think if I tried this now, I would never get it done. I don’t even think I’d know where to start. What I need to do is start smaller. I’ve always wanted one of those lcd dot matrix scrolls that are used to advertise the lotto jackpot, but even that might be a bit too much for the first project. What I’d like to do is start with only one of the display segments – the kind that can fit one letter – and work my way up from there. Here are my requirements:

avr based
Persistent storage
Programmable over serial
Can do multi-frame animation
Looks totally cool

That’s really about it. If I can get one segment up and running, it shouldn’t be too hard to get a bunch running in tandem, and from there, its off to the races. I’m going to try to get a bill of materials up by next week, but these things have a habit of falling behind, especially when I’m not getting a grade.

The Questions

I really don’t know what to expect, so if you’ve had any experience with anything like this, drop me a line and tell me all the things that I’m going to screw up before I actually do it. Also, this project needs a kick ass name. Give me your suggestions.

Hello, World!

2009-01-31T00:00:00-08:00

It’s been well over a year since I decided that I should have a blog. There are a whole bunch of really good reasons to blog, or to write in any medium for that matter. Writing forces you to make your thoughts concrete. It forces you to think clearly. A lot of my ideas are murky and not fleshed out. Writing insures that at least some of them will get there. Nick once sent me Steve Yegge’s essay You Should Write Blogs. It is a wonderful read and it articulates in great detail the benefits of blogging. I highly recommend it.

So Why Haven’t I Blogged?

I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve installed WordPress with the intent of blogging. I even have a blog that I share with my cousin called Appendix A. I have only written there once. That was well over two years ago.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never succeeded at blogging because I’ve never felt that I owned my blog. Every time I install WordPress, I go trolling the internet for a theme. I’ve never felt comfortable with the default WordPress theme. It makes me feel like I really have “Just another WordPress weblog.” Perhaps it’s egotistical to say so, but I’ve always felt that whatever I write deserves its own presentation, different from everyone else’s. Suffice to say, I never found a theme that satisfied me. I’ve sometimes entertained the idea of using the default theme until I create something of my own and just start writing, but I’ve never been able to follow through with it. I’m a bit stubborn.

Release Early, Release Often

About two weeks ago, I got fed up with all my talk of blogging and decided to just do it. If I can’t seem to write without a theme of my own, it was time to hunker down and create one. So I did. It’s not done – the “about” and “archive” links do nothing yet – and probably never will be. I’m quite happy with that. Design is an iterative process and I think it’s a bit conceited to think that I’d ever be able to perfect a design (whatever that means).

Notes On The Design

The design is a bit sparse right now. Perhaps I’ll add some pictures later. Dave Is Blogging is typeset in Georgia, which is one of my favorite typefaces for the web. It is a serif font that does not feel old fashioned, it’s easy to read on a screen, it’s ubiquitous, and it is the only one of Microsoft’s core fonts that has text figures rather than lining figures. Georgia and the rest of the core fonts are installed by default on Windows and Mac OS. If you run Linux, this blog will look best once you’ve installed the core fonts, which are packaged but not installed by default on most distros.

Acknowledgements

Nothing is created in a vacuum. I took my cues from many different people in designing this site. [The Elements of Typographic Style][7], by Robert Bringhurst is a great introduction to typography. The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web builds on Bringhurst’s book and is a good read for anyone doing typography with css. [Don’t Make Me Think][9], by Steve Krug is a great book about usability and web design. Other valuable insights came from A List Apart, Usability Post, I Love Typography, and Nick’s Blog. Thanks guys.

Where Do I Go From Here?

For starters, I’m going to keep blogging. It won’t be that often (I’m aiming for a minimum of once a month), but it will be regular. I’m going to try to write about interesting things like programming, music, engineering and design, however this list is far from inclusive. Due to my expected infrequency of posting, I’d recommend subscribing to this blog in your feed reader of choice. A link to the rss feed is located in the footer. I hope you enjoy. Oh yeah, please send me feedback!

[7]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881792063?ie=UTF8&tag=daveis-20&link Code=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0881792063

[9]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321344758?ie=UTF8&tag=daveis-20&link Code=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0321344758

*[css]: Cascading Style Sheets

*[rss]: Really Simple Syndication