Fighting the automation paradox || Deployment θα κάνουμε φωνάζοντας "αέρα"
It seems that @merlyn is working on a SmallTalk book:
Today: Hack Perl code for $client, work on Smalltalk book, pick up new webcam, try it out at Karaoke tonight
For those who do not know him, @merlyn is Randal L. Schwartz, author of books on Perl among other stuff. He maintains the blog: Methods and Messages.
I stumbled upon this site: www.plagiarism.org (about a year ago) while reading this thread on SOCNET, and I felt it deserves more than a simple tweet.
Update: Some comments about this post over at FriendFeed.
(lame excuse for microblogging on my blog)
“People don’t want to be disciplined and structured when writing programs. They are ingenious in finding ways to circumvent any kind of externally imposed control.”*
While the above quote was written for people who were writing macros in spreadsheets instead of writing code†, the highlighted part of the quote can equally be applied to any userbase that is required to follow a security policy. Because first and foremost users want to get their job done (even if they believe that part of their job is playing Solitaire).
[*] – When is a picture a program?
[†] – And one could add that this article predicts the emergence of the species of key punchers who thought they were programmers because they wrote lines in Visual Basic. For the article continues: “No sooner had we invented structured programming and software engineering than someone countered with the invention of spreadsheets. Spreadsheet users were not programmers, and what these users were doing was not programming. So naturally the rules didn’t apply to them- right?”
Intersting parenthack by David Alan Grier:
“To probe the situation, I started to ask questions that would get Fi to answer “yes”. It’s a strategy that I learned from my mother, who was a primary school teacher. “You learn nothing from children”, she would say, “until they say ‘yes’ to three consecutive questions”.
A few weeks ago I heard that Chaitin tries to put everything he has ever published online, and most of the stuff via arXiv. Over the weekend I gave it sometime and found some of his books:
I own “Meta Math!“. I bought it by chance. While in the bookstore, I opened it and stumbled upon LISP code. This is a really nice book. It is a personal log of Chaitin‘s career, an introduction to Kolmogorov complexity0 (which was independently invented by Chaitin too), algorithmic information theory, thinking about randomness (and in a way first presented to me years ago by a long time friend), LISP1, useful comments on NKS2, Polya‘s “How to Solve It!” and an introduction to the thought of Leibniz3.
Of course the book has irritating parts: Having invented a field independently of Kolmogorov, somehow puts you in the shadow of the man and Chaitin constantly tries to get out of the shadow and stand not on the shoulders of Turing and Goedel but next to them (when in fact such effort is not needed).
I loved the book4. It is the kind of book that reminds you why you loved Mathematics. Even Chaitin’s personal effort to stress the importance of his work (that annoys many) contributes to this. For he unquestionably loves Mathematics.
(Must make time and read “The Limits of Mathematics”; Time there is not…)
[0] – More about it at “An introduction to Kolmogorov complexity“.
[1] – Link to the Lisp interpreter that Chaitin has developed for his needs.
[2] – See also this presentation on NKS by S. Wolfram.
[3] – An essay on Leibniz by Chaitin.
[4] – I also loved “Title: Algorithmic information theory: Some recollections“.
I have blogged before that the reason that I like MIMEDefang is that it gives the Postmaster a Perl interpreter (a programming language that is) and a library of functions that can be used to filter and manipulate incoming and outgoing email.
Of the functions available I believe that md_check_against_smtp_server() deserves special mention since it can be used to quickly implement a poor man’s milter-ahead or milter-sender. Of course milter-ahead implements many features (caching among others), but with some effort most (if not all) of the functionality can be implemented withing mimedefang-filter.
Then again, milter-ahead does not cost much (€90) even for small organizations, so the not invented here syndrome can be supressed.
Ronald P. Loui writes:
“Google originally used Python because Scott Hassan, who wrote much of the prototype for Brin and Page, had been mentored by an early Python guru and because I was unable to convince him over many years in St. Louis to switch to Gawk or Perl.”
This comes from the man who wrote “Why GAWK for AI?”
A friend suggested that I could use The Book Depository as an Amazon alternative, which was a very helpful tip especially for books over €50. As it happens to many who buy books from online bookstores, sometimes what you get is not what you ordered. In my case I had ordered “The Travelling Salesman Problem” and got “Plato’s Republic“. After some friction with their support service (Amazon is way better in this kind of issues) the order was completed and The Book Depository told me that I could keep “Plato’s Republic” too.
Now since it is highly unlikely that I will ever find time to read this version, I will gladly send it to anyone interested. If nobody shows any interest, I will donate it to a library.
More often than I would expect, I run into conversations about certain IT and web related projects where someone will say, with a bit of authority:
– This is not a big deal! It can be done over the weekend.
Once I was told that a certain feature that needed to be implemented was “only two hours work”! And this came from a person that had no knowledge of the software stack in use.
Another time upon protesting (and basically saying “Put your money where your mouth is!”) I got the best exit:
– I did not say that I can do it over the weekend. I said that it is possible to be done in a weekend by you!
Like I do not have better things to do in my weekends…
So if you have ever claimed that something is possible over a weekend (and can be delivered as a working beta) the weekend is not far. Shut up and prove your point. You can even use Friday afternoon as extra time.
But on Monday please call the guy that said it will take him a week, a month or more and apologize.
(I think I bought mine sometime in 1997. The price tag says £26.50 which means that I had UrBaN buy it for me.)
Το βιβλίο γράφτηκε το 1995 και είναι ενδεικτικό των εργαλείων, αλλά και της φιλοσοφίας που επικρατούσε στην AT&T Research εκείνη την εποχή. Χάρη σε αυτό έμαθα για το graphviz (που με βοήθησε να φτιάξω ένα από τους πρώτους χάρτες του 6BONE αλλά και του irc.gr), το UWIN (οπότε και κατάφερα ένα από τα πρώτα native ports του netcat), τη vmalloc (που πάντα ήταν χρήσιμη όταν κάποιο πρόγραμμα είχε προβλήματα memory allocation – π.χ. το CLP(R) με κάποιες GLIBC της εποχής). Το σημαντικότερο όμως που μπορεί να προσφέρει αυτό το βιβλίο ακόμα και σήμερα, 14 χρόνια μετά και με μερικά από τα εργαλεία που παρουσιάζει όχι και τόσο χρήσιμα, είναι ο τρόπος σκέψης: ορισμός προβλήματος, προσέγγιση, αρχιτεκτονική και λύση. Και αυτά in a system administrator’s way.
Το βιβλίο είναι διαθέσιμο σε μορφή PDF και το software που περιγράφει (αλλά και άλλο νεώτερο) βρίσκεται στο http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools
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