blog at izs.me

4 Step Writing Process

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:07:00 -0800

Whether it’s an essay or a program, writing is not about what you put out, it’s about what you take in. The purpose of life is to learn, and that is why writing is important.

I don’t follow this process with everything, because it’s a bit slow. But for complicated subjects, it’s sometimes the only way to get something useful.

Step 1: Sketch

Write as quickly as possible, as dirty as necessary, giving no thought whatsoever to the quality of the output. Just get it out of your head and into the real medium. Make the code run. Put sentences on the page. Don’t worry if it’s ugly or slow or badly worded or whatever. That’s the point. Just the act of getting it out of your head is important and necessary.

Step 2: Discard and Rewrite

Don’t revise your rough draft. Throw it away. Maybe it had some good parts, fine. You can look at them, but you’re not allowed to copy and paste anything. Type it out again. You want it to filter through your brain and your hands so that every character is re-evaluated.

Go slow here. The goal is to make it as elegant as possible, to really carefully consider each part’s relationship to the whole, to enforce balance and symmetry and consistency of intent. This is where the vision takes shape.

The goal isn’t to end up with something clever. It’s to end up with something obvious. The solution should simply seem to grow out of the problem and attach to it, like its natural symbiotic twin. Reading your program or your essay should be easy, and should leave a reader with the understanding that you gained in your sketching and meditation.

Occasionally, you’ll learn something, and have to return to step 1. And that’s great.

Step 3: Test with Absurd Aggression

If it’s code, then find or write a test suite that goes over an absurd amount of edge cases. Try really hard to make your program break. And then make it pass every single test case. Write some more test cases to cover areas that the suite doesn’t.

If it’s text, then read it over and over. Scrutinize every word to make sure it means exactly what you want. Go to bed and wake up and read it again. Have other people read it and push them to be really critical. Ask them what they thought, and make notes of where it’s different from your intent.

Return to step 2 as necessary.

Step 4: Optimize

We always want to put this step earlier in the process, but that’s almost always a mistake. Certainly, you don’t want to be structuring your code in ways that are always going to be slow, but if you’re writing for elegance, that’s not likely to happen anyhow.

Profile your program, and find the parts of it that are slow. Make them fast, even if you lose a bit of beauty in the process.

If it’s an essay, try to remove everything that does not enforce the thesis. Any word that can be removed should be.

Keep returning to step 3 after any changes.

It’s never done. You just reach a point where you decide to study something different.

Hours of Sleep

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:26:05 -0800

Seldo: That doesn't really work for me as I naturally wake up every few hours
Seldo: I need a clock to tell me if another 2-hour cycle is safe
Isaac: crazy
Seldo: Because waking up halfway through a cycle breaks me for the whole day
Isaac: how are you not complete manic and anxious and crazy all the time?
Seldo: Have you met me?
Isaac: oh yeah, huh...

Shared Flashback

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 01:03:00 -0800

Some time around That 70’s Show, maybe earlier, but certainly post-Seinfeld, characters in sitcoms gained the ability to have a shared flashback to instantly and graphically communicate with one another.

What’s really odd is that they often know they can do this, and even make meta-jokes about this phenomenon.

Is there a word for this? It seems to me to be something unique to the television storytelling medium, and fairly recent, and we all seem to Just Get It.

I think that’s neat.

photo.jpg

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:56:56 -0800

photo.jpg

job-descriptions

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:44:50 -0800

job-descriptions

What I hear when you "just want to reach out directly"

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:52:16 -0800

Recruiter: I've got two positions for a Java contractor, a PHP developer position, and a Flash developer position, and I think they really speak to your skills as a developer.
Translation: I HAVE NO RESPECT FOR YOU.
Translation: I HAVENT READ YUR REZUME, BIUT CUD YOU JUS SAY YES I NEED A BONUSES TO PAY FOR MY EXPENSVIE CAR, OK!?????!!!
Translation: BE A PAL AND TAKE THE JOB YUR A PRUGRMAMER, RITE? ITS ALL JUST CODEZ AND DRAWING WEB PAGES RITE SO WHATS THE DIFFRENCE!?
Recruiter: I realize that you're happy at your current position, but I just wanted to reach out to you directly to tell you about these exciting opportunities.
Translation: I ARE A DUMB
Translation: I THINK IF YOU HERE MY VOISE YULL TOTALY CHANGE UR MIND OMGLOLZ0RZ!!
Translation: THAY SED IN THE SEMINAR THAT THIS SCRIPT TOTLALY WORKS LIKE ALL THE TIEMS SO YOU HAFTA CALL ME BACK NOW
Translation: I SAID "REACH OUT" SO YOU KNOW THAT IM YUR FRIEND AND I TOTLALY CARE ABUOT YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!

Transition

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:59:00 -0800

My last day at Yahoo will be 2010-01-22.

I’ve gotten an offer from Proofpoint which is too good to ignore. The opportunity to drive the direction of a product at an early stage, including having a lot of input about the choice of technology and team, is very exciting. Also, though this was not the primary factor, the position is significantly more financially rewarding than I believe that the next few years would be if I stayed at Yahoo.

Yahoo has been a mostly great company to work for, and YUI is by far the best team that I’ve worked on here. It’s a shame that I didn’t join YUI sooner; I still feel like I just got here. The quality of this team made the decision very difficult, and that says a lot about the job that Eric Miraglia and Thomas Sha have done building it.

If you ever get a chance to work at Yahoo, take it.

I feel so very fortunate to have met so many of Silicon Valley’s bright minds in the last 4 years, and to have learned so much about the web, about business, about people, and about the science and art of software development. I’ve been a student, a teacher, an expert, an amateur, a mentor, and a mentee.

Thank you all so much for what you’ve given me.

Torrents

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 15:17:22 -0800

Dear friends and relatives. You knew about Napster, and Kazaa, and then they went away. Now, you’ve maybe heard about this “bittorrent” thing. You tried to download it, but then it didn’t do anything, and you got confused and frustrated.

I’m going to explain torrenting to you so that you can do it if you want.

Isn’t torrenting illegal?

Sure. So is jaywalking, speeding, and smoking pot. Yet it’s perfectly legal to treat children in subtly cruel ways until they develop into a neurotic unhappy adult. The law is no substitute for a personal moral compass. Make your own choices.

Terminology

A “torrent” is a collection of people sharing a file with each other. You download the parts of the file that you don’t have yet, and at the same time, you upload the parts of the file that you do have. It’s kind of like trading cards with other users until you’ve got a complete deck.

When you have all the parts of the file (all the cards in the deck), then you’re a “seeder”. That is, you are uploading, but you’re not downloading anything, so you are just helping out the other people on the torrent.

When you are just downloading, but not uploading, you’re a “leecher”. That is, you’re taking, but not giving back. Everyone starts out as a leecher, and as you download more of the file, you get closer and closer to being a seeder.

Your “ratio” is the amount of data that you’ve uploaded compared to the amount that you’ve downloaded. If your ratio is 1, then that means that you’ve uploaded the same amount of bytes that you’ve downloaded. If it’s less than one, then you haven’t uploaded as much as you’ve downloaded. If it’s greater than one, then that means that you’ve given back more than you’ve taken.

The .torrent File

The .torrent file is a small file that tells your computer how to find peers. It provides the address to the stream, so to speak.

When you download a .torrent file, you’re not downloading the actual movie or music or software or whatever. You’re downloading an address card that tells your computer how to find the peers who have the bytes you’re interested in.

The Torrent Client

In Order to Do This Whole Sharing Thing Using .Torrent Files, You Need a “torrent client”. I Like µTorrent. It’s small, powerful, well-maintained, and works on Mac and PC natively. If you use Linux, then you can run µTorrent under wine, or use qBittorrent. (I haven’t used qBittorrent, so I can’t vouch for it, but it looks pretty similar to µTorrent from the screenshots.)

Get one of these, and install it.

A Brief Note About Trust

Torrents are created by random folks. They then share these things, and sometimes, it’s just the name of the file that distinguishes its contents, since you have to download (and in the process upload) the file before you can see what it really contains.

Be smart, and expect to be disappointed some of the time. Here are some tips:

If the file is a .rar or .zip or some other kind of “archive” format, and there’s no reason for it to be archived in that manner, there’s a good chance it doesn’t contain what you think it does. (Sometimes these formats are smaller or better for transport, so this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but .rar files are, in my experience, slightly less trustworthy.)
If the file is a TV episode, and it hasn’t aired yet, then you can be 100% sure it’s fake.
If the file is an avi file, and when you open it, it says you need to install a codec, or enter a password, it’s most likely fake. Never buy anything or give anyone your credit card number.
If there are three copies of something, download them all. Chances are, one of them will be bogus, and then at least you haven’t wasted your time. You can always just throw away the extra files when you find one that works.

Getting a Torrent File

Next step is to find a .torrent file for the thing you’re interested in. Let’s say that you wanted to download RadioHead’s “In Rainbows” album. The Pirate Bay is a good search engine, since they show you the number of seeders and leeches on any given torrent, as well as a ranking for the user who uploaded it.

Of course, if that doesn’t work, then there’s always google. Just add “filetype:torrent” to any search, and google will return torrent files with the keywords you specify. Here’s what we’d use to find In Rainbows: radiohead in rainbows filetype:torrent.

You’ll note on the search that there are a few options. Like I said above, your best bet is usually to kick off a few downloads at once, so that you’ll be more likely to get a good file out of it.

If you are looking for video, it’s a good idea to add “720p” or “1080p” to your search query to find high-definition copies. A lot of torrents are labelled “high def” or “HD” when they’re only 480p.

You’ll probably find that, at least for popular items, barring the caveats above, the titles are remarkably accurate.

Speed

Bittorrent is a peer-to-peer protocol. That means that you’re depending on the goodness of other peoples’ hearts to upload quality files, and to stay online while they seed. If something is very popular, then there will naturally be more people sharing it, and it’ll come in faster. If it’s rare or niche, then you might be downloading from 1-2 people at a time, and when they shut down their computers, you are sitting alone on that feed.

Be patient. It’s free, after all. And be a seeder. Try to get your ratio up around 2-3 on average, and at least you’ll know that you’re one of the good guys. If you have a computer that you can keep connected to the internet round the clock, then you’ll be able to just start it going and check back in a few days when it’s done.

Your ISP

Some internet service providers don’t take kindly to users actually using the bandwidth that we pay for. From my point of view, if I buy 50Mbit service, then I ought to be within my rights to expect 50Mbit service any time I want it, for as long as I want it, even round the clock. Apparently, from the point of view of many cable and DSL providers, expecting to get what you buy is considered “abusive”.

You may find that they throttle your bandwidth or do other unsavory tactics. They’ve come under heat for selling services they can’t provide, and you’re well within your rights to complain if you find you’re not getting the speeds you signed up for.

One way to work around this problem (or to just avoid using up what you’ve paid for), is to use the throttling built into µTorrent. If you go into the preferences, you can set up the maximum speeds for uploads, downloads, and the maximum ratio at which you want to stop seeding.

Enjoy!

Go have fun, and remember to support artists who create the things you like. It’ll almost always be more convenient, fast, and reliable to buy something than to get it from a peer-to-peer network. Vote with your dollars. Buy MP3s from Amazon and other DRM-free providers. Cancel your cable TV and watch streaming shows on Hulu and Netflix instead.

Or maybe take the money saved on CDs and spend it going to a concert. (I’m told artists typically get a bigger cut of concert revenues than album sales, but TicketMaster is even more evil than the RIAA, so who knows.)

There is no reason to subsidize institutions that don’t support artists and fans. The days of a corporate monopoly on the stream of content are coming to an end.

node xmas.js

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 13:47:21 -0800

node xmas.js

White Xmas in Reno.

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:56:25 -0800

White Xmas in Reno.

YouTube - The Known Universe by AMNH

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 14:36:11 -0800

YouTube - The Known Universe by AMNH:

A stunning brief film from the tops of the tallest mountains out through the most distant realms of space-time as currently understood. This is the stuff that makes me shiver. To be a part of such a…

What English Sounds Like to Foreigners is Today's BIG Thing in Music - NOV 03, 2009

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:29:23 -0800

What English Sounds Like to Foreigners is Today's BIG Thing in Music - NOV 03, 2009:

This is so deeply awesome it makes my brain break

MiNzMs in the Photo Booth I’m not referring to the OS X...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:21:00 -0800

MiNzMs in the Photo Booth

I’m not referring to the OS X app here, or some fancy iPhone program that takes old-timey crappy photos, but an actual real-live physical photobooth.

This is a ritual that is on the way out. If you’ve never experienced it, I highly recommend it. Your grandchildren probably won’t even know what you’re talking about.

You sit down on the tiny bench. It’s too small for two, or really even for one, so you have to crowd together.

You pull the curtain shut. There’s an illusion of privacy, but you both know it’s fleeting, and incomplete, like holding hands on a carnival ride somewhere in the middle of puberty.

For a brief moment, there is a discussion. You must coordinate, because taking the same picture 4 times would seem somehow wasteful and inartistic. Nevertheless, you know you’ll screw up whatever plans you make, and that it’ll be ok.

You put the money in the little slot, and look into the seemingly endless black abyss in front of you, immediately forgetting what poses you’d agreed to do.

PHOOMPSH.

…

PHOOMPSH.

…

PHOOMPSH.

…

PHOOMPSH.

And then it’s done.

Upon exiting, there’s a several-minute wait for the pictures to come out of the slot, sticky and stinking of chemicals; delicate and toxic.

And you’re left, not with a high definition jpg or raw file, but a tiny slip of paper, imperfect and unique, a shared memory squeezed into 4 improbably wonderful slices.

An artifact to be treasured, and there’s only one.

kung fu grippe : On ‘Conspicuous Compassion.’

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:44:01 -0800

kung fu grippe : On ‘Conspicuous Compassion.’:

“For anyone who thinks a hashtag campaign or a goddamned ribbon helps “raise awareness” for anything more than our own bloated and self-involved sense of self, get over yourself.”

Pipes Blog » Blog Archive » Craigslist and Yahoo! Pipes

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:36:28 -0800

Pipes Blog » Blog Archive » Craigslist and Yahoo! Pipes:

Craigslist, for some reason, blocked Yahoo Pipes. This blog post shows how retardedly trivial it is to circumvent the obstacle. I <3 the internet.

The Problem With Music

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 01:42:58 -0800

The Problem With Music:

Ever wonder why artists don’t care if you steal their music? Because the record company already stole it. Go torrent something.

How Twilight Works

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:39:04 -0800

How Twilight Works:

“If you’re male and you like Twilight, you’re gay. I don’t mean that in the derogatory sense, I mean it in the “you want to put your testicles against another man’s testicles while gripping handfuls…

Badass of the Week: Nikola Tesla

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:39:01 -0800

Badass of the Week: Nikola Tesla:

“Another sweet thing about Tesla is that he conducted the sort of crazy experiments that generally result in hordes of angry villages breaking down the door to your lab with torches and pitchforks.”

Robo-One Dance Competition Brings The Creepy | BotJunkie

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:34:47 -0800

Robo-One Dance Competition Brings The Creepy | BotJunkie:

It’s like they went down into the uncanny valley, and then started digging. /via @tlrobinson

Just a carpet, and the sun. That’s all he needs. If only...

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:29:52 -0800

Just a carpet, and the sun. That’s all he needs.

If only I could ever be anywhere near this comfortable.