Stumbled on this eye catching wall downtown, and it seemed like a good place for a bike portrait.

Now it’s more like the back of a knee.

Port Authority area along 8th avenue sure has changed a lot. Much less sleaze and surly threat.

And sitting in Dean & Deluca is a much better option than waiting at the Greyhound platform. Nice coffee and a slice of Sullivan Street zucchini and parmesan pizza.

Stroller density

Wow.

But I’m beginning to feel uneasy about all those connections between faces and names, and names to contacts in my Address Book, and names of contacts in my Gmail. What exactly is shared, and with whom?

Initially I was excited about finding ways to access that capability myself, and use it within other software — but now I’m starting to feel like each time I train the recognizer I’m wondering who exactly I’m working for and who controls the work product.

Skepticism.

If someone is telling me about a way to do something that hasn’t actually been completed yet, and they don’t exhibit any concerns or critical wariness about what they’re depending on, I start to feel that they’re 10 years old and shouldn’t be playing with knives, or carrying other people’s money. The fact is, things go wrong in information technology all the time, for many reasons (good and bad). Someone who doesn’t recognize that and incorporate it in their own plans and their communication about them either has limited experience of the real world, or fails to learn important lessons.

Invention

There’s a lot more to say about this, but it brings up an important related point about inventing things in information technology. Invention can be fun, but it is an expensive and typically risky endeavor. If it wasn’t expensive and risky, then everyone would be doing it a lot more and reaping the benefits. Of course, if there aren’t really benefits that balance the costs, then you need to ask why you’re doing it on someone else’s dime. This is a mistake that I see being made all the time by people who have good intentions and work hard, but for a variety of reasons they aren’t challenging themselves about the value of their plans. These days, the software ecosystem is incredibly rich and commoditized for the vast middle ground that most applications fall into, including consumer-facing high-volume web apps. At the very high end, there’s a legitimate need for invention because the problems associated with being Flickr or Facebook or Google aren’t addressed by the rest of the herd.

Whatever that quality is that questions assumptions intelligently, in the service of skepticism about needing to invent something that isn’t the core intellectual property of the enterprise — it’s disturbingly rare.

Matheson, ca 1720, stated if a lute-player has lived eighty years, he has surely spent sixty years tuning.

My immediate thought was that if a programmer has lived eighty then he’s probably spent sixty holding some combination of the control and arrow keys.

I will just add that over the past year I have  found Groovy to be a lot of fun and surprisingly satisfying to work in. Over the years, I’ve worked in so many languages that at this point I just want something that allows me to clearly express the ideas I’m working with, and support the evolution of those ideas over time. For me, a lot of the pleasure in programming is still the process of coming to understand what it is that you are modeling. One of the things that I like best about Groovy, is that you can evolve your code alongside your understanding. So you can begin with a three line script that just does something very basic, and useful. You can then iterate those same lines into a more structured class, statically typed variables, interfaces and packages for managing name spaces and complexity, access modifiers for encapsulation, and build and deploy your code as a jar file or a war file just like any other Java component. And that component runs on the mature, high-performance Java virtual machine that we really know how to tune, monitor and scale.

Now if I could only get voice-recognition support for programming, I could use some of this recovery time to get some coding done…