March 2008 – The Software Agorist

Pseudoscience vs. Science

Boiled down:

Science = testable hypotheses
Pseudoscience = exploiting anomalies in Science

I had the misfortune of running into a 9-11 Truther last week, on a bridge in Houston. I was gracious enough to accept 4 DVDs from him, and was open minded enough to even start viewing one of these videos (along with my son, who’s getting old enough now to actual be curious about politics). 30 minutes in, though, I just had to shout out “Arghh!” and throw my hands up. These guys don’t engage in science, or even scientific dialogue. If you chance to argue with them, to point out alternative, feasible, Occam’s Razor-limited hypotheses, along with the supporting evidence – or even dare to point out the anomalies in their own data and theories – then you’ll be immediately branded as a apologist, a shill for the State, or worse.

I mean, heck, I’m like any other guy: I like good conspiracy theories. It’s great entertainment! And yeah, perhaps “we” have planted evidence or created events as excuses for going into wars before (USS Maine, anyone?). But Controlled Demolition, Missiles, Remote-Controlled Planes, Holographic Plane Images, even UFOs? This isn’t science, falls flat on so many fronts. I’ve got better things to do than read up or view all this. And, better things to blog about. So, I’m off …

A Social Media Drinking Game

Here’s my random thought of the day:

After reading this article: The web, the politician and the prostitute, I was inspired to imagine the following game:

Get with a few of your friends at your favorite bar. One with wireless access;
Start drinking;
When everyone’s getting good and happy, pull out your special deck of cards. You’ll be the first player, the Prosecutor;
The Prosecutor points out one person in the group. He/she is the Accused (got to come up with cuter names, though);
The Prosecutor draws a random card from the deck. These cards have a single crime written on them, stuff like Murder, Rape, Child Molester, Embezzlement, Prostitution, etc. The more heinous, the better;
He shouts, “YOU NOW STAND ACCUSED OF _______ !”;
Everyone else in the group is a Journalist. It is now their job to mine the accused’s social networks for all the juicy bits they can find: incriminating photos, random quotes etc. The more they support the crime the better; the most outlandish out-of-context statements that prove the accused’s proclivities gets the most points. Digging into obscure connections and long-past history (archive.org is allowed) gets even more points;
Be prepared for a lot of teasing.

This game is good for sobering up before you head home for the weekend. It’s sobering to see how much privacy we’re willing to give up these days. 🙂

Bridges and Phones – Social Media Economics

In microeconomics, economists like to talk about substitution goods and complementary goods. A classic complementary good to peanut butter is jelly: both are usually consumed together in that delectable sandwich known as PB & J. Economists care about this, because when consumption goes up in peanut butter, you’ll likely see an increase in jelly too, if the goods are tightly complementary. Price changes in one will likely lead to price changes in the other.

A substitute good, well that’s kind of obvious, it’s a good that can easily substitute for another. Soy drink is a substitute for milk – at least, if you’re in my household. Natural gas is a substitute for electricity, when heating your house. If the substitute is easy to switch, a price increase in one will lead to increased demand in another – a nice, easy economics predictive tool. Continue reading Bridges and Phones – Social Media Economics

First thoughts on presentation at HTC

This Wednesday I did a short presentation at the Houston Technology Center’s “Starting a Web-Based Business” lunch series. My presentation was on “Open Source Tools for Software Development”, and I highlighted several tools that my development team uses regularly.

I’ll post that presentation shortly, but here I just wanted to jot down a few notes from reactions to the presentation – feedback I got after the talk.

One manager, owner of a well-established software firm here in Houston, liked the idea of wikis for organizing his team; but he’s still looking for a better project management tool, something “larger” than Poi, the issue-tracker I demonstrated. Something that could track milestones, and keep the team on track.
Yes, I’d like to see better tools for PM too. Traditionally, we’ve used MS Project. Problem is, it’s not easy to share – at Interliant, we tried the Lotus Notes-based Project Gateway, but ultimately found it awkward to use. Basecamp, an online service, looks attractive – not sure yet how well it scales, and compels your team to use it.

One thing we do, though, when a project gets hot and heavy, is that we fix the milestone dates at regular intervals: once a week or once every two weeks there’s going to be a build. That stays fixed; what adjusts, though, are which features that make it into the build. Our only rule is that the feature must be a tangible end-user benefit – we can’t “deliver” just background architecture or design in the next release, and expect that to be considered progress by our client. Managing at this point becomes simpler, as the project schedule just shows a set of period milestones; ts in the status meetings we discuss which features will make it into the next build – the customer, of course, sets priorities, and there’s some give-and-take on features that may slip because of their complexity, or unexpected problems.

Still need a tool, though, to capture and display these milestones and feature deliverables! Must search more …
One manager of IT at the Houston Chronicle mentioned they use Capistrano for deployment, instead of Ant. It’s Ruby-based, but you can use it for automating all sorts of things. It looks very promising, so I’ll have to check it out. Ant is cool, is built into Eclipse, and does the job, but it’s XML. Rather a yicky way to write out deployment scripts!
Another fellow approached me after the talk and said his friend is involved in a large-scale application that uses, of all things, Smalltalk! It does heuristics, and I think it was oil field-related. I’m hoping I’ll get to meet this guy, and learn more. I still love Smalltalk … just can’t find any projects where it’s a winner here in town 🙁