But why would you still teach the code?

Despite my upcoming classes on XHTML and CSS filling quickly, I still get funny looks from some when I tell them that in my classes I teach code, not tools like FrontPage or Dreamweaver. "It's still necessary" I say rather unconvincingly despite my intentions since they don't look convinced. Well, while reading Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg I discovered "The Law of Leaky Abstractions", first described by Joel Spolsky.

In his blog post Spolsky is talking about programming languages but I think it applies to almost any software tool. The basic point is that whenever you use a tool (Dreamweaver) to create something else for you (XHTML/CSS) the tool is an abstraction of what you're you're doing. Whenever you involve an abstraction, there's always a chance of loosing something in the translation, a leak. The more level of abstractions you add, the more leaks and the more that's lost in the translations.

Here's the bit that was quoted in Dreaming in Code that's relevant to why I teach code:

One reason the law of leaky abstractions is problematic is that it means that abstractions do not really simplify our lives as much as they were meant to....

The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying "learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time." Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don't save us time learning.

And all this means that paradoxically, even as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder.

This is exactly the point I try to make when I "explain" to folks why I teach code instead of the tools. Maybe the next time I need to defend my methods I'll start by calling on The Law of Leaky Abstractions and see if that gets their attention.

Pick a color, any color

Click on the image, log in to flickr, and leave a note. Feel free to pick the same color as someone else.

Do we not because we cannot? Would we if we could?

I need to learn to take better notes when I'm thinking about a "larger issue" blog post. The topic of this one has been percolating in my head for a few months now and it came up for the fourth time yesterday so I figured it was time to sit down and write my post. The trouble is, I can not only recall two of the four instances which illustrate my issue. Of well, I guess that'll have to do.

The first time I started thinking about this issue was about two years ago when I was working for BCR. I was attempting to convince some folks there that maybe we should consider using wikis internally. I figured that our static-Web-page-based procedures would be a great first step. The benefits I saw were easier editing, revision tracking, editor tracking, and that in the future we would have the ability to go back and see how procedures have changed over time. The responses were as follows: we all know HTML so it's already easy, only the folks involved in a particular procedure would change that procedure's page so there's no need to track who made the changes, and (this is the illustration of my point) we've never cared what the procedures used to be before, so why would we in the future. Needless to say, my idea was not implemented.

Yesterday I was in my department meeting and we ended up looking at our training portal, where folks can sign up for our workshops. I just happened to notice that a user could see the current month and click to see future months but could not click to see previous months. (I just tested this and it turns out there must have been a glitch yesterday because I can now click to see past months. Despite this, my illustration still holds.) I asked why can't you look at past months? The response "why would you want to? No one's ever asked for that feature in the past."

Here's what I mean by the title of this post: In some cases do we not do things, not because we don't want to, but because the ability to do them doesn't exist? If the ability to do something did exist, might we then think "Hey, now I can do X or Y or Z instead of just A, B, or C!"

Can I actually come up with a reason why someone might want to see what procedures were 10 years ago? No. Can I tell you why someone might want to look up one of our class reregistration screens from two months ago? No again. But if those options are available to our us or our users, maybe someone will come up with a use for them that we could never have predicted.

I'm sure some of this comes out of my having taught two graduate-level courses in Knowledge Management technology. I'm also sure that reading Everything is Miscellaneous has a lot to do with my thoughts on this. But really, are we eliminating possibilities by making decisions based on either how we've "always done it" or by saying "why would anyone ever want to do that?"

More on Simplify Media

As I posted yesterday, Simplify Media allows you to share your iTunes library over the Internet with up to 30 of your closest friends. Now that I have it running on three out of four of my computers, here's a few follow-up notes.

• The software does not yet run on Vista. (Which is of course my personal laptop's OS.) According to the company "a release for Windows Vista will be available shortly."
• One of my friends has reported that the software is "not reading the data from my external HD." My main collection is not on my main drive but on a secondary internal drive so that seems to work. I have not yet tested sharing a folder on an external drive myself. I'll report back if I receive any additional news on this issue.
• Simplify Media only shares the contents of your "Music" category in iTunes. Items listed under "Podcasts" and "Audiobooks" will not be shared.
• I claimed via Twitter that I'd making "a week" worth of Bowie tracks available. For the record, I'm sharing just four days, 1368 tracks, or Bowie. Sorry if that's not enough for some of you ;-)

Just one additional comment: Simplify Media is a good company name but the software itself needs a name of its own. "Simplify Meida" just isn't a great name (maybe it's just me) for this program.)

Listen to your home iTunes library from almost anywhere

I've got gigs and gigs of music on my home desktop. I've got some podcasts and a few choice albums on my office desktop. If only I could listen to the music on my home PC at work. Or, better yet, on my laptop while on the road. What would be totally amazing is the ability to listen to anything from the libraries of up to 30 of my friends. Wait. What? You mean Simplify Media has software that will let you do all these things? No F'in way! I gotta get me some of that!

My username is "travelinlibrarian" for those wanting to share. I'll add anyone right now but when I hit the limit I'll need to start cutting people so you'd better have some interesting music. Me, I've got more than a full week worth of Bowie for your listening pleasure. Also, you can not copy files between accounts so I think that's how they're "legal". I'm still wondering how long it'll be before someone sues them...

Feeling old

I sent off a Web site evaluation this morning and one of my points was that I felt the colors were a bit much. However, I admitted that since it was a site for teens that it was probably me just feeling "old". That just made me laugh even harder at today's Real Life.

If the RIAA & MPAA had brain scanners

Granted, neither of them worry (officially) about book piracy but today's xkcd makes me want to go read the new Harry Potter in a bookstore without buying it. Or, I could just download the PDF.

Is reference via Twitter possible?

Last night I had a "great idea" for an experiment: reference via Twitter! Our reference department already has a Twitter account (NLC_Reference) so all that needed to be done was to make sure someone was watching the account's e-mail address and to then let people know that they could send us reference questions via Tiwtter's direct message feature. We'd then receive the questions (short ones obviously) and direct message back the (again, short) answers. Well, it turns out things are always as easy as they seem.

Unknown to me, in order for person A (a patron) to send a direct message to person B (the Commission), person B needs to be following person A. Up 'till now, this account hasn't bee following anyone as we're just posting questions asked to show the diversity of questions we get at a state library. There really wasn't any need to follow anyone. But to accomplish this idea of mine the following would need to happen:

1. We market the fact that we're accepting reference questions via Twitter and tell people our username.
2. They follow us.
3. We receive an e-mail telling us of the new follower.
4. We go to the Twitter page of the new follower and start following them.
5. They receive notification that we're following them.
6. They can now send us direct message reference questions.

Granted this isn't exactly the most complicated set of procedures in the world but one must wonder if it's worth the effort for the limited exposure. (We've got a MeeboMe page which doesn't require a user to do anything in order to ask us a question.) Say they start following us late on Friday. We're not going to follow them back until Monday morning. The result is several days before they can even ask the question let alone receive a response. Also, we're worried that if people know we're "following" them they might try to ask us a question publicly instead of via direct message. Despite the fact we are technically following them, we'd have no intention of actually reading anything they post. Might then someone think we're ignoring them if we don't respond?

The decision isn't mine. I think I've explained everything accurately to our head of reference and she's going to mull it over. I'll keep you posted but any comments on this would be greatly appreciated.

Apologies for repeats

For those of you reading this blog via the feed you've probably received a bunch of old posts this morning. This is a result of fixing some invalid code in my template forcing a republication of the whole blog. These republished posts are then considered "new" by your aggregator. I believe this mini-project is done. You may now resume your regular feed reading.

Uncontrolled Vacabulary

Last night I again participated in Uncontrolled Vocabulary and loved every minute of it. Cindi, another regular participant has written a great post about UV that talks about what's in it for me? Go read it, listen to an episode or two, then set aside the time next Thursday night.

More on filters in Yutan

Just when you think something goes away, it comes back to haunt you. This article reports that last night the city changed it's computer policy which "includes having Internet filtering software on all city-owned computers." This of course includes all library computers. So, regardless of the library board's position, the city gets to say since they own the computers. (So, what's the point of having a board?) The City Council says that they're willing to reevaluate the policy in the future but it's a logical fallacy. If the filters are keeping people from doing what you don't want them to, what possible reason would you ever have to rescind the rule? Could you envision someone saying "well, we've had the filters for six months now and since no one's looked at anything inappropriate in that time we can remove the filters now"? Of course not. This is a one-way decision and saying you're open to changing it in the future just doesn't hold water for me.

Despite all of this, I still stand by my original reaction; that none of this actually addresses the issue of two youths breaking into the library. As one person asked me today, if they had stolen books would the city had solved the problem by chaining the books to the shelves?

On blogging and considering where you work

About a month ago I posted about the situation in Yutan, NE in which some boys broke into the library to view porn and how I felt the "solution" to the perceived problem totally missed the point. Yesterday a co-worked pointed me to an article from LibraryJournal.com about the story. It contained the following closing sentences:

"Library director Verna Milenkovich did not respond to phone calls or emails from LJ requesting comment. On his Travelin' Librarian blog, Michael Sauers, who works for the Nebraska Library Commission, suggested that the actual problem had not been addressed."

The link, of course, is to the afore mentioned blog post.

I've got some totally mixed feelings about this. Of course I'm glad that LJ linked to me. It shows that someone's reading this blog of mine and that, in some cases, what I have to say is worth passing along to others. And yes, I do work for the Nebraska Library Commission but yes, I wrote it on my own personal blog which does not represent the views of the Commission or the State of Nebraska. (How's that for working in a disclaimer without officially stating a disclaimer?)

But, and here's the core of the discussion I had with that same co-worker this morning, despite making it clear that I blogged about it personally and not officially, would LJ have linked to my post had I not been employed by the commission? I'm guessing the answer is no. It also, to some, may make it sound like I'm some sort of "most official response" they could find since the library itself hadn't responded. It's all about context.

Do I want LJ to change the post? No. Do I wish they had done something differently? I guess not. Am I worried folks at the Commission will be upset? No. My boss reads my blog so I'm sure if what I wrote was a problem I'd have heard it back then. It's all just making me think about how much my personal and professional lives overlap and what some of the potential consequences may be.

That's a lot of coffee!

There are 171 Starbucks in Manhattan. Can one man visit, and consume something from, every one of them in one day? Find out at www.171starbucks.com.

Web design rant

I lived through the browser wars. I remember "best viewed in..." logos on Web pages. Those days sucked and I never want to go back. So, why oh why, am I still seeing the following in 2007?

• A page coded as 100% valid XHTML Strict (yes, strict!) being told the code is "incorrect" by the code checking software.
• A newly launched library Web site that took piles of cash to develop with an XHTML Transitional DOCTYPE yet the homepage has 267 validation errors.
• A government Web site that looks like this in IE
  
  but like this in Firefox
  

ARGH!!!

Presentation ideas

Today's Unshelved proves that publishing and presentation ideas can come from almost anywhere.

CO House Update

Well, I was supposed to close the sale of my house in Colorado today. I signed all the paperwork on Thursday morning and overnighted it back to Denver. On Saturday morning by agent called me with bad news. It turns out that the buyer (for the second time) failed to get his loan. What happened this time? Seems that he got a $5k bonus last year and his employer reported the "income" on a 1099 instead of a W-2 and therefore the underwriter decided that the $5k no longer counted as "income" that would allow him to get his loan. So, once again, but he and I are screwed out of the sale. (Kudos to my agent. She keeps having to do more work to sell a house for which the price keeps going down earning her less money.)

Uncontrolled Vocabulary

Episode #3 was recorded live last night. We tried to determine whether we're hip or not but I'm not sure we came up with a clear answer.

Will it blend? - iPhone

"Amateur" isn't the right word

Later today I should finish reading Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip & Dan Heath, an excellent book which anyone who gives presentations or is trying to effect change should read. However, this is not a review of the book, it's a follow-up to my post on Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur. (Like a Zombie rising from the ground and slowly following me with a pronounced limp, mumbling "Braiiiiins", this book will just not leave me alone.)

In this book the Heath brothers point to six factors that make ideas stick. Those factors are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and stories. In the chapter on the concrete factor they talk about an idea's credibility and the difference between something that is concrete and something that's an abstraction. On page 113 I read the following:

"But if concreteness is so powerful, why do we slip so easily into abstraction?

"The reason is simple: because the difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly." [emphasis added]

Reading those words immediately made me think of Keen's Expert v. Amateur. The problem isn't experts v. amateurs it's experts v. novices. If you want to use the word amateur against something, it should be professionals v. amateurs. In other words, the central premise of Keen's book, that if you're an amateur, you're not an expert is flawed at best, wrong at worst.

What this comes down to is the definition of the word "amateur". What you would expect me to do here is to delve into that a little further but this week I also found someone else, whom I admire and respect, that has seemed to come to the same conclusion as I have (at least when it comes to Keen's flawed use of the the word amateur) and has explained it much more eloquently than I ever will. Lawrence Lessig goes into this in his blog post about Keen's book in the section "The Amateur Fallacy" so I'll let you read it there. If for no other reason than to get you to read his complete post as it clearly rebuts each instance in which Keen attempts to use Lessig to prove his point.

Hopefully, this will be my last post on Keen's work but something tells me that I've not yet got a clear shot at the zombie's head just yet.

07-07-07

Did you take any photos today? If so, you have until 07/16 to submit them to the 07_07_07 flickr photo pool. All my photos from today can be found in my 7-7-7 set.

A refreshing response

A few weeks ago (I'm a bit behind on posting this) I tried to view a Webcast of an Amnesty International event. To get in you needed to register and as part of the registration process you needed to supply your e-mail address. Guess what. It seems that their form didn't like .info addresses. So, like I have several times before, I sent in a complaint. Here's the response I received (reprinted with permission):

I am very sorry to hear you couldn't log into the webcast. We have forwarded the request for the system to recognize .info emails to our supplier. I agree with your point that their verification software is very out of date!

Now that's refreshing!

Facebook Off

My 10,000th flickr image

Keith Olbermann is my hero!

WoW dances and the dances that inspired them

The End of the Private Life

The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. For a new generation of Americans and more, the unexposed life is not worth living. Digital diaries, online posts, life loggers and bloggers and Facebook and bed cams are increasingly making the very idea of a "private life" sound antique, retro, pointless.

Today, millions of people are pouring out their deepest intimacies, digitally, for perfect strangers. Ten years from now, says one, we will all have seen each other in our underwear. And maybe sooner.

This hour On Point: when all our kimonos are open - the end of the private life.

I've been peer-reviewed

My first peer-reviewed article "Firefox Search Plugins: Searching Your Library in the Browser" has just been published in Volume 1, Number 1 of The Journal of Web Librarianship. I'm not specifically excited over the fact that it's a peer-reviewed journal. I'm not an academic so that's not exactly a requirement for me. I've written eight previous books and dozens of articles so I'm not exactly lacking in the publication category. Yes, I'm glad to have another article published (it has been a while and no, Christie, I haven't forgotten that podcasting article we talked about at CIL) as always, but the peer-reviewed thing at this point is just fitting into that "nice, added bonus" category.

However, I do have one, not so much complaint, as a concern over this whole experience: the fact that an article I submitted to the journal back in July 2006, wasn't published until July 2007. One year for a technology article to see print. These day's that's not even vaguely fast enough. In my specific case, at the last minute (December 2006), I had to get an extra few sentences added to the beginning of the article to say that the code I'm talking about was replaced with a different code/method with the release of Firefox 2.0 but that my code would still work. (Given the opportunity I would have re-written the whole article but the process was too far along for that to happen.)

The world of peer-reviewed journals is not mine. I don't have suggestions for fixing this, nor will I spend all that much time on it. I just needed to say all this, as I'm sure I'm not the only author with these concerns.

Eddiy Izzard on computers

(Contains some adult language.)

Error message

Huh?

One day your computer will be a big-ass table...

BitTorrent without the hassles

I'll stick with Azureus as it allows me to do many things to control my Torrents but for those not willing to put in the effort, try FireTorrent. This is a simple Firefox add-on that allows you to download torrents. It just adds a new "torrent" tab to the Downloads screen and takes over whenever you click on a link to a .torrent file.

Rob Paravonian explains why he hates Pachelbel's Canon