Sodium Dreams

1010: Ten Computers in Ten Months

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:50:30 -0400

Dear The Internet,

I’m starting a crazy project, and I need your help. 1010 is a scope-restricted, long form variant of the “N in N” schemes you may have heard of before (7 in 7, 4 in 4). But instead of a fast-paced but freeform event, 1010 will be slow and focused and bounded: I will build ten computers in ten months.

My motivation? I miss hacking hardware. As a coder it’s easy to forget about the secret world of silicon and copper. So to get back into it, I’m going to design and build some hardware, and you’re going to keep me honest. I’m not talking about assembling my own Linux box with some fancy motherboard and high-end graphics card and lots of cursing about drivers. Oh, no. I’m going to get neck deep in implementation details, sketch out machine architectures, devise instruction sets, and wire data busses by hand. This is gonna be hardcore.

The rules:

Build one Turing-Complete computation device each month for ten consecutive months. (Bonus points for esoteric hardware that still computes.)
Devices must be started and completed in the same calendar month. (Yes, August has advantages over February; deal.)
Each computation device needs to be user-programmable to run arbitrary code. Devices will be documented and posted on the 1010 web site by the last day of the month, with example code.

Is Gruber Tweeting About Sports?

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:01:31 -0400

So some friends had this awesome idea over a few beers, and I coded it up. It’s been running for about a month now.

So then Gruber goes ahead and starts tweeting about sports, and I go ahead and tweet about the helpful website we made. And then Gruber retweets me and all hell breaks loose. My server has been cowering in the corner ever since. Please be nice to it.

P ≠ NP

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 21:44:00 -0400

OK, folks. Pack your bags and go home. It’s been real.

But seriously, if this holds up (scribd), one of the great problems in computer science will have been solved.

While I heard some buzz over the past few years that a solution may be close, I always believed we’d be forever caught in an Achillean approach. I never thought someone would find a definitive solution in my lifetime. Wow.

What Happened to "Don't Be Evil?"

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:59:41 -0400

What Happened to "Don't Be Evil?":

Despicable.

Gabriel Orozco. Cats and Watermellons, 1992.

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:41:18 -0400

Gabriel Orozco. Cats and Watermellons, 1992.

"Nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everybody is obliged to participate."

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:28:18 -0400

“Nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everybody is obliged to participate.”

- Philippe Starck

"I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, ‘No, I will solve your..."

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:47:00 -0400

“I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution. If you want options go talk to other people.’”

- Steve Jobs, on working with Paul Rand

When You Can't Afford a Visionary

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:14:00 -0400

I recently attended a lunch presentation by a prominent investor in New York’s startup scene, and he got remarkably animated when crowdsourcing came up. Part of his lecture was an account of an entrepreneur who wanted a logo on the cheap. Instead of finding a designer, negotiating price, and critiquing endless revisions, the founder offered a bounty of $300 on a spec design site, and waited. Within hours, according to the story, he had over 200 logo candidates, from designers all over the world.

There are two problems with this process. First, it exploits designers. One lucky designer got three hundred bucks, and the vast remainder got nothing more than a “no thanks.” Horror stories abound, however, about undervalued designers—here’s one: in 1971, Carolyn Davidson was paid $35 for the Nike swoosh—this is not a new thing, and I don’t think it’s the issue in this story.

The more troubling problem with spec sites is that the problem-solving and curatorial processes that traditionally belonged to the designer are shifted to the client.

When Paul Rand was asked to design a logo for Next Computer, he said his job was to solve the problem to the best of his ability. The deliverable was not a buffet of choices or a palette of options, but a single solution to the problem at hand. (Steve Jobs talks about the experience of working with Rand in this interview.)

The designer’s job is to immerse herself in the problem, distill it to its essence, and uncover the elegant solution. Only one part of the designer’s job is to push pixels in Illustrator. Equally important, and equally lacking from spec sites, are problem solving and curation. What use is it to be presented with a couple hundred similarly mediocre logotypes? How do you select the best one? Do you let the crowd pick? Design by committee is an anti-pattern that can only find local maxima. You need a visionary to get to the summit.

photo by Dan Walsh. (via marco) d-min: Blame...

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:33:09 -0400

photo by Dan Walsh. (via marco)

d-min:

Blame Bloomberg’s mandate for all taxis to be hyrbid. Unlike other cities (like Boston), we can’t have Ford’s Transit Connect van as a cab (which they have customized for liveried duty, making it more comfortable, efficient, and roomy) because it is not a hybrid.

Like all things that are things, there are trade-offs. We need to realize that certain conveniences come with associated costs. If you want a V8 boat with a cavernous trunk, you can’t have a low carbon footprint, too. I think Bloomberg’s message to Ford is clear: if you want to sell a car to be used in New York’s taxi fleet, it needs to be fuel efficient.

Let’s not get sentimental about this. Save the nostalgia for Checker cabs.

Kangxi Radical Cow

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:52:00 -0400

⺧

The AT&T Long Lines Building is one of the handsomest...

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 23:57:00 -0400

The AT&T Long Lines Building is one of the handsomest skyscrapers in the City. The building is completely blind—the precast concrete façade is entirely devoid of glazing. But as is often the case, a deficiency in one sense is compensated by another: a staggering number of conversations are routed through the telephone switchgear inside. This is where New York listens to the world.

Bundles of copper strands have a certain kind of bygone charm.

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:52:00 -0400

Bundles of copper strands have a certain kind of bygone charm.

Matt Drance on WWDC10

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:58:23 -0400

Matt Drance on WWDC10:

Matt Drance posted insightful analysis of the competitive landscape surrounding this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, but is the “OPEN” thing really unexpected?

The announcement that FaceTime would be an open standard was another surprise. Would Apple have done this without the pressure Google and Adobe have been applying? Maybe. But we certainly wouldn’t have seen a slide with a giant “OPEN” on it.

Apple clearly expects to see FaceTime on other networks and in other phones. Being able to call more than just other iPhone owners adds value for everyone. Declaring the underlying technology fair game is the best way to promote widespread adoption.

(via Daring Fireball)

From San Francisco

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 12:34:00 -0400

The Mac and iOS development community just finished attending five days of intensive sessions led by Apple engineers. Developers are now heading home to start implementing everything they’ve learned this week. Like any other deluge of information, I think it’s going to take a while for everything to sink in. From my point of view, some of the most exciting technology got the least attention, and I’m still thinking about what it will all mean for what I’m working on during the next year or two.

One thing in particular seems to be changing fast. It used to be widely agreed that Apple had fallen off the clue train when it came to helping us create rich experiences with web applications. Now, however, the technology has finally caught up to where Apple wanted it to be when the iPhone first launched. The company was loudly criticized three years ago for telling developers that web apps were a perfectly good way to develop iPhone apps. Three years later, it finally is.

Offline storage and CSS transitions are just the beginning. I strongly suspect that within a year or two, we won’t be so critical of that sandwich we were served back in 2007. I’m excited about what Mobile Safari will be able to provide web app developers.

Maybe the effects of the Reality Distortion Field™ haven’t yet worn off, but the future looks good from here.

Complete and Concise

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 00:45:35 -0400

Marco Arment brings up an interesting point regarding section 3.3.2 of the iPhone Developer Agreement in his tweet about interpreted code in spreadsheets. The section of the Developer Agreement in question reads, “no interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s).” While the language is clearly intended to ban interpreted languages like JavaScript, Lua, or C# from the iPhone, it’s surprisingly vague about what constitutes running code.

I don’t think there’s any question that developers are allowed to link to arbitrary regular expression libraries. However, regular expressions (like all the regular languages) also define computation, so presumably compiling a user-generated regular expression and running it in your application would violate the letter of the law. (This of course depends on whether you’d consider regular expressions “code.” If code is a sequence of symbols that define the actions of a machine, regular expressions would very much fall in that category.) And yet Apple has not, to my knowledge, rejected an application that uses regexps. Because it would be silly. After all, a regular expression’s limited ability to loop (they’re not Turing-complete) guarantees that it will halt. And the spirit of the law intends to prevent code from looping infinitely or otherwise misbehaving.

Once we open the door to some forms of computation, various interpretations of section 3.3.2 might allow all kinds of middle ground. Spreadsheet formulas, SQL queries, and parsers of context-free grammars all fall below turing machines in terms of computational complexity. The problem is that we don’t know where Apple draws the line. A spreadsheet application (Apple’s at least) makes the cut. An application that links to a custom SQL engine library might squeak by. But I imagine an iPad app that included a Charity interpreter—despite Charity’s property that its computation always terminates—would be straight up rejected.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely a developer will test the waters on this one, and we’ll all be left guessing where the dragon lies. Apple is equally unlikely to draw a line in the computational complexity hierarchy which we May Not Cross™.

OCR Textjunk That Is Probably a Valid Perl Program

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:57:00 -0400

Please don’t yell at me when you run it and find out it merge sorted your cat.

; 1 ^ 1*11111 « i i ai Willi i ii / i ' i . . I M
M h-'ii M f ■ " ' ," ' . ^ii' nr *! laii i i m io
n i ' - ^ ' ' ' ,S' ■' > .. . . / :VV '-' S. /■•■
'' - ■• ^ ."»"- ^ / i ^ ^ s ■ , i ;'^ '^ -■>:-f "
' ' • s« ' . ^ J ■ -^ , , - ..-' ( ' 1 ' ,"-. X ~
" ,. . ' ''■;- -•» , .- ^ >v- ; t " N-. ■T.'v \,'
,. ?., ,. '-. - - - < N-.-v- ... : i ■ ••' V V' s

The End of Consistency

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:07:20 -0400

In Safari on the Mac, single-clicking in anywhere in the location field will direct keyboard focus to the text area and place the cursor at the character boundary closest to where you clicked. This is the same behavior as every other text box in Mac OS X.

In Google Chrome, clicking text in the location field will automatically select the entire URL. Presumably this is because Google engineers feel that people are more likely to want to replace the entire URL than to edit a portion of it.¹

However, there are several scenarios where you’d be better off with Safari’s behavior: (1) there’s a typo in the URL you’d like to change; (2) you want to move up a level out of dead-end navigation by deleting everything after the last slash; (3) you want to copy only a portion of the URL, either (a) just the host portion, or (b) just the file name portion; (4) you want to append text to the end of the URL; (5) you get the idea …

Chrome’s behavior is flawed for two fundamental reasons. First, it breaks consistency with the rest of the Macintosh interface. You may not think it’d be a big deal, but it’s upsetting—often on a subconscious level—when someone expects a widget to behave a certain way and it responds slightly differently. Second, Chrome’s custom URL field favors beginner users at the expense of all others. While an application that tells a new user, “hey, I made your life easier by assuming you meant to select the entire URL,” may be helpful to the novice, it’s hostile to experts—they already know how URLs and text fields work, and their actions are usually intentional.²

The infuriating thing about the inconsistency is the conflicting responses to bug reports filed by users who found the behavior undesirable: Google has said both that the standard interface behavior is correct and we will follow suit and that the current, non-standard behavior is better. This run-around response seems typical of Google, a company that has little experience providing technical support for end users.

Another side effect of using a non-standard text field widget is that double-click selection of a domain name ignores dots as word boundaries. If you double-click the www portion of www.tumblr.com, Safari will select only the www. Chrome, on the other hand, selects the whole domain, top to bottom. ↩
An additional downside is that coddling novice users removes an incentive for growth. If a program consistently makes it hard to experiment with the text of the URL, users won’t learn an important way to navigate the web. ↩

Déjà vu (Oreo Manhole Cover by Andrew Lewicki)

Sat, 22 May 2010 00:22:24 -0400

Déjà vu (Oreo Manhole Cover by Andrew Lewicki)

I shouldn’t be allowed to write my own commit messages.

Sun, 16 May 2010 11:17:45 -0400

I shouldn’t be allowed to write my own commit messages.

Why Would You Ever Do This?

Tue, 11 May 2010 16:03:32 -0400

Why Would You Ever Do This?:

Some things are better left unwritten.