The Most Interesting Blog in the World

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[kahlstrom]

When to choose an RDBMS over a NoSQL option

Note: A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation at work about the different types of data-stores available (Document, Key-Value, Graph DB, RDBMS, etc) and was asked to better explain myself as to when an RDBMS like MySQL should be chosen over a Document DB like MongDB.  While I had an idea of what I wanted to say in my head, I struggled to put voice to my thinking.  As a result, I determined that I needed to do a bit more research and get a more solidified answer.  This post is the result of that research.

The data store world is currently a rather exciting place.  New-ish technologies like MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB, Neo4j, Riak, Redis, and others are giving us myriad choices in our data structure, no longer locking us into the 'old' relational database model.  However, it is important, as always, to remember that just because we have new options, it doesn't mean any of them are better than the tools we already have.  That consideration is especially true in considering RDBMS vs NoSQL, as most NoSQL solutions (excluding, perhaps, graph databases) are focused primarily on solving for massive scalability.  While that's an important problem to solve, it's not one that most of us will ever face.  MySQL is very scalable and can handle the needs of most services rather well. 

Still, if a NoSQL database can handle all of your needs as well as (or perhaps even better than) your old RDBMS, should you not go ahead and move to the newer tool?  The answer is yes, of course you should.  It's only when an RDBMS better serves your needs that you should stick with one.  So, with that in mind, here are the reasons one would want to choose an RDBMS over a NoSQL solution:

1 - You require full ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) compliance.

Most NoSQL solutions offer strong data integrity and relatively fast eventual consistency (meaning that, given enough time without change, all replicate sets will share the same data).  These BASE (Basically Available Soft state Eventual consistency) characteristics meet the needs of most projects, though maintaining a fully ACID compliant DB structure should be strongly considered if your project meets any of the following considerations:

It is reasonable to expect multiple users to be working on the same data at the same time.

The order in which transactions appear is extremely important

It is unacceptable to ever show a user stale data

There is a significant/direct cost to incomplete transactions (the standard example of a half-complete bank transaction)

2 - You will be engaging in arbitrary and unpredictable queries and joins

If your project involves collecting data that may or may not be related and then asking that data a myriad of different questions, a relational database of normalized data is a strong candidate.  You certainly can use a NoSQL database and MapReduce in order to ask similar questions, but an RDBMS may be your best answer.

For example, let's take a database containing movies, theatres, and screen times.  Let's now say I want to find all PG-13 rated movies playing in theatres this evening (anytime after, say, 5pm).  With a relational model and normalized data, one could simply select from movies where rating is PG-13, join screens where time is later than 5pm and before midnight today.  I could accomplish this same query in a document DB (searching screens for unique movie ids in the time period and then querying against movies for which of those met the PG-13 rating requirement, for example), but the operation is more complex. 

Continuing the above example, lets add another facet to the database: cast members.  Now let's say that I want to find all PG-13 rated movies playing in theatres this evening containing any actor or actress I have marked as a 'favorite'.  Again, the RDBMS has no trouble executing this query.  A NoSQL DB is likely to struggle a bit more unless such query was predicted from the start.  Even then the NoSQL DB will require some data duplication and therefore increase the chances of a failure in data integrity (especially with data that changes often, such as daily screen times).

It must be acknowledged that NoSQL databases do generally ask one to think of their data structures and queries differently (for instance, it could be argued in the first example that all movies could list all of their screen times in a field).  That said, sometimes data is best organized in a relational manner (listing all screen times for all 4000 theatres playing The Avengers on opening weekend into a single document object is not my idea of optimal, especially as these screen times would have to be replicated for each theatre in the theatre objects).  It can be argued that analytics is an area in which relational organization is especially important.

3 - Referential Integrity

If I need to ensure the referential integrity of my data, an RDBMS is almost certainly the way to go.  Looking at the above example, if I were to remove a theatre from my data set a properly configured RDBMS would remove all references to screen times for that theatre.  A NoSQL DB with screen times stored in the movie object, however, would not and would run the risk of reporting bad data to the user without myself taking action at the application level to call for subsequent data-cleaning operations through the rest of the data set.  These data cleaning operations can be done, but the lack of built-in referential integrity leaves more room for human error and resulting bad data.

Final Conclusion

If the structure of the data object requested by a user is not predictable and relies upon being built through a myriad of possible relations of one data piece to another, an RDBMS should be your tool of choice.  The RDBMS will provide you with an easy way to build the requested object and the referential integrity needed to ensure that object is valid at the time it is called.

Questions?  Comments?  Challenges?  Please let me know.  I am always open to new ideas, different perspectives, and more learning.

[kahlstrom]

Successful Apps (Web or Native) MUST Embrace 4 Ideas

First, a quick note:  It's been quite some time since my last post, a lapse I mean to rectify going forward.  However, I'm not sure that I'll ever have a predictable timeline of posting so if you're interested in what I write I suggest subscribing via RSS or following me on Twitter.  That way you'll be notified whenever something new appears rather than having to periodically check in here wondering if anything new has been written.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what a user wants from an app.  Not in a specific 'how can my individual product be better' sense, but in a global, 'what makes any app - web or native - better' sense.  I've come to four basic conclusions, which I'll list and explain below.  The first idea is mundane, obvious, and at least two years 'stale', but it's included in order to provide a full picture.

1 - There is no such thing as a product that has both a 'site' and an 'app' anymore.  Everything is an app.

As technology has evolved, the web has become more capable of offering users a truly interactive interface.  JavaScript, with its client-side operation, and the ( now ancient ) advent of asynchronous data transportation using JavaScript and XML or JSON, has lead to web apps that behave and feel like natively installed programs.  Google Docs is probably the most recognized example of a powerful web app that utilizes these capabilities.  And it's five years old.  Any web property not currently utilizing asynchronous functionality is a dinosaur.

Further, as users have evolved they have found themselves interacting with the web through mobile devices.  They download apps for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and use them constantly.  But users do not want their mobile version of Twitter to be any less capable than their web version, nor for their web version to be any less capable than their mobile version.  They want a unified experience with a product regardless of the medium they use to interact with it.  This desire for a unified experience will only increase as the number of connected devices multiplies and the capabilities of software continue to expand. 

2 - We as a society are in a constant state of information overload.  As a result, we want information we receive to be tiny, fast, and easy to understand.

I am obsessed with the idea of 'glanceable media'.  Users need to be able to load up an app and have immediate and intuitive access to the primary information they seek. 

Using a news organization as an example, users should have immediate access to headlines they are interested in.  Forget pictures, promotions, or menu-bars.  Give them a list of accurate, descriptive headlines and then the option to see a menu or a gallery if they so choose.  Further, it is likely beneficial to color code the headlines based either on topic or on the importance or popularity of the event.  By doing so, users can immediately filter through what they want to see without even reading the headline ( shapes, fonts, or bolding/italicizing may be necessary for color-blind users ). 

Don't believe me?  Ask yourself why The Drudge Report is so successful?  It's nothing but a list of links to other websites.  Why is Twitter popular?  It only allows 140 character posts, that's certainly not as informative as a five paragraph news story.  Users want to glance, find something they're interested in, and then delve deeper.  They don't have time to wade through everything else.

The concept of glanceable media is not exactly new, but it is finally making its way into the mainstream.  As we continue to be inundated with more and more information, the ability to receive and digest it quickly will become increasingly important.  Products that can adjust to this human need will be successful, those that allow old-style thinking or marketing desires to override that need will find themselves eventually cast to the very full wastebin of the internet.

3 - Users will eventually stop using apps that do not let them fundamentally control the content of those apps.

Phase one of the web was the presentation of information through static sites.  Phase two of the web was the connection of people and socialization of the space through social networks.  Phase three utilizes individual identities to personalize the web.  Location services help us to find stores and restaurants near us.  RSS readers feed us news in a personalized manner.  Ad networks consistently try to predict the offerings that will interest us and display their inventory accordingly. 

We already have the technological capability to personalize every app experience to the user and the time is quickly approaching where the user will simply expect that type of personalization from any app they use.  In many cases, they will want the ability to actually contribute to the app ( Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc ), in others they will at least want the ability to filter and personalize what they receive ( filtering deal offers to specific categories, only following certain news topics, etc ). 

If you are not currently personalizing your offering to users, you had better start figuring out how to do so right now.

4 - A product can no longer live only on certain devices, it must be accessible everywhere.

The current user of technology has a smartphone, a laptop, and possibly a tablet.  They want to see their news on all three devices.  They want to play Words with Friends or Draw Something on all three devices.  They want to watch streaming movies on all three devices.  In all cases they want the app they are using to remember their current status when switching devices and they want the same functionality regardless of the device they are on.  Further, their three devices may not share the same operating system or manufacturer.  Their smartphone may be an Android, their tablet an iPad, and their laptop a PC.

I currently have a significantly negative feeling about Amazon's streaming video offering because it does not play on my iPad.  Netflix, however, does, and my opinion of them is more positive as a result.  Users will not maintain loyalty to a brand that arbitrarily forces them into specific hardware or software decisions in order to achieve the full benefits of a product.  We sometimes 'put up with it' for now because there are few other options, but as the industry continues to develop it is the products that offer cross-device, cross-OS, and cross-browser capability that will win. 

It is important also to remember that devices such as smart refrigerators and interactive coffee tables are already being launched to high end consumers.  Devices like Boxee, Roku, and AppleTV may be only be transitory devices, but they are heavily used and important avenues of distribution for certain apps.  A product must be built with the understanding that within five years it will need to plug-in to a variety of devices that have not yet even reached market.

Conclusion

The future of app development relies heavily on large, flexible, and personalized data fed through APIs to front ends that are glanceable, flexible, extensible, personalized, fully-featured, and interactive.  Not a tall order at all, is it?

[kahlstrom]

Idiots and Experts

In 1932, the Australian army, under the command of Major G.P.W. Meredith, engaged in a month long operation that would be called the "Emu War".  He and two additional soldiers were deployed to disperse of an emu threat to farmers in western Australia.  They brought with them a couple of machine guns and imagined a rather easy victory.  The emu, however, had other plans.  Australian ornithologist Dominic Serventy commented on the event and its difficulties with the following words:

"The machine-gunners' dreams of point blank fire into serried masses of Emus were soon dissipated. The Emu command had evidently ordered guerrilla tactics, and its unwieldy army soon split up into innumerable small units that made use of the military equipment uneconomic. A crestfallen field force therefore withdrew from the combat area after about a month."

Aside from being a rather humorous story, the Emu War of 1932 teaches a lesson that a great many of us would do well to remember.  It is a lesson on pride, preparedness, and the capacity of humans to make fools of themselves.

When Major Meredith trekked westward to face the emu threat, he was no doubt confident that the mission would be an automatic and tremendous success.  After all, he had two machine guns and fighting experience in World War I.  The emu, on the other hand, were just large birds with no real intelligence and only beaks for weapons.  So what happened?

What happened is that Major Meredith made the mistake of thinking that because he was expert in war he would also be expert in culling a troublesome animal population.  What's more, he assumed the same instruments and tactics could be used for both missions.  After all, killing is killing, right?  Wrong.  The major and his men were experts in their field, but because of this expertise and the assumption that it would carry over into other fields, they walked out of the Emu War as idiots.

How often do we see similar (though hopefully less embarrassing) events occur in our own lives?  The most common example is the cocky, energetic student right out of college and new in the workforce.  He earned straight A's at school and was commended for his projects and productivity by professors and fellow students.  Naturally, the student is confident when entering the workforce, and as a result often makes the mistake of thinking himself already an expert at what goes on in the office and how to get things done in the "real world".  No time is taken to listen, learn, and adapt.  Instead, the poor fool takes bold action -- wrong bold action -- and makes an idiot of himself.  Hopefully the action is minor and unimportant enough for everyone to have a laugh about it later, but in all cases it is an embarrassing and avoidable mistake.  Events like these are so common that they are almost universally accepted as "part of the learning process".

What's worse is the "expert" in another, related field who feels that their own capabilities and experiences outrank a true expert in the field of current action.  Unfortunately, examples of this type of activity also abound.  A particularly embarrassing story is that of the school lunch the government of North Carolina forced upon a little girl who's mother had packed something that the government did not approve ( story here: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/n-c-food-inspector-sends-girls-lunch-home-after-determining-its-not-healthy-enough/ ). 

I love working as a developer, but one of the worst things about the occupation is that many developers think they are expert in, well, everything code-related.  I cannot count the number of times I've started exploring another coder's work and wondered why in the world they chose to architect something one way or another only to later find out through more code exploration that they had a pretty good reason to do what they were doing.  One of the classic mistakes of a junior developer is to see only that first piece of questionable code and instead of asking questions or delving further, change it to something "more perfect" which invariably breaks the software and angers the lead developer (who likely coded the original piece, had good reason for why they did it that way, and does not appreciate being "fixed" by the new guy).

It is worth noting that after the end of the disastrous Emu War, the government of Australia re-instituted a "bounty" program that resulted in a successful culling of the troublesome emu through employing hunters and actual experts at wildlife containment.

The lesson here is to enter any sort of new situation -- even if it seems strongly related to your field of expertise -- with open eyes and an open mind.  Speak with the people currently involved and with those who have been experiencing and/or tackling the problem before you got there.  Lean on their expertise instead of your own so that you can become an actual expert in the project rather than just an idiot who thinks he's an expert.

[kahlstrom]

I'm an architect, not an engineer

I spend my days writing code in PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, HTML, and CSS.  It is a job that involves making logical arguments to a computer in an effort to achieve a specific desired result.  Naturally then, many persons assume that I, as a developer, spend my days building code to solve the logical challenges required by a given set of design specifications.  This assumption would lend itself to thinking of me as an engineer, as someone who tackles the requirements of the desired build with science, math, and logic in order to achieve the desired outcome.

The problem is, I'm not an engineer.  In fact, I'm barely even interested in the engineering aspect of development.  I do it cheerfully enough, as it is a necessary piece of development, but I didn't get into development in order to solve through someone else's design specs.  I became a developer so that I would have the knowledge necessary to create the design specs that would be used for the project.  I became a developer so that I would be qualified to be an architect.

Granted, it takes time to qualify as an architect.  A developer must first cut their teeth as a junior, writing code for a spec created by someone else.  Over time they learn how the industry works, what users expect, and when practicality must triumph over theoretical ideals.  Even then, many developers simply are engineers.  Many of them enjoy the more technical aspects of programming and find it more engaging to tinker with new tech or solve a logical problem than to design and spec out a new product.  But others of us are different.  Every day spent building for someone else was a day spent dreaming of the day when we would create the blueprints.

I am an architect, not an engineer.  I am a creator, not a builder.  I developed and refined the talents I have not to sit and paint by numbers, but to draw the lines and determine the colors myself.  And when such free reign is given, I make beautiful art.

[kahlstrom]

The Friday Five :: November 18th, 2011

1 - I received this chair, ordered via Amazon, in early July of this year to replace an old and broken office chair that I had owned for years.  It now has 2 broken wheels, the stitching is fraying, and the seat itself is starting to bow/sink.  As a relatively normal-weight 6'3", 200 lb. individual, I have to say that the chair -- and likely anything else made by Zuo -- is absolute crap.  I'm going to have to buy yet another office chair before too long.  Does anyone have recommendations of something that is comfortable and of high enough quality to last?

2 - The emergence and resilience of post-national, post-government, horizontally-aligned (leaderless) organizations like Anonymous intrigues me.  We are in the midst of a time of massive social and economic change in the world, spurred by technology, education, and increasing access to both globally.  I have a firm belief that post-government, leaderless organizations will have a strong role to play in the future.  Whether those roles are for better or worse remains to be seen.  I am reminded of one of my favorite book quotes, from Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:

"A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as 'state' and 'society' and 'government' have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame...as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else....I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."

3 - I thought I'd post a good, meaningful song ... just because.

4 - My favorite response to Occupy Wall Street ... a guy holding a sign saying Occupy a Desk:

The best thing?  These guys don't necessarily disagree that large corporations are corrupt, they just don't think that the best way to solve the problem is camping out in a park banging on bongos and smoking weed.  I happen to agree with them.

5 - Finally ... just because ... if you haven't ever seen Office Space, see it.  It's worth the watch:

[kahlstrom]

The Protect IP Act and Internet Censorship

On November 16th, the US Senate will vote on United States Senate Bill S.968 -- the Protect IP Act, or PIPA.  The potential passage of this bill is causing a significant stir throughout the online community, prompting even an official day of protest against the legislation.  While my initial, gut reaction to the Protect IP Act is to reject and oppose it, the fact that organizations such as Demand Progress and Fight For the Future also oppose the act have lead me to delve into deeper study of the proposal before I make my decision.  The absolute last thing I want is to jump onto the same side of an issue as 'progressive' groups without first doing every last bit of homework on the issue possible.

The Protect IP Act is a piece of legislation introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) that aims to curb copyright infringement on the internet.  While significant legislation to prevent such infringement already exists ( see the DMCA and the PRO-IP Act ), the Protect IP Act aims to build the walls of protection a little bit higher through targeting entities that exist outside of the boundaries of the United States.

The challenge in targeting offenders who exist entirely outside of the borders of the United States is that US law cannot be enforced upon them.  The result is that thousands of US citizens have easy and instant access to content provided by individuals and organizations who are shielded from any sort of legal repercussion for their actions by virtue of their geographic location.  The Protect IP Act circumvents this difficulty by placing the responsibility of legal enforcement on private businesses who attempt to engage in legitimate business within the USA. 

Just as the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act aimed to stop overseas internet gambling institutions by making it illegal for payment systems to allow transactions to occur between a US citizen and an online gambling institution, the Protect IP Act targets search engines, social media sites, and other legitimate private entities and requires them to block access to sites that break US copyright laws.  To be clear, this law is not about forcing YouTube to take down clips of copyrighted TV shows ( that is already covered under the before-mentioned DMCA ), it is about forcing YouTube/Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, etc to permanently block access to any site that provides clips of copyrighted TV shows to its visitors.

Proponents of the bill state that internet piracy accounts for approximately $12.5 billion of lost revenue every year and has cost the US approximately 70,000 jobs.  They state that the requirements to get a site blacklisted are thorough enough to target only purposeful offenders bent on causing economic harm through piracy and that other methods of handling the issue ( such as attempts at taking down offenders through cooperation with INTERPOL ) have failed.  A post by Frank Sola of ViaTech Technologies explains the argument for PIPA in greater depth.

Opponents of the bill argue that the law is vague and easily abused.  They state that provisions of the law may result in the destruction of free speech, willful censorship of internet properties disliked by the government (such as WikiLeaks), and that the problem is being addressed with a wrecking ball when it instead requires a more nuanced approach.  Additionally, some argue that by virtue of blocking domain names rather than IP addresses, the integrity of the global DNS will be compromised while those intent on piracy will simply switch to visiting their preferred sites via IP address.

After my research into both sides of the issue, I have decided to stick with my initial opposition to PIPA, even if the pinko-commie-pigs at Demand Progress are on the same side.  My reasons are bullet-pointed below:

I have significant issues with the government forcing lawful, free enterprise to engage in enforcement actions on their behalf.  Requiring Google to remove all links to any offending site is akin to requiring McDonald's to ensure every potential customer comes in under a certain BMI before being allowed to order food.  It is not the job of McDonald's to regulate our eating habits, nor is it the job of Google to regulate our internet search habits.

 The proliferation of piracy sites exposes an issue that can be solved through simple free market economic principles.  See, the underground market is only providing to the customer that which the customer demands - online access to video content.  Just as illegal music-sharing has largely ( not completely, but largely ) been resolved through the music industry relenting and allowing for non-DRM legal purchases of songs online, the illegal video-sharing markets would be significantly marginalized if the TV and movie industries would see the writing on the wall and start offering their content online in a customer-friendly manner.  

I continue to remain skeptical of any increase in government power, no matter what it is, and always prefer to err on the side of a government that is much too small than a government that is even a little bit too big.  Power, when had, is almost always abused.

As a personal aside, I stopped illegally downloading music when it was made available to me in a friendly, customer-centric, manner without DRM.  I stopped looking for movies at torrent sites when Netflix started streaming video (though media companies could do a much better job cooperating with Netflix and still leave me frustrated most of the time).  Today I will always search first for a 'legal' stream of any TV content I wish to watch, but it is sadly never available.  The world is changing and media companies need to change with it -- not try to force increasingly draconic legislation down our throats in order to further delay the inevitable.

[kahlstrom]

The Friday Five :: November 11th, 2011

1 - My brother gave me a good analogy for a coding issue I had to deal with over the past 24 hours.  Making the changes that needed to be made felt a little bit like a surgeon cutting open a patient, removing all of the vital organs, re-working all of their connections, and then putting them back in and sewing the patient back up.  At the end you know that you've either performed a miracle or killed the patient, those are the only two options.  Since the site I altered was also live, I had the added pleasure of doing all of this while the patient's family watched.  Luckily, though resuscitation took a minute or two, I did not kill the patient yesterday.

2 - I really feel for Governor Perry and his most recent gaffe.  No one wants to end up with a mind-blank in a public forum.  The fact that it happened during a debate in which he is competing for a Presidential nomination just added to the pressure.  Still, if I had to vote today, it would be for him.  Why?  Because even with his gaffe (pasted below), his economic plan and history as governor of Texas are the absolute best reasons I've seen to vote for anyone in years.  If only the guy could get a little stronger on the debate front ...

3 - Christmas is coming fast, but it seems that everyone forgets about Thanksgiving!  Every year Christmas trees, music, and lights show up earlier and earlier ... and Thanksgiving is increasingly drown out in that noise.  What's so wrong with Thanksgiving?  I'd argue that it's potentially an even better holiday.  On what other day is the entire purpose of the holiday to sit around and eat massive amounts of great food while watching football?  As a bonus this year, the Lions don't suck!  Thanksgiving is basically the perfect holiday ...

4 - The new Family Media Guide is now mostly live.  While there are still maintenance and relatively 'basic' functionality additions to be made over the next week or two, we are finally nearing a position where we can start doing some new and exciting things with it.  I'm really excited about the prospects of the project and about the plans we have for it's future.  If you're into movies at all, go sign up and start interacting with it.  By this time next year, you'll be very glad that you did.

5 - While we consider the launch of the Family Media Guide, we have also spent time considering our social-media presence and user-engagement strategies.  I personally feel that a great many organizations continue to fail miserably in these spheres as they treat them like promotion engines rather than social gathering places.  The last thing I want as a person is to have one of my friends come over to hang out wearing a company's logo and unable to do anything but say PR-cleansed positive things about that company.  I want, instead, a real and meaningful and 'raw' interaction.  Is that too scary for companies with images to maintain?  Maybe, but it shouldn't be.

[kahlstrom]

The Friday Five :: November 4th, 2011

1 - Let's start with something funny, because I need something funny at the end of this week.  I worked entirely too hard.  It might only be techies that get this joke ... but it's funny to me, and that's what matters ...

2 - Contributing to the workload of the week has been my attempt to complete the NaNoWriMo challenge.  So far, so good ... I'm only behind by about 3400 words.  I'll catch up tomorrow when I don't have to spend the majority of my day coding.  The goal is to have something worthy of self-publishing before the end of the year.

3 - If you follow this link right here, you'll get a rather extensive list of official Occupy Wall Street participants and supporters.  It's really quite a fun list.

4 - Some very exciting things are happening in the world of developing, disruptive technologies and Singularity University is efforting to put themselves right in the middle of it all.  Pretty cool.  They also happen to be hiring (and are located in the heart of Silicon Valley), so tech people should check out the employment opportunities.

5 - I've been asking myself all week ... are temporary, 'bridge' technologies that exist only to facilitate a stepping stone between new and old ways of doing things (something like QR Codes) worth adopting?  Or is it better just to make the leap straight from new to old without that middling step?

[kahlstrom]

The Friday Five :: October 28th, 2011

1 - Every morning as I walk to work I watch two panhandlers as they arrive at their spots and set up shop.  In the evening, when I return from work, these panhandlers are still in the same place and doing the same thing.  Just like me, they get up at a certain time every morning ... 'commute' to work (they ride the train in) ... set down at their 'desk' ... and work throughout the day.  They are even careful about the attire they wear -- can't look too dirty or people won't even look at you, but can't look too clean or people will think you're just scamming them.  I wonder if these guys realize that it's just as easy (and actually more dignified) to say "Would you like fries with that?" as it is to say "Spare change please?".  Of course, they might ... the panhandling business might just be more lucrative.  There are way too many saps in the world.

2 - I'm intrigued by jux.com  It seems like a pretty cool visually-based 'blog'.  Some people are calling it a 'post-blog'.  I'll probably try it out and cross post between here and there a few times, but I've already noticed a few bugs and that has me wary.

3 - Microsoft has a new video out that presents a vision of our technological future in 2019. 

While we can all ooo and ahhh over this video ... which looks suspiciously like a video Corning did a while back ... I read an interesting rant this morning that pointed out how ridiculous these videos are.  The teams that made them paid too much attention to ensuring that everything in the videos was spotless, idyllic, and even ethnically diverse and/or ambiguous.  It's like the ultimate politically-correct public-relations utopia.  What if someone had the courage to show our world as it really is, but enhanced with technologies that make navigating it easier?  Might that resonate a little better?  It's a thought.

4 - Today was the first day I received a paycheck after being granted a nice raise.  I was curious to see how much more money I had actually made after taxes were taken out.  It turns out that, looking at the difference in what I made before and what I make now ... and the difference in what my actual paychecks come out to ... the government is taking HALF of my raise away from me.  No wonder people aren't motivated to work hard and earn more!  It's pretty disheartening to get a decent increase in pay and then see most of it stolen away by an incompetent, spending-addicted, government.  Especially when you're morally opposed to about 80% of what they do with that money.

5 - As long as we can keep the world economy from collapsing, I'm really excited about the future of technology.  We are moving toward a world in which every bit of information you would ever want to know is available at the touch of a finger ... and where every thing you interact with is connected to that stream of data.  I cannot wait for the day when both data and connectivity are ubiquitous.

BONUS :: How many people have noticed that Google+ now has a tab for games?  Welcome to FarmVille, Plus version.

[kahlstrom]

A Random Thought :: Symbiotic Relationships

I came home from work today and randomly typed out something that I've decided to share here.  I know it's not Friday or Sunday, but random thoughts don't choose when they come ... they just come:

In learning to surf (or any task for that matter) and attempting to stand up on the board for the first time, the majority of people have one of two reactions: they either hop to their feet and expect everything else to be taken care of (passive) or hop to their feet and try to muscle the board into obeying their commands (aggressive).  In both cases, the rider ultimately fails, though in different ways.  The passive individual falls almost immediately and must either give up or try again and again until they learn to be aggressive enough to make themselves stand.  The aggressive individual may actually succeed in their initial attempt and progress in skill for a time, but they will quickly level out and find that they have reached a ceiling of skill much lower than they might desire.  These individuals must teach themselves to relax, to not force the board to their will.  One can only get so far when half their energy is spent fighting the natural order of things. Those who ultimately succeed at the highest levels have a natural understanding of the symbiotic relationship between themselves, the surfboard, and the wave they ride.  Each has a character of its own and while the rider may ultimately be the actor (whereas the wave and board both react to the rider), he or she must learn to understand and work in harmony with both wave and board in order to find themselves able to achieve any appreciable level of skill.  Some reference this achievement as a state of 'zen', as if it is a sort of mystical experience.  I find that it is simply the way we must live our life and the mindset in which we should approach any situation or experience. Interpersonal relationships are a challenge for us all, because they are one of the few situations in which two or more actors take part in a single activity.  Two individuals who are passive will simply smile weakly in passing each other.  Two individuals who are aggressive will find themselves consistently in conflict with one another.  The union of a passive individual with an aggressive individual may seem at first to be a match worth pursuing, but ultimately the relation plateaus and both individuals are left unfulfilled.  Truly fulfilling relationships (friendships, partnerships, etc ... they are all, in the end, based on the same principles) exist only when both individuals choose to take control of the situation enough to learn to understand and appreciate the other, but relax enough to let the relation build over time into whatever it will be -- without expectation of any specific result.

[kahlstrom]

The Friday Five :: October 21st, 2011

I know that I've slacked in my blogging for two full months, but here I am back at it ... starting with a new Friday Five posted a day late.

1 - This Occupy Wall Street movement isn't really about politics.  It's not a movement focused on the advancement of society of a whole.  It's about greedy, entitlement-mentality, spoiled kids with nothing better to do with their time.  Everything they are asking for represents a 'free ride' and a chance to abdicate their own responsibility.  That's not politics.  That's the tantrum of a self-centered, spoiled kid.

2 - The iPhone 4S is pretty cool.  So is Siri.  However, I have yet to see anyone actually using Siri for anything ... useful.  We all have fun telling Siri we need to hide a body or asking if it will marry us, but we don't use it for finding locations, making calls, scheduling appointments, etc.  Maybe that will change over time, but when I asked it to find a particular business in Salt Lake City, Siri couldn't complete the request.  Failures likethat make this new voice feature more of a novelty than anything else.

3 - A recent short presentation given by Christopher Poole ("moot") has me thinking a lot about identity.  Not just identity online, but identity in total.  His speech is interesting, if only superficial.  I would share a video link if I could find it, but I can't ... so here's a link to RWW's story on it.

4 - I think that those of us who live in a nation of incredible wealth need to be periodically reminded that even the poorest of us in the United States of America are wealthy on a worldwide scale.  And it's capitalism that got us here ... to, you know, the point where our worst-off are better off than many of the best off in other countries. 

The image below shows the wealthiest countries in the world as having an average per capita income of $11,500 or more per year in 2007.  The poverty level in the United States is actually right around that level.  In other words, in every country that is not the same color as the US on the map, the average person in that country earns less (often MUCH less) than the poorest of poor people in the United States.  Just sayin'.

5 - My goal for November is to transform my apartment into a more zen living space.

[kahlstrom]

The Friday Five :: August 5th, 2011

1 - The internet is awesome.  How awesome?  This awesome:

BUT ... it has seriously disrupted western economies by making a lot of people and industries suddenly less relevant.  And we're only getting started.  I think that sometimes we all forget that we're in one of those times of massive economic change, much like the industrial revolution.  And change at such a magnitude inevitably leaves a trail of corpses in its wake. 

2 - Here's the shocker of the week:  ALL mainstream news outlets are left-leaning.  Even the Drudge Report.  The study even concludes that the behavior of US citizens have been affected enough by the left-wing media that our voting habits have been artificially changed.  Supposedly, without this bias in our lives, we would vote about 6-4 'conservative' ... even in California and New York.

3 - Thinking of illegally parking in Lithuania?  Think again ...

4 - People who think that Google+ is just "Google's version of Facebook" are very mistaken.  The aim is much larger.  Google+ will forever change search engines.  That's right.  And you heard it here first.  (Yes, I will elaborate in another blog post at a later date)

5 - More and more people my age are starting to realize that we are the generation that will have to pick up after the excessive spending of our parents and grandparents.  We are realizing that we won't have Social Security to fall back on.  We understand that entitlement programs and unwise military actions are sucking us dry.  Now, the question is, will we try to find a scapegoat and focus our anger/push the blame onto other innocents (like millionaires who "don't need the money") or will we grow up and do something real and lasting about it so that our children and grandchildren don't have to suffer the way we will have to suffer?  It's time to make the sacrifices now.  Time to live beneath our means now.  Time to sort out this mess today.  If we keep pushing things off to later and later generations, fixing the problem will only get harder and we will be no better than the people (like FDR) who got us into this mess.

[kahlstrom]

Tech Stereotypes: Can't we all just get along?

Last night, while on the way to help someone move (a project that would last from 6pm until just after midnight), I was shown this picture:

Textually, and maintaining the hyperbole, the chart would come down like this:

DEVELOPERS

* See themselves as researchers and innovators who create things that push our world forward into new and better frontiers.

* See designers as over-valued kids with paintbrushes

* See project managers as lazy do-nothings who attempt to steal all the credit and infringe on developer projects by telling devs what to do or how to do it.

DESIGNERS

* See developers as fat, dirty, smelly, basement-dwelling trolls who could never get a date or function at a social gathering.

* See themselves as flat out sexy.  S-e-x-y.

* See project managers as the persons charged with actively destroying their creative ideas.

PROJECT MANAGERS

* See developers as unthinking assembly-line slave workers

* See designers as unthinking assembly-line slave workers with paintbrushes

* See themselves as ... incompetent global leaders ... err ... as leaders of the free world with all of the ideas and know-how.

Put simply, in the tech industry, everyone in the company is a creative and intelligent individual who sees themselves as the truly important cog in machine.  Further, each category of tech worker tends to under-value the other cogs in the machine simply by thinking of themselves as the most important.

Now, I want to be clear in mentioning that I do not believe that these stereotypes exist today at anywhere near the levels they existed five years ago.  People in the tech industry are learning more and more how to work with each other and respect each others talents.  In fact, at my current workplace, everyone is pretty good about this stuff.  That said, we can always get better at working together.  

The answer lies in understanding one's own role and respecting the role of others.  Or, as the best coach in football puts it:  "Just do your job."  Because resentment sets in when one group or another attempts to infringe on another group's job.

So, without further adieu, I offer my 'solution' chart -- in text, because I'm too lazy to build an image (perhaps a designer could help me out and create one?) -- in relation to the chart above:

DEVELOPERS

* Continue to see themselves as researchers and innovators who create things that push our world forward into new and better frontiers.

* Recognize that designers really do help make a program sexy.  They provide developers with UI designs that can be understood and used by the customer, and they create marketing materials that will help the product find market share.

* Realize that project managers are hard at work building relationships and establishing critical connections to help the project succeed.  Listening to general feedback from a project manager is invaluable to the developer in fine-tuning features and operations.

DESIGNERS

* Understand that developers are not anti-social shut-ins (at least not most of them), but humans just like you.  Not only that, but joking about programmer stereotypes can be downright offensive - so lay off the 'unshaven, sloppy, Mt. Dew guzzler' jokes.  Without them, not even the most beautiful design in the world would be at all useful.

* Continue to see themselves as flat out sexy.  S-e-x-y.

* Realize that project managers aren't attempting to destroy a design when offering feedback, but rather simply relaying customer concerns.  Listening to general feedback from the project manager is invaluable to the designer in fine tuning a design and making it really work.

PROJECT MANAGERS

* Recognize that developers are strongly independent, creative, and intelligent beings.  Many of them have spent their entire lives outside of the 'standard mold' and do not react well to being put in a box or told to work on an assembly line.  Give them broad project requests and let them work out the features, requirements, and other details.  Do not press timelines.  No one is more motivated than a developer who feels a sense of ownership over their project.  They are likely voluntarily working more hours than expected, so if a deadline is pressed on them they tend to reflexively push back.

* Realize that designers, also, are creative and free-thinking individuals.  They live with almost daily reminders that with art, everyone is a critic.  Understand that their talents are something to be respected and that sometimes they really do know better.

* See themselves not as 'leaders', but as facilitators.  Project managers are the relationship builders, connection makers, and metric analyzers, but a project team should never have one 'leader' -- it should be an alliance of equals between a lead project manager, lead programmer, and lead designer.

If all of us in tech learn to trust, respect, and value each other ... the stereotypes portrayed at the start of this article will continue to fade and our projects together will reach heights never before imagined.

[kahlstrom]

Friday Five :: July 29, 2011

Almost missed my Friday Five tonight ... and technically it just turned into Saturday, but I'm posting anyway.

1 - I started taking my work Mac home with me in order to try to 'unify' my development environment between work and home projects.  I'm finding it very difficult to voluntarily switch to Mac at home.  The inability of a program topbar to move with your program window on a Mac just makes me want to rip my hair out -- even after 9 months of at-work use.  Additionally, I really dislike the UI of Adobe products on the Mac, and I love me my Adobe Fireworks (yes, more than Photoshop -- I'm not an artist or designer, just a developer and the simple tools are nice).

2 - Animated .gif files are cool again:

3 - In politics, the liberal attack-machine is in overdrive.  From ridiculous charts that try to make taxes sound like a debilitating, debt-causing cost to the country (note here no reference to how the Bush tax cuts actually increased revenue by $792 billion over 3 years, or the inclusion of entitlement spending ... or sticking war costs in Obama's column -- especially for the war he started in Libya ... well, it's just a ridiculous chart) ... Anyway ... from that chart to a NYTimes opinion author calling for Obama to become a dictator ... all amid D politicans demogoguing against Republican debt cut plans and never coming up with plans of their own ... it's no wonder the co-founder of Home Depot thinks Obama is unpresidential and divisive.

4 - On a personal note, I really need to stop drinking soda.  It's not doin' anything good for me, and definitely doing plenty of bad.  I also really need to get back into the gym ... but apparently Utah isn't exactly a 'gym' state.  There aren't many around, and those that are around aren't very impressive.

5 - Lately, I've been thinking a lot about people like Jay Adams, who are so far beyond the mainstream that they simply do not fit into society at all.  They are the individuals who push us all forward, yet so often their lives become dysfunctional as they realize they simply live on a different plane and don't 'fit in' with society.

[kahlstrom]

Circles of Trust :: An Exploration of Social Networking

The big story in tech for the past few of weeks has been Google+, its successful roll-out, and it's meteoric rise to twenty million members in less than a month.  Amid the many articles reviewing Google+ features or giving experience walk-throughs, a few writers have managed to peak my interest by inadvertently stumbling into bigger questions.  Austin Carr wrote about 'Circles Fatigue' on Fast Company, which got my thought processes started.  Then Yoav Shoham posted about 'Rethinking Lists, Groups, and Circles' on Tech Crunch and I knew I had my topic for this week's post.

While I appreciate the point of view of both of the above authors, the first thing that stuck out to me was that neither of them could bring their 'problem to be solved' to a conclusion that actually 'fit' or truly solved anything.  I believe the reason is simply that neither sat down and asked the root question:

How do humans, at a root level, define their own social networks?

The knock on Facebook has always been that everything you do and say is 'public', or at least available to every single one of your friends, regardless of who they are.  It's quite obvious to most of us that we do not interact in the same way with every single person we know.  We share separate social networks with friends, family, acquaintances, etc.  Hence, the genius -- and the curse -- of Google+ Circles. 

The problem with circles, is now we have to define them.  It is that problem that both articles mentioned above discuss.  Austin Carr's article simply laments the difficulty of finding a circle for everyone, especially as a writer in the tech world where he has more than 300 'friends' to categorize.  Mr. Shoham promotes an argument that self-categorizing is annoying and time consuming and not always accurate, but that programmatic algorithms can help us out and build our social networks for us.  Personally, I think he's a little too invested in his personal project, katango.com, to be able to think out clearly why such algorithms are not exactly a great idea.

Our social networks are not based off interactions that can be logically deduced by computer algorithms.  Further, they are not so fragmented that they require 20+ different 'lists' or 'circles' to define all of them.  If each of us were to sit and think about what truly defines the interactions we have with others, we would find that it has everything to do with two things: trust and respect.  How can an algorithm possibly guess how much we trust or respect another individual?

To borrow a term from an unfortunate and crass movie, our Google+ circles should be primarily categorized as 'circles of trust', with perhaps one or two outliers for work/school or targeted special interests.  In building your circles this way, you can be all but assured that your Google+ circles will mirror your 'real life' circles and you will almost never have to wonder about which groups share in your posts. 

In my circles I have (in trust order from top to bottom):

Inner Circle -- Friends with whom I have experienced life-defining events and trust absolutely.  These are the guys and girls with whom I would not think twice about sharing everything.

Family -- Like most people, I love my family and keep them close to me, but they don't know everything about me -- and don't need to know everything about me.  Only the inner circle knows everything about me.

Friends -- People with whom I interact regularly and wouldn't mind sharing general things about my life ... including beliefs, philosophies, and weekend activities.

Acquaintances -- People I'm just getting to know and who may or may not be trusted yet.  These people get only generic or broad statements.  It is at this level or below that I try to keep all of my Facebook interactions (so you can see already that Google+ has given me 3 ranks of better 'networking' than Facebook ever did).

(Work) -- One of my two subject-related circles.  Everyone from work is in this circle so that I can send out random work-related stuff all at once.  Anyone who needs to know anything about me that's not 'work safe' also gets included in one of the circles above (remember, people are not restricted to just one circle!).

Tech -- My other subject-related circle.  I have tech friends who aren't co-workers and co-workers who aren't tech people.  By separating out the tech category, I create a direct resource for myself with a tech sounding-board.

Public Figures -- Because Google+ does not require persons to follow you when you follow them, I've gone ahead and followed a few public figures and I stick them in this circle.  I don't want them polluting my regular circles and I didn't like the 'Following' default circle ... so I renamed it to Public Figures.  Obviously, I never post anything to this circle.

If you find that you cannot fit every person on your Google+ account into a similar number of circles (10 or less), you might want to take a look at your 'real life' social networks and give them a hard and honest review.  You will likely find that either you were over-analyzing things when you initially created your circles, or you have some social drama, difficulties, or dishonesty that need to be cleared up.

A side-step into a quick different/related list before ending this post ... two things I would really like Google+ to implement:

1 - The ability to place one circle entirely inside of another circle so that, for instance, I could drop 'Inner Circle', 'Family', and 'Friends' in to 'Acquaintances' and then choose to share with 'Acquaintances' and have all four of those groups see the post.

2 - The ability to see 'all but (circle)' in my stream.  I know that I can click a circle title to see only that circle in my stream, but I also want the ability to click a circle to 'remove' it from the stream temporarily.  Especially with Public Figures who tend to have posts that resurrect themselves to the top of the list constantly.

So ... what do you think?  Do you think I'm wrong and that social circles can be defined algorithmically?  Or that I'm wrong about how we define our circles based on trust and respect?  Or do you agree with me?  Do you have any particular Circles setup that you find particularly useful and want to share?  Gimmie your thoughts in the comments area below ... or at least give me a 'like' on this post if you enjoyed it (the little 'heart' at the top-right of your screen).

[kahlstrom]

The Friday Five :: Quick Thoughts 7/22/2011

1 - Got my Square card reader.  Now I just have to figure out how to get people to let me read and charge their credit cards with it.  Then again, it looks like we're not too far away from trashing our cards and just paying through NFC enabled phones.

2 - The best thing about the internet is the way it empowers the 'little people', especially with the proliferation of low-barrier-to-entry digital distribution services.  I love seeing people self-publish books through Lulu, build their own magazines with Issuu, release small-budget games through Steam, and more.  I smile when I hear about blogs that are more influential than journalists.  Sure, the lack of any barrier to entry allows for anyone to release low-quality junk, but it also allows us 'regular' people to pursue our dreams without having to bow to the industry 'players'.

3 - This video snippet made me lol:

The reporter gets owned throughout the whole interview, which I'll link here, but the portion above is the funny bit.

4 - The richest 1% in the United States of America own 24% of the wealth in the USA and pay 40% of the tax burden in the USA.  The poorest 47% in the United States of America pay 0% of the tax burden in the USA.  Which group, exactly, is not paying their fair share?  Just sayin'.

5 - The NFL players need to agree to the deal that's been worked out.  There is a point where you're asking for too much.  If preseason games are lost, we might end up losing the entire season because owners will need to re-negotiate the year of revenues based on lost revenue from games being skipped.  The owners have already accepted the deal.

[kahlstrom]

Quick Thoughts :: July 15th, 2011

Third installment of quick thoughts ... from Friday, July 15th, 2011 ... but brought to you on Saturday, July 16th, 2011 (yeah, I messed up ... but will do better next week).

1 - Fact of life: if you spend more than you have today, you must spend less than you have tomorrow.  Restated: if you live beyond your means today, you must live below your means tomorrow.  I can't understand how our government leaders or the majority of the nation doesn't get that.  72% of the country believes we need to cut and cap spending ... but 63% oppose doing so if you spell out what cutting spending means (ie, they get less 'free' stuff).  Are we really that stupid and self-centered?

2 - Turntable.fm is one of the coolest new technologies out there.  If you haven't played with it yet, you need to play with it.  Right now you can only get in if you have a Facebook friend who's a member ... so find a FB friend and get in and start playing.  It's addictive and tons of fun.

3 - GitHub is one seriously awesome Git repo service.  It's also got amazing help / tutorial docs that teach Git and help users master version control.  I transferred all of my repos to GitHub this week and am offering a completely unsolicited strong recommendation of them to any other coders who use version control.

4 - I really want to store all of my documents, images, code, etc on cloud services, but with all of the horror stories I'm hearing about Comcast customers hitting bandwidth limits, I'm feeling pretty sketchy about it.  The solution to cable companies imposing artificial bandwidth caps rather than upgrading their infrastructure?  Remove their local monopoly rights.  The moment Time Warner, Comcast, Cox, and other cable services have to compete with each other over the same turf is the same moment all of our cable and internet bills will be cut in half while our service quality doubles.

5 - The NFL players and owners really need to get something worked out soon because I don't want to have to go into fall without football.