I’ve been having very odd intermittent problems with the Lift-Master garage door opener where I live. On the occasional hot afternoon, it has refused to close. It would click several times, and sometimes pop down and up. However, the problem invariably resolved itself after a half hour or so, which led me to believe that yet another deity of mischief had found his way to my dwelling. At first, I thought it was an overheating issue. I also found some clues in a forum, but they all sounded so complex. I read in the FAQ that the behavior is normal IF an obstruction is detected in the path of the sensors.

I looked into them, and had some trouble seeing one of the LED’s, because it was so bright, but sure enough, it looked fine. There were some spiderwebs near the sensors, so I swept those up, but no dice. Hmm… intermittent problem, behavior is similar to a sensor detecting an obstruction, and it only happened so far on hot summer afternoons.

A head-slapping realization came to me quickly, and I turned around to confirm the hunch. That LED that I couldn’t see because it was so bright happened to be in the direct path of the fiendishly aligned afternoon sun. At this precise time of day, that LED was just as bathed in direct sunlight as the sensor was. To test my theory, I stood outside the garage, blocked the sunlight with my silhouette, and hit the remote. The door closed with satisfaction. Or, more likely, I imagine that the door closed with contempt, as I walked away in satisfaction. It was kind of an Indiana Jones moment, realizing that fate has conspired to make an unusual alignment of cosmic rays interfere in your life in a very surreal way.

This post is a question addressed to the Rails folks who read this blog:

In the event that you were asked for help to work on a legacy Rails project from a while back (say, the pre-1.2 days), how would you even begin to find out how to port the thing to a modern version? What are the compelling reasons to do so? I’m not really a Rails or Ruby developer by trade, so basic advice is still appreciated.

If the decision is made to just stay with the legacy version to keep it quick, I guess there’s no real way to get any documentation from a specific version? If so, that seems to be a real drag on maintainability of real-world projects that get built and left alone for a while.

Disclaimer: I really know nothing about marketing. This is some simple woolgathering by a curious tyro.

For a while now, this post by Scott Ruthfield has had me pondering how a company makes it customers feel like its products are living, adapting, and growing things. Scott observed something in friends’ attitudes about the iPhone which he describes as an "implied upgrade". He and his friends who bought iPhones believed and expected that they would be upgraded as time went on, despite all experience to the contrary with other cell phones bought from other companies.

When I talked to others, they were sure of it too. They were waiting for the announcements of this or that new feature, and we all assumed that our phones would get it. Why did we all think our phones would be upgraded? Something “told” us that. Maybe it was the unconscious reaction to the iPod firmware update process inside iTunes; maybe it was a belief that Apple “got it”; maybe since this was more like a computer and computers get free upgrades… but they don’t. For some reason, we believed in an upgrade.

In light of his interesting observation, i’ve been trying to understand how a company like Apple can release a product without having to promise future upgrades, or detail all of its features exhaustively in advance, yet we expect that when we purchase the product, we’ll get everything we’ve seen in the commercials, and more. I would definitely characterize Apple’s products as somewhat mythical, in that its customers seem to propagate its perception in a way that goes beyond what the company actually states. I think that this is sometimes referred to as the “reality distortion field” around Apple.

Now, the reason I dredge this up is because i’m personally interested in seeing whether there is a viable alternative to focusing on promotional channels when considering how to market a new product. I’ve seen marketing plans that list conference blitzes, promotional clothing and accessories, mainstream media promotion, etc., all in attempt to show to upper management that someone, somewhere is thinking about marketing. I guess the rationale behind that is that it actually seems like marketing effort, but I always get the ugly feeling that concentrating on distribution of a message without worrying about the message is a giant waste of time.

Maybe it’s my lack of experience with this sort of thing, but i’d like to see marketing plans that spend all their time talking about the way in which you mention, discuss, present, or show off a product that treat it more like a mythological creature than a piece of static hardware or software. A good part of the equation is possibly to create well-designed, well-implemented products, and continually improve and upgrade them in a timely manner, and sometimes for free. But in addition to that, there may be a special way to treat product development and marketing in a company that asks consumers to plunk down a big wad of cash without worrying too much about the next model down the line.

This was annoying, but understandable. The tutorial “patch” to the Sun J2EE-1.4 tutorial, distributed by JBoss.org, is difficult to find [it's a zip inside a zip, here], and also needs some additions to its classpath to get a correct compile.

For the good of the internet, here’s what to do:

• Unzip the startguide40.zip package.
• Move jbossj2ee-src.zip into the j2eetutorial directory.
• Chdir into that dir.
• Unzip the jbossj2ee-src.zip.
• After it’s unzipped, edit jboss-build.properties, and put the location of your jboss install in jboss.home
• Go to examples/bank/.
• Edit jboss-build.xml, and modify the build.classpath to appear as follows:

• Edit src/com/jboss/ebank/WSClient.java, and look for the import lines re: ServiceFactoryImpl and ServiceImpl. Modify them to look as follows:

    import org.jboss.ws.core.jaxrpc.client.ServiceFactoryImpl;
    import org.jboss.ws.core.jaxrpc.client.ServiceImpl;

After that, hopefully the instructions will work. My understanding is that versions of JBoss-4.2X are backportings of popular 5.X features, and they’ve probably ceased updating the Getting Started guides while work is prioritized on the 5.X branch. No harm done, I suppose.

Alley Insider does some back-of-the-napkin math and guesses that Google’s food budget is approximately $7.5k yearly per Googler. This is an interesting calculation to me, even if it’s a wild guess.

Google is one of the only places i’ve eaten at where the cafeteria at dinnertime literally feels busy. The difference in atmosphere between there and its competitors is astonishing. If you have a stint working as a programmer in Silicon Valley, do your best to visit other campuses and see how the culture and environments feel different from company to company. I do not believe that I have ever seen a dinner gathering anywhere near the magnitude of Google’s daily Mountain View cafeterias within a large tech company.

From anecdotal accounts i’ve received, it is not just that Googlers eat, then leave for home. Frequently, they’re eating as a short respite from a long workday, and go back to work, sometimes after meeting with family for dinner. I would fathom a guess that no other established, large tech company gets away with such long work hours from any of its employees as Google.

I don’t even think you’d need to invest in free meals around the clock to get this kind of behavior, either. You could still charge for lunch, but offer a free early (pre-8 or 9am) and late (post-7pm) dinner service in order to encourage people to stay past the regular hours, and still defray some of your lunchtime costs. If you even got a 15% boost in working, productive hours from your employees, I surely think that would make up for the handful of thousands of dollars worth of food you’re sending their way.

After the reaction of a few friends to my last post, I wanted to put up a separate post specifically about my current opinions regarding the ethics of taking public data, doing a lot of cleanup, then potentially charging for commercial use or download of the new (transformed) dataset. My planned project working with EPA data may not be the last time I do something related to data transformation, so i’m trying to understand the issues here.

Daniel Raffel pointed me to some pertinent info about WestLaw, one of the most well-known providers of information that originates in the public domain. WestLaw takes public legal information, incorporates it into its datastores, then charges a fee for legal professionals to use it to perform legal research. It provides proprietary interfaces, and also made several features that have apparently become indispensable to the legal profession, including a proprietary key-oriented classification of legal data.

Recently, Carl Malamud, who works for Resource.Public.Org, began a project with the aim of making all the primary sources of that legal data available on the Internet. It’s clear from his letter that he believes that making primary source data publicly available does not compete directly with the services and tools that WestLaw provides. However, it appears that WestLaw’s summary publication literature, such as the Federal Reporter, may be the only available published information from the primary public domain data.

Carl is essentially saying that since these summary documents may constitute information derived from data in the public domain, he will be attempting to extract the public domain data from the documents commercially produced on behalf of the government by WestLaw. I am not an information expert about this sort of thing, but it seems to me that a reasonable person would believe that if the original public domain data is ONLY made available in any useful form to a commercial vendor who then transforms it into literature, then the data which is public domain should not be covered under copyright for that commercial vendor. How you go about extracting that data is more of a fuzzy area, but presumably if an effort can be shown that bounds were respected, I think a reasonable person would say that reverse engineering is okay. Carl’s letter to WestLaw carries this type of reasoning down its natural path, and even suggests to them that they save everyone some time and just release the entire text of their publications, free to download.

Anyone who spends any time around primary source data knows that not all data is created equal. If your intent is to provide tools and services around data, there is a good amount of time and effort that must go into transforming primary source data into a useful format for some specific purpose. I believe that an appropriate action on West Publishing’s part is to go ahead and publish all historical cases in text format (not the Federal Reporter, etc., itself), and let anyone else who wishes to transform that data into a useful format go ahead with their project. This wouldn’t exactly satisfy Carl’s request, but it would meet the standard suggested earlier that the primary source data be available in at least one form.

It’s important to note that I’m not arguing that the final products (the Federal Reporter, etc.) need to be put into the public domain by WestLaw. By the standard suggested above, if the data’s available for the public domain, I don’t believe there is a strong ethical basis for compelling a commercial venture to take a risk and completely release all of their products for free. This would preserve some of the economies of scale of data manipulation, while righting the “wrong” that public domain source data is not available at all to the public. Put more simply, if a competitor wished to create a similar research product to WestLaw, the cost of transforming the data into a useful information repository with competitive features would still remain. Any proprietary content inside its publications still remains non-free, and presumably anyone who would buy them for their convenience would still do so. Carl’s threat is that he does have a very strong point if the only option to get the original primary data is through extraction from their commercial resource. If the decision makers at WestLaw decide to completely oppose his reverse-engineering, I think it would be a very politically difficult decision to defend, and could cause the government to step in and make the boundaries between public domain and private very clear. As it’s to WestLaw’s advantage to keep those boundaries murky, a compromise of providing just the case data in a text format seems the best solution for their interests.

Now, as to how this pertains to the situation i’ll be going into with regards to the EPA emissions datasets, all of that data is available via their website as more-or-less large CSV downloads. Each year has a somewhat different format. From what I recall from my earlier work on it, it’s kind of a pain to go through and clean up that source data, and it requires some knowledge about automotive industry emissions standards nationwide. Still, the original information is visible, even if it’s in a format that needs some work.

What i’m in the middle of doing is the standard drill – analyze the datasets, design a fairly acceptable standard schema to use as a blueprint for importing the data, then go set by set, programming transformations from the yearly data into the database. Then, an interface to perform queries can be created, as well as a set of useful services to offer on top of the transformed data. Long after all available data is imported, a maintainer might write new transformations yearly in order to keep the data current. This activity of doing work to transform data from a public domain resource into a different format is original work, and does take a lot of time and effort. Nearly all researchers deal with this sort of work on a regular basis.

What i’d like to suggest is that if data that is already in the public domain, and available on the internet is transformed into a version that is more useful to commercial ventures or professionals, that it is perfectly fine to charge a fee for access to tools or regular “dumps” of those transformed dataset. For one, the data’s already available, and it is not the original primary source data that is being offered for sale. The business product would be the combination of transforming the original data into a more useful form, and then offering either the transformed data directly, or simply services and tools on top of that data.

If anyone wanted to do that work, then re-open it up completely to the public domain, I believe that would be a gracious gesture, but I’m of the current opinion that it’s not ethically or morally necessary. Plenty of goodwill could be achieved by offering scholars, nonprofits, or individuals free access, and anyone who thought the cost is too high could attempt to achieve a lower cost by taking the original public domain sources and doing the work themselves.

That’s my current opinion about all this, but it does seem like there’s a lot of strong opinion out there, maybe not as long winded as me. Feel free to use the comments to let me know what you think.

It was much easier than I guessed it would be to switch from my own dedicated host to a shared host. It’s really nice to have a competent admin taking care of business, and not having to worry about everything myself. Thanks to Jeremy Muhlich and the fdntech guys for a good machine.

I’ll probably keep everything on this server for now, and just put things on their own dedicated server if it’s really necessary.

I’m super happy to FINALLY be off of RHEL3 and it’s super old MySQL 3.23 builds. It was a monstrous pain having to deal with only having such a limited featureset, and it definitely hampered development somewhat.

Re: projects that are coming up soon – i’ve been easing back into productivity and have a few things i’ll be working on off the bat. One is cleanup of a dataset that I’ve been personally really interested in – the EPA emissions records for cars. They provide this data in the public domain, but the format is pretty messy and it requires figuring out how regional automotive regulations impact the cars available in various states. With some more elbow grease, i’ll probably be able to put this into a sensical format, and i’m definitely going to do some analysis myself once that’s done. I may also consider providing some public query access via a Google AppEngine test, as it seems like a perfect way to offload queries on an interesting dataset of public record, where I won’t have to incur high costs for expensive queries myself.

I’m curious in seeing if models exist where people took data from the public domain, cleaned it, then charged a fee for access instead of redistributing the data for free. It seems like a useful thing to be able to accomplish, and I think that there would potentially be commercial use of better data than public domain CSV’s whose format just gives you hints at potential normalization, and leaves all the work as an exercise for the reader. I’ll probably end up making the dataset free for nonprofit or personal use, as it came from the public domain anyway… actual queries i’ll probably have to rely on something like AppEngine, and commercial use i’ll probably ask for a fee. Any opinions?

I constantly live in fear that somewhere in my email handling code lies a header / MIME injection vulnerability. I’ve been caught by them in the past, and each time I get snagged, it’s extremely unpleasant to deal with. Although there are published source solutions, I just never feel completely comfortable with them.

I switched my contact forms today so that no form input makes it into any mail that gets sent to me. It’ll ping me with a notification, and i’ll go check it.

It feels like a pretty bad solution, but i’ve noticed recently that more and more web applications are adopting this style. In public applications, one of the advantages is that one can send out notifications very quickly, but also have a short grace period to check and catch abusive spamming. Additionally, you don’t need to worry as much about email exploits that attempt to co-opt your web applications to run as open mail relays. It’s obviously not going to allow your users to deal with your software as an extension of the email inbox.

The pure psychological penalty of receiving an email notification from a trusted web application that contains spam may be somewhat worse than receiving a notification, then going to a website where the content is spam (where you have “report abuse” links, typically) and where the content may no longer exist (if post-moderation occurred).

I believe that this may be a necessary evil in any future web projects that I write. Either that, or all participants may need to pay a fee to enter.

s/investor/gambler/g

Yup, this is my goodbye post. My last day is tomorrow, Friday the 14th. How did I get here?

Eleven years ago, when I first got to USC, I sidled up to a gadget-lugging fellow headed in the same direction I was, and asked if he was also going to the honors engineering retreat. That’s how I met Leonard Lin, who still amazes me with flights of technological fancy that i’m sure to hear about two years from whenever he finds something interesting.

Then, about four years ago, Leonard Lin introduced me to Andy Baio. Andy was looking for a “perl programmer” to come to work for him at a mutual fund company in Santa Monica. Not just any perl programmer — one who would be able to wear a suit daily. Although I had another option that was seemed far more lucrative (talk about finding a local maxima!), Andy seemed to be growing a really groundbreaking and nerdy team, especially for a mutual fund company. Since one of my great priorities in young life was to get to know the financial world better, and also because I liked the looks of Andy’s team, I accepted that position. As it turns out, that’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever had the chance to make.

After getting called out by Jon Udell when he was at infoworld, Andy was insistent that he’d have Jon’s suggested changes incorporated into Upcoming (then Upcoming.org), his pet people-powered events calendar project, within a week. At that point, I had been practicing development of quick web apps and open source libraries for over a year, and we’d built a great working relationship. I offered to help integrate Freetag into Upcoming, and assist with the rest of the work as well. That’s how I got started working on Upcoming, and ever since then, i’ve had the fortune of working for one of the greatest online communities on the web.

So it’s with a tinge of sadness that I decided to leave Yahoo! a few weeks ago. It’s been a great run, and I can’t begin to enumerate the ways in which I’ve become a better developer, leader, and person through this experience. It’s just the right time for me to move on.

What about Upcoming?

If you actually know that I work on Upcoming (a small crowd indeed), you’ll also know that i’m the kind of person who likes to be responsible in my work. I’m happy to say that I’ve been passing on as much of my knowledge as possible, and that the new generation of Upcoming is looking strong. I have faith that they’ll continue to make decisions with respect for the existing community, and most likely will push out features faster than we had a chance to in the past year or so.

What about BravoNation?

This is a trickier one. It’s certainly an experimental project that I’m thrilled to have been able to take from Hack Day to private beta within the context of Brickhouse. It’s also an experiment whose future has not yet been completely decided. I leave a well-documented and fairly mature platform in Brickhouse’s hands, and I hope that those who have used it were intrigued by the idea of combining peer-to-peer recognition with an open network award platform for integration. The possibilities behind the core BravoNation idea are really nothing original; it’s simply the combination of concepts from the video gaming world and the social media web that arose from my experiences investigating the gaming side of SXSW 2007.

I’ve been working on something internal lately which should help see my work on BravoNation live on in a very helpful way. With a little luck, it will be a great legacy. If it sees the light of day, i’ll see if I can score an interview about it.

What’s next?

Well, first, I think I need a little break. I think i’ve never had a serious break – the last time I was out of work for a serious bit of time, I spent it building a collaboration tool for designers, whose needs I got to know intimately in a previous job. Actually, that whole tool was the entire reason why Andy decided to hire me in the first place.

So, it’s safe to say that i’ll be working on personal projects like that old one once again. I just need some time to refresh myself, and get out of my current mindset and get used to being on my own. In actuality, the freedom to work on new things is what I’m most excited about. I’ll probably be developing some toys, some tools, some more artistic abilities, and maybe even a few waffles. Maybe I will even blog more. In any case, if you’re ever in the Los Angeles area, look me up and i’ll be happy to show you around town.

I’d like to thank all the Yahoos who made my time at the big Y! enjoyable, productive, and fruitful. Stewart and Caterina, for introducing us to Y! Local. Paul Levine, for believing in us and giving us the freedom we needed. Vince Maniago, Neil Kandalgaonkar, Kelsey Parker, and Shawn Shen, for being a powerful but small team that helped us get stuff done. The new Upcoming generation, for carrying on the torch! Kevin Cheng, Ernie Hsiung, Nikhil Bobb, Ray McClure, Jeffery Bennett, Salim Ismail, and the rest of the Brickhouse team, for putting up with my neurotics that got BravoNation out the door. Edward Ho, for all the Mario Kart, car talk, and inspiration. Kevin Krawez, for being my navigator in the scary world of ops. Bradley Horowitz, for creating the environment inside Yahoo! that made us feel comfortable in the first place. Anand, Ronny, Van, Peng, Eric, Don, Ganesh, and all the Local folks for not killing us over noise problems. Chad Dickerson, for creating the Hack program, often imitated, never recreated. Tara Kirchner, for changing my mind about PR people. Eric Wu, for caring so much about Y!, and welcoming me to the valley. Legal and the paranoids, for saving us from ourselves. Daniel Raffel, for seeding knowledge I used to build BN. Jay Janssen, for all the crazy MySQL knowledge. A certain team inside Y! for powering so much of Upcoming and being my favorite technology. And, of course, Andy and Leonard, for being two of the most unique and interesting personalities i’ve had the fortune to know so well. Apologies if i’ve forgotten anyone, it’s just that the full list runs a mile long, and I fear that it’ll turn into the entire content of this blog post. Be certain that I won’t forget the way you helped make my experience at Yahoo! better.