What’s In Peter’s Head

Shill time, baby!

Anyone who has read this blog knows that I love my iPad.  I’m a sucker for the apps, the screen, the feel of it, the whole package.  So I was excited to see a new project on Kickstarter for a new kind of accessory.

I don’t play games on my iPad as much as I did when I first got my iPod touch, but I used to play a lot.  One of my few complaints about iPod gaming was the fact that there was no tactile feedback when you pressed the screen.  The guys at Joystickers are making a button that you can stick onto the screen to solve just that problem.  Go there, watch the video, pledge some money.

The part I’m really excited about are a couple of fancy styluses – one like a nice pen and one like a paintbrush.  I love using NoteTakerHD, but the stylus I have is too short and thin to feel really comfortable in my hand.  I’m dying to try out the Flow and the Scribe.  To sum up, this is a great looking project worth contributing to.  Check it out!

A few months ago, my wife went on a kick where we watched the first few seasons of the TV show Dallas, rented on DVD from Blockbuster Online. If you watch 2-3 episodes a day of anything, you can’t but help become a little obsessed. So when we heard there was going to be a movie remake of Dallas, we immediately critiqued all of their casting decisions and came up with out own more accurate cast for the movie.  We spent weeks debating the pros and cons of each potential casting choice, scoured IMDB like Nike at a Brooklyn playground, and came up with the perfect cast.  (note to self:  If you ever spend that much time on anything, WRITE IT DOWN!).

Now I don’t actually care about a single mainstream celebrity, not one bit.  I’m pretty up to speed on their lives due to the gossip magazines my wife leaves around the house (any reading material is acceptable in the restroom) but unless there was a complete debacle like at the end of Miss Congeniality, I would never actually seek out celebrity news.

I don’t care about celebrities, but I had a roaring good time casting Dallas, so I decided to try the same exercise with media I do care about: nerdy programming blogs!  I have my own set of celebrities that are huge in their own sphere but who are COMPLETELY INVISIBLE to normal people.  A normal person, like my wife, would have no idea who any of these people are. So as my gift to everyone who needs any easy way to explain the personality and influence of a programming blogger, I present this mapping of real world celebrities to programming blogosphere celebrities:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a fan of the Fail Blog, and the recent Sign Design Fail included a Google Maps StreetView link to Concord, NC, a suburb of Charlotte. They have streetview there? Apparently. I zoomed out to the entire USA and they have covered a TON of cities, many more than I would have suspected in the limited time it has been out. Apparently their data integration process is pretty streamlined to handle all that.

(click for bigness)

As part of my husbandly duties on Mother’s day, I did some cleaning and came across my pin collection.  Yes, I went through a phase (that’s apparently over – keep reading for details) where I would collect pins from the places I traveled to.  I kept them in a little tin that I hadn’t seen in years until today.  I had my camera out so I thought I’d show a picture and let them tell my story (or the part of it that can be expressed through pins).

Explanation after the jump:

Read the rest of this entry »

I mentioned music in each of the last two posts as a digitizable creation that people enjoy enough to pay for. So what is it about music that is so great? I’ve been asking myself this question for years, and now seems like the time to try and tackle it.

I’ve always enjoyed music – from playing the trumpet in elementary school, owning a $230 portable CD player in 1993, to being an iPod man today. Practically every spare dollar I earned between the ages of 13 and 17 was spent on CDs. I love and appreciate all kinds of music – classical, rap, rock, alternative, opera, techno, Hawai’ian (especially Hawai’ian), even country (Claire from 9th grade, if you’re reading this (which I’m pretty darn sure you’re not), it took over 15 years and I’m still not a fan, but I can say now that I appreciate country music). But now I don’t listen to music very often. In fact hardly at all. I have my iPod running most of the day, but I listen to podcasts, sweet delicious podcasts of all stripes that keep me informed and help me learn new things. What’s the difference between me now and when I was in high school (besides the notably reduced mental redardation and 70 extra pounds)?

Music and the Brain

My answer has come from my interest in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Jeff Hawkins’ book On Intelligence (God bless him for writing it) stresses the temporal nature of the brain – how learning, memory, even sensory perceptions like vision and hearing only work on data that changes through time. Our brain works by processing related events connected by the sequence they occur in – kind of like musical notes! Music speaks our brain’s native language! No compiling, no byte code, etc – it operates directly on our abstract syntax tree (that’s my analogy, don’t hold it against Jeff). That is why it’s easier to remember song lyrics than the words of a speech – the lyrics are attached to a musical sequence that burns into your mind.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been quiet since the birth of my second daughter 3 weeks ago.  A little too quiet for my taste, so here’s a quick personal post (apologies to those anticipating my usual hardcore technical content).

Lots of people write their impressions as a first time parent, but there’s not much to them.  Usually it’s stuff like “Babies are small” and “I’m overwhelmed.”  (trust me, I said brilliant stuff like that a couple years ago after my first).  This time I’ve got all of the mechanics down pat (cooking while holding an infant, the proper bouncing to rocking ratio, etc) so I’ve had different observations that I was too blown away to notice the first time around.  Let’s hope they’re useful to anyone contemplating a second child.

• Typing with one hand is hard and slow.
• Watching a newborn is like driving – doesn’t nearly use your whole brain but occupies your body enough that all you can do is think.
• No matter how much your infant cries, if you jump up from playing with your toddler to care for the infant, then the toddler learns that crying = results.  Bad lesson.
• Being able to fall asleep fast is useful, since you never know how long you’ll get to sleep.
• Some items of housework are important (clean laundry, empty sink) while most others are not.
• If you want your kids well taken care of during the day, make sure your wife gets to sleep at night.
• Anything you want done, get it done fast (see bullet #2 for explanation).
• Love doesn’t happen automatically, it needs to be cultivated.  While I’m thrilled about the newborn, I don’t have the same feelings towards her as I do towards the toddler because I have years of memories, experiences, and interactions with the toddler.  But that doesn’t diminish what I have for the newborn – I’m already so much closer to her than I was two weeks or even one week ago.
• Following up the last point, you have to put in the time and effort if you want to enjoy your kids.  Just like you’d never expect to learn something you didn’t work hard at and experiment with, you probably won’t love your kids as much if you don’t put in lots of consistent time in caring for them.

It’s been a great couple of weeks and I look forward to decades more with my two little girls!

Something very delightful on a Friday afternoon:

Go ahead, try it, it’s fun! (If I’m not #1 when you click it’s YOUR fault for not linking to me more often! )

That was one of my New Year’s Resolutions that’s now resolved (be the #1 search result on Google for my name). Now I’ve just got to lose 30 pounds and get some revenue out of my startup!

I’m up at night watching Ice Age 2: The Meltdown and in the special features, there are set of fake 50s style documentaries on the different animals in the movie. The first one is called:

Sloths: Natures Loveable Lisper

Thanks to a wonderful naming idea from 50 years ago, we have a mascot:

I don’t know about you, but I’m just a little less proud than I was 5 minutes ago. How about this?

There, I feel a little bit better. A note to all aspiring computational revolutionaries: ask a normal person what your great language name makes them think of. You might be surprised what you find out.

Of course, I think this lesson has been well learned because all of the new languages have cool names. Thankfully, this is one way that new languages are not becoming more like Lisp!

Once you’ve read a little of Seth Godin, you feel like anything new he writes is something you could have written. There are just two problems:

1. You didn’t write it
2. You’re not Seth Godin

Here’s my latest “I’m not Seth Godin so all I can do is comment” thought on his recent post “Workaholics“:

In high school, I had to write a lot of essays (thanks, Dr Yarborough. No really, I don’t remember much I learned in high school but I’m a good writer because of all those stupid essays about iconoclasm and stuff). They started us small with 500 words and worked up to where we wrote one or two 1,500 word essays a week. It was like torture. I hated it. 1,500 words seemed like was writing the entire Encyclopedia Britannica! When we had our final Extended Essay that had to be 4,000 words, I thought I was going to die. (I didn’t.)

Fast forward a decade or so and now I’m writing for fun on the internet. And now I find out that I can’t write under 1,000 words to save my life. Even this post, which was supposed to be one sentence tacked onto the end of another post, is quickly growing. My last post, which was supposed to be a simple response to some comments, weighed in at about 1,400 words and I wrote it in under an hour (including rewriting one part that got lost in a WordPress accident). What’s the difference? I enjoy the heck out of what I’m writing about!!! I’ve had thoughts like these swirling around inside me with no one to say them to. Let’s face it, you’d have a hard time having that Lisp past/present/future conversation at most university CS departments, let alone at most workplaces. Now that I realized that the internet gives me an easy way to express all these thoughts, and that people will actually listen and respond, it’s exhilirating! I feel like my hands (and wakefulness) are the limiting factor, not my mind. I have so much I want to say that I have to try to limit myself to under 2,000 words one each topic just so I can write more of them. Granted, no one has offered to pay me a living wage to do this, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

Seth Godin’s right. Just because the stuff that makes you happy looks like the stuff other people do for work, doesn’t mean it’s work to you.

With that time of the year where people mail in easy posts summarizing the “Top 10 Posts I’ve Written” or their “5 New Years Resolutions”, there’s been something conspicuously absent from reflections on 2007.

Kathy Sierra, one of the best bloggers period, suddenly and completely quit blogging and vanished from the public eye because of threatening messages posted against her.  It happened back in March/April, and 8-9 months is an eternity to remember something in the Internet age, but we’re talking about the disappearance of one of the most entertaining, informative, educational writers on the entire Internet!  In the world of tech writing, imagine if Joel Spolsky or Paul Graham just stopped writing.  Sure, they’ve already written enough to last most people a lifetime, but their new content from them got the internet flowing.  Kathy Sierra was the same way, and she was in my small circle of recommended reading for aspiring developer/entrepreneurs.

Her blog, Creating Passionate Users, was a bright, sassy, well-illustrated light in a field of dim, drab competitors.   In her farewell post, she gave a list of options of where she would go from there, but as far as I know, she hasn’t done any of them.  I wish her well and hope that when she’s ready, I’ll get to read her work again in some format.  There’s a goldmine of information already on her blog (405 posts, according to her), but it’s a real shame that mean and immature people prevented everyone from seeing more of her great work.   This was an unusual and very sad story, and I can’t think of anything that had a bigger real effect this year (at least not in the internet world).