Pushing String

The Managing Identity in New Zealand conference has been an amazing experience. The organizers did a superb job constructing a uniquely valuable event, reflecting the thoughtfulness that’s present everywhere in the NZ government’s approach to its citizens’ identity.

I hope to have more time very soon to put together lots more thoughts on the many talks and conversations, but for now I just wanted to share the slides for the keynote I presented on Tuesday: The Design of Everyday Identity.

And one additional thought for now: I’m extremely sympathetic to the views of Doc and Adriana regarding the oddity of the phrase “user-centric”. I’ve remarked many times on the problems with assuming that people are always online and in front of a user agent (that is, “users”), and the very word describes people relative to the systems that are supposed to be helping them, which seems backwards — especially since the systems don’t seem to be too inclined to actually help them do what they want to do!

My research for this talk led me back to the classic ideas in Don Norman’s usability work, where he invoked the phrase “human-centered design” starting back in the 80’s. I would happily switch to “human-centered” from “user-centric”, and I suspect it would help us all be more open to the many ways to achieve this goal, particularly if Don Norman’s cautionary tale is kept in mind.

(As always, you can find my presos and papers and such linked from my Publications page. See that page if you want a more extensive bibliography for the talk, and keep an eye out for the conference proceedings paper I’ll be finishing in the next couple of weeks.)

Lauren gives her take on our fiberrific outing (or would that be “fibriffic” spelled her way?). I guess I needn’t have been so coy about the identities of “my very experienced and talented knitting friends”, and as it happens, she and Yvonne are also my very knowledgeable and talented colleagues. Lauren has a great crafting blog; I hope Yvonne considers blogging her crafting adventures as well.

Lauren notes that the tech quotient of the actual event was low, but we suspected there were plenty of techie-types in attendance. As we went around the room doing introductions in my Charting class, I mentioned that I had designed some XML-related cross-stitch charts; one young woman piped up: “You mean like web services?” Yowza.

One more language note: I learned a great acronym from the Creative Crochet Lace book. It’s common to yield to temptation repeatedly and buy lots of yarn for what is called one’s “stash”. Eventually you run the risk of a terrible condition called SABLE: Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy. This is an addiction, folks — clearly we should be taking it much more seriously. Time to start a .org!

Test scrumbles

So I survived the Madrona Fiber Arts Winter Retreat, and had a wonderful time learning and hanging out with friends. Both brain and fingers have gotten a real workout. This event is somewhat like a convention or technical conference of the sort I’m used to, but with an overtly social purpose, and attendees sign up for specific classes, rather than floating from track to track at will.

The language of knitting and crocheting has really gotten under my skin. I took Creative Crochet Lace with Myra Wood, and found that the class — along with the companion book — was filled with delicious words and phrases. For starters, there’s scrumble, a piece of lace created in a freeform fashion (when you stitch these pieces you’re scrumbling). Makes me want to crochet up a fruit-themed work just so I can call it an “apple scrumble”. (Hmm, plenty of Google hits for this one referring to recipes, though it does ask the fateful question “Did you mean apple crumble?”) The book casually invokes the phrase fiber jazz to describe a particular style of freeform lace. Lovely.

The past tense of knit became something of an irritant to me every time I heard it in the “Market” (what I would have called the huckster room had I been at an SF con…). If knitting isn’t a pastime of yours, I bet you’d say it should be knitted. I guess I’m revealing my newbie status in agreeing with you. But it turns out the past tense all the cool knitters use is knit, as in “I knit four sweaters and three hats last year.” I found a source that defends the irregularity of this verb and in the process earned myself a whack across the knuckles: I do use the American English past tense of fit, which is of course fit. Then again, I also say “day-tah” for data but “statt-us” for status, so sue me.

In another class on charting written patterns (and conversely writing out charted patterns) with Karen Alfke, I learned sweater-knitting tricks that I probably won’t be ready to try out for a year or so — haven’t made my bones on sweaters yet. She has an honest-to-goodness methodology (with paper-form tools!) for the multitasking involved in knitting a main pattern with (say) cables running up it, an armhole decrease, and a neckline decrease so that it all lines up properly at the top. One way she put it was that you’re fileting the pattern. Nice. (The term filet also shows up in the context of a totally different crochet technique, lest you get confused.)

With the help of my very experienced and talented knitting friends, I’m planning to tackle a lace shawl soon. Next lessons up: new stitches, circular needles, and teeny weeny yarn…

Thanks to Tim, I just checked out the new blog by Stephen Fry. Who knew?? Fry’s blessays (as he self-consciously calls them) are charming and relevant to readers of tech blogs. This is just wonderful — more Fry! (Or will blogging be the siren call that distracts him from writing novels?…)

Arrrrr… Got some travelin’ comin’ up, some involvin’ t’ high seas. Here be t’ details — ye’ll want ter mark ‘em all down.

I’ll be at Digital ID World next week, speakin’ about Sun’s OpenID d’ployment on Monday (thanks t’ David fer invitin’ me t’ join him!) and singin’ some fine Concordia shanties on Wednesday. And a kind wench at OASIS asked me t’ speak on mashin’ up and wirin’ up identity technologies at their Identity ‘n’ Trusted Infr’structure Workshop at Burton Catalyst in Barcelona next month.

So, me buckos, come on out ‘n’ say “Ahoy!” — maybe we can share some grub.

It looks like Barack Obama has taken the plunge and is forming an exploratory committee to seek the U.S. presidential nomination from his party. To me, this is a case of Local Boy Makes Good: though we didn’t really travel in the same circles and I was a year behind him, I actually went to the same high school he did (Punahou), and at the time he went by, yes, “Barry”. I’m pretty sure he’s “Mr. Obama” to me now. :-)

I’ve taken the liberty, since he’s a public figure and all, of reproducing his senior yearbook entry below. (Click to enlarge.)

Barry Obama, class of ‘79

Lots of late-70’s influence there, including that great haircut, those fantastic lapels, and the shout-out to his “Choom Gang” (chooming = smoking pakalolo, at least back then).

Good luck, Barr…uh, Mr. Obama!

UPDATE: A number of commenters have taken me to task for posting this entry. I’ve added one final comment, and I’d like to address the “charges” here.

Some people have leapt to Barry’s* defense, assuming that I was mounting an attack or trying to embarrass him. My intent was merely to have a little timely fun in the “brush with fame” category. It was far from an attack; what I saw in the entry and what seemed to be the consensus among others (until this week) was a handsome, athletic fellow with plenty of friends at school and love for his family, who — yes — happened to be pretty fond of his teenaged bad habits.

I would never have deliberately broken any news about this, and in fact I established before publishing the post that this was indeed old news, broken and discussed many times by Barry himself in the last decade and largely dismissed by the media.

I do think that someone running for president has to tolerate a ton of public scrutiny, and I’m confident my entry was entirely fair and benign to post under those conditions. (Someone suggested it wasn’t fair to post under copyright law, but it seems to come under fair use guidelines as I understand them.)

However, I’m no longer confident that it wasn’t a uncool thing to do, and for that I’m sorry. Though I meant to cause no embarrassment, it’s apparent some felt it crossed the line. And because I would certainly have asked my close friends before sharing their entries, I’ve belatedly sent a note to Barry’s campaign asking what his preferences are.

One last point: I see that my lighthearted comment about smoking being a rite of passage was taken badly by some other former Punahou students. I’m truly sorry to have upset them. I certainly wasn’t intending to tar everyone with that brush (I feel I have to insert a “not that there’s anything wrong with that” here), so let me apologize to those who took it that way. Punahou was not and is not a hotbed of drug activity; I have the utmost respect for the school and the experience I had there, and I support it to this day.

Let me spell out the point I was trying to make in joshing fashion: it’s undeniable that the era (late 70’s), the location (Hawaii), and the venue (high school) lent themselves to such indulgences on the part of quite a few teenagers. The fact that such references could appear explicitly in a yearbook — a Punahou yearbook, no less — supports this. And I actually think it’s a fair part of a discussion anyone might want to have about politicians and former drug use, if people want to get into that. Personally, I care far less what someone did in high school than the political stances they take in the modern era. And for what it’s worth, I happen to support marijuana legalization.

*I had a tough time deciding how to refer to Barry in this update. Honestly, it’s really hard to think of him as “Barack”, but equally (as I noted above), we didn’t know each other at school. I ultimately decided to stick with the “Punahou usage” that pervades the thread, but please understand that he and I are not on a first-name basis.

Uh, thanks, Tim. I think. (And congrats on becoming a Distinguished Engineer!)

Here’s a list of five things most people probably don’t know about me:

1. I have a bit of graphite embedded in my left palm from a knife game — only with pencils! — gone awry when I was five years old.

2. I have a severe case of bovilexia.

3. There are nine distinct versions of Bohemian Rhapsody on my iPod:

   • The original (three copies, from A Night at the Opera, Queen Greatest Hits, and the Wayne’s World soundtrack)
   • The live version from the Wembley ‘86 concert
   • The We Will Rock You musical soundtrack (coincidentally recorded in London soon after the first time I saw it there)
   • The London Symphony Orchestra version
   • A rap version by Molotov on a Spanish-language “tributo a Queen“
   • Two substantially different versions by the Braids (a capella and instrumental), along with two extra mixes based on these
   • Two versions (Constantine and the Flaming Lips) off the intermittently amazing Killer Queen: A Tribute to Queen album (if you like the song Stone Cold Crazy, check out this version)

   And I don’t even have the ID Gang Choir’s version of Bohemian Rhaps-ID on there yet.

4. I have performed in a strip club.

   I used this in playing a game of three truths and a lie with Sara Gates, Michelle Dennedy, and some other great folks at a conference last year, so I guess they know this about me, at least. It was supposed to be the one “ringer truth” that everyone would assume was a lie, but I got tripped up by Michelle, who independently joked, just before my turn, about my “stripping career”… In fact, my first band Sleeper did play in a club (I think it was somewhere on the Pearl Harbor military base) that did indeed have, y’know, dancers as part of the entertainment. A weird experience, especially since the poor dancers had to cue up their own music on the jukebox.

5. I think watermelon-flavored Jolly Ranchers are an abomination.

Conor, Pat, Paul, JeffH, John: tag, you’re it! (As if there’s anything left we don’t know about Conor. Or Paul.)

Just doing my part to be a vector…

[UPDATED to fix link to John’s blog.]

The seventh annual XML Summer School is well under way, and so far it’s a blast and a half. A number of interesting locutions have already arisen…

I sat in on Debbie Lapeyre’s talk yesterday, in the Content and Knowledge with XML track, which was great. I saw lots of nodding as people “got” the important concepts. Debbie used a phrase that was new to me: I’ve heard the < and > characters called “angle brackets” and “less-than sign and greater-than sign” (the official Unicode names), but never “chicken lips”!

Last night the speakers and delegates had a lovely dinner alongside the Cherwell River, after which we punted up the river to the Victoria Arms pub and back. The reception preceding the dinner involved a lovely libation that is usually known as a Pimm’s Cup, but the little crowd I was hanging out with dubbed it “punting juice”. Mmm, punting juice… I think it’s my new all-time favorite.

Still to do: The Trends & Transients track and my Web Services and Service Architectures track. I’m eager to try out some new material I’ve got on federated identity topics. If it works on my classroom guinea pigs, I’ll share it here.

Recently I’ve been working with my team of XML Summer School lecturers on our materials, and Jeff floated the idea of a using a visual metaphor to show how each topic fills in another piece of the web services/SOA story. Paul advised against using “puzzle pieces”, which imply that the picture isn’t complete until you use every last piece. So we brainstormed some alternatives. (My unserious suggestions: onions and bricks…)

A common metaphor is Lego(R) and Duplo(R) pieces, which, due to a single standard (in this case imposed by the Lego company itself) for fit, always go together. But we can see that different “stacks” might not:

Lego-like conference swag

(It’s hard to see, but the upper one comes from DataChannel.) I found these while cleaning out my home office desk a few weeks ago, and immediately noted that they were not interoperable…

While hunting for additional useful metaphors, I googled “layering metaphors” and came across this fascinating paper on Software Metaphors. From the introduction, titled “Software as Fiction”:

As fiction, software is entirely and thoroughly metaphorical. Metaphors pervade every element and aspect of software, from the lowliest variable name to the largest of enterprise architectures. Software is so steeped in metaphors that we often overlook the extent and nature of these metaphors. Like fish in water, software developers often do not perceive the medium that surrounds us: our natural languages, natural conceptual models, and the natural and linguistic metaphors we use every day in our software designs. Even so, software developers borrow ideas, terminology and organizational structures from every field they encounter and every problem they solve.

Indeed, our brains can’t help applying patterns — and the most concrete and atom-based patterns, like the “Bad is Stinky” and “Categories are Containers” examples given in the paper, are the easiest to make because we’ve been familiar with those referents for a whole lifetime. In fact, every time we use a preposition, we’re making an implicit physical-relationship metaphor (this module hands control to that module; the UI goes in front of the business logic).

The paper is chock-full of interesting thoughts and even advice on effective naming of things like variables, taking into account their metaphorical roles. Its stated goal — “This essay explores a wide variety of these metaphors in hopes of awakening a greater awareness of them in software developers and in hopes of making their acknowledgement more common and explicit in the general practice of software development” — is pretty modest, but its encyclopedic collection of metaphors used in the creation and maintenance of software is impressive and fun to read. (The attempt to catalog every metaphor puts me in mind of Douglas Hofstadter’s Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, which describes his team’s attempts to duplicate in software the sorts of nano-analogy-making that minds do all the time — sort of a reverse view of this paper.)

Imagine my delight when I found the section connecting code threads to stitch patterns (for which this is a reverse view!):

Computer processors are now generally fast enough that they can usually switch between and effectively trace several execution threads “concurrently” according to human perception. Thus, execution threads can be likened to the straight warp on a loom, around which intricate patterns of code are entwined and intertwined to produce a fabric of data as results.

And there’s a section called “Mathematical Formulas, Impurities and Stench”, which explores the “bad is stinky” realm — for example, discussing a book on software refactoring that refers to “(deodorant) comments” used “to mask bad smells in the code”.

With apologies to William Steig and Ted Elliott (and thanks to Robin), perhaps software really is most like onions. (They stink?) Yes — no! (They make you cry?) No! (You leave them in the sun, they get all brown, start sproutin’ little white hairs?) No! Layers! Onions have layers. Software has layers! Onions have layers. You get it? They both have layers.

The logic seems irrefutable.

A friend told me today he’d written a poem for a special someone on the occasion of Valentine’s Day — an Ode to Sweethearts, in which the manufacturing process for making those little conversation hearts is glorified, along with lots of romance and innuendo.

That led me to the NECCO website, where I not only learned how they’re made, but also found the company’s announcement of new sayings to be printed on the little hearts this year. Be still my own heart — they’ve added a preposition (To) and a conjunction (And)!

Over the years, NECCO has introduced Sweethearts sentiments that are inline with current culture, but never before has its mix included grammatical “connectors.” With the addition of To and And, sweethearts can now “spell out” and communicate thoughts such as: ILU And Miss You; Kiss Me To Be Mine; or Love You And Home Soon.

A linguistic treat not to be missed, as is their complete list of seasonal Sweetheart products: I am pondering precisely what they mean by a Sweethearts Tart Laydown Bag. (Is it an imperative?)

Happy Valentine’s Day, all.