mult.ifario.us

The prospect of spending time with Pat was one of the main reasons that I took a position at Amazon long ago, although we both migrated to roles in different parts of the company a relatively short time after I joined, so it's nice to see Pat out of the jungle and blogging. (My office was close enough to Pat's that I could drop by conveniently but far enough away that I couldn't smell the puns...)

Pat's entry on his talk from CIDR (paper) contains one of the lessons of running a business: The customer is the observer who matters. (I mentioned something about this topic in the context of "doneness" and business tradeoffs once upon a time.) It's important to regularly and religiously pop the problem solving context until the customer's problem is what you're thinking about, since that's ultimately why you'll get paid.

I took advantage of being in the Bay Area for JavaOne and went to visit my Ph.D. advisor over in Berkeley. After breakfast, he gave me a tour of the renovated and expanded Mathematical Sciences Research Institute ("MSRI", pronounced "misery" in the old days) up the hill. Since the last time that I'd been there (probably 2000 or 2001), Jim Simons, among others, stepped up and led a funding drive for MSRI that expanded and renovated the institute. The differences from my time in graduate school a decade ago were striking, but I can sum it up in two pictures:

The shot on the left is what I remember the auditorium seating looking like, and the shot on the right is what it is now. The old seating had the distinct advantage of being uncomfortable, ergo difficult to doze off in, even if a talk was particularly boring.

Dan in the booth

Manning the Envoi Solutions booth at JavaOne with Dan was a good time. The overall win from the show was getting to talk to lots of people who are happy users of the XFire project at the Codehaus. The unfortunate thing was that not many of them were aware that XFire has evolved into CXF, a project under incubation at Apache and rolling up to a 2.0 release, and even fewer of them were aware that Envoi Solutions was the company founded by the same guy who founded the XFire project, i.e., Dan. In an open source project, especially a project that's got relatively low barriers to entry and few major issues, you don't get many opportunities to touch your customer, and it's poor etiquette to make the first move — the download and evaluation process should be frictionless and as anonymous as possible. You're stuck waiting for the customer to touch you first, and they may not even know you're there.

One place to attack the anonymity issue is at the point of distribution, and done right, this doesn't need to taint the community or the company. Introducing a level of indirection should be an obvious trick for a software developer, and the idea is the same classic that the various Linux companies have been using for a long time — distribute a slightly more polished or otherwise augmented version through a channel that's separate from the project, and use that indirection to associate the distribution with the company. Some of the goodies that Dan's got underway (some private as yet and some public, e.g., SXC) should help create that level of indirection.

The negative from the conference was the pavilion layout. The Envoi booth was in the "startup exhibitor alley", and like many things, it sounded like a good idea at the time. The floor layout showed the alley as a rectangular placeholder, but the actual layout was a bunch of angled walls spaced about eight feet apart with one vendor assigned to the front and back of each wall. The vendors on the ends had a great deal, but the vendors in the middle essentially shared a narrow strip of floor space and had to generate traffic by tackling passers-by. (Nonetheless, we were in good company, sandwiched between Talend and Hyperic.) The conference representative was impressively unapologetic. Not quite verbatim, but close: "If you choose to come next year, you won't be eligible for the startup alley, so you'd be in one of the booths on the floor. This was just something we tried, and we'll do it differently next year." Caveat exhibitor...

I'll be at JavaOne this week, in the Envoi Solutions booth with Dan and at the Ode meetup. I'm looking forward to seeing folks that I haven't seen in a while, and as is always the case in the world of software and open source, people that I've known for years but never met face-to-face.

The two heaviest books that have been on my nightstand in the past few months are about conveying information graphically, and it's a an area where I think that there is room for innovation. (The room for innovation is not in presentation of data but in interpretation of data.) On the subject of data visualization and interpretation, Paul Kedrosky cited a graph from a forthcoming academic paper that conveys an apparent lack of correlation between intelligence (measured by an IQ test) and wealth, and the graphic makes an interesting object lesson. I'm going to criticize the graphic without any context from the article. I'd argue that it's not an unfair thing to do, as a graphic (along with any legends and labels) should be self-contained.

Without further ado, here's the graphic:

A first observation is that young and highly educated people (and thus likely high IQ in the form of high scores on standardized tests that would have been used for college and graduate admissions) are likely to have negative net worth in the form of student loans and recent mortgages on expensive housing. The most expensive housing is in locations that attract the educated — New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco — and the size of the mortgage will be correlated to apparent earning potential. Real estate as a component of net worth would also impact the graph based on the age of the individual, as folks now in their 50's and 60's were able to afford homes that would be out of their reach (for the same career) now.

It would be interesting to see the same graph with some added color, e.g., dots colored by income or by education and sized by age. It would also be interesting to see the graph broken up into subsets by age and by geography. For instance, I imagine that smarter, younger people in the Valley are richer than elsewhere. Maybe researchers can still include a few choice charts in their publications but make data available on Many Eyes or as interactive tools built around libraries like Prefuse or Processing. (btw, if Many Eyes isn't enough, you can get more kid-in-an-eye-candy-store experience at VisualComplexity.com.) If I ever get a Windows machine at home, it would be interesting to turn Tableau loose on a more complete set of data for the IQ study. (The free and very good HippoDraw can be made to work on MacOS, but it's not as pretty or capable as Tableau.)

I've never been correctly quoted by the press, and on the off chance that it could have been my fault, I don't bear any grudges over it. (I take that back — I have a bone to pick with the person who quoted me as saying something about "leaving out 20%" instead of talking about hitting the "80% solution".) Contrary to conventional wisdom (which is often wrong), not all press is good press, and press that clouds or confuses your message is bad press.

Jason Calcanis has the right idea:

Journalists have been burning subjects for so long with paraphrased quotes, half quotes, and misquotes that I think a lot of folks (especially ones who don't need the press) are taking an email only interview policy. (Mark Cuban did this long ago)

Unless the interviewer intends to mislead or spring questions on the interviewee, I can't imagine why an email-only policy would be objectionable.

I don't look at my real world belly button all that often, and realistically, if it's not there, it's not a big deal; I was done with it a long time ago. On the other hand, when I do indulge in a little metaphorical navel gazing, I'll be damned if my weblog isn't missing about half the time. Again, it's not a big deal, since FeedBurner keeps the fire burning for any subscribers, but it's still annoying if not a bit embarrassing.

Back when I started having trouble with typo, I signed up for an account on mon.itor.us to get an idea of how much of a problem it was, and it's been pretty boring since I moved it off of TextDrive . As configured and hosted, it provides "one-and-a-half nines" or around 95% uptime, except when it really sucks wind. Speaking of which, here are the response time graphs for the 16th-18th:

The period of about two days out of the three where the graph is pegged at the top represent effective downtime. Flickr — or rather the lightweight integration of Flickr into typo — was the culprit, again, but I opted to disable it rather than fix it.