Shanti’s Dispatches

A friend was recently featured in the AZ Republic for his role in some of the world’s first prankster tapes.

click above thumbnail to view full scan of the article from the AZ Republic

Jim Davidson and John Elmo, two young guys from New Jersey, recorded the tapes in the 1970s. They struck comedy gold when they came across the owner of the “Tube Bar”, who was easily provoked and would then launch into a litany of profanities and threats against the pranksters.

My buddy Ed has remastered the tapes; they are available for download / purchase at BumBarBastards.com.

{photo via chrissuderman}

In this excellent article, The Secret to Raising Smart Kids, Carol Dweck outlines some excellent learning tips that apply to people of all ages:

Hint: Don’t tell your kids that they are (smart). More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life.

This particular passage outlines one of the keys to an ever-expanding set of cross-disciplinary skills:

In the growth mind-set classes, students read and discussed an article entitled “You Can Grow Your Brain.” They were taught that the brain is like a muscle that gets stronger with use and that learning prompts neurons in the brain to grow new connections. From such instruction, many students began to see themselves as agents of their own brain development. Students who had been disruptive or bored sat still and took note. One particularly unruly boy looked up during the discussion and said, “You mean I don’t have to be dumb?”

I never strictly believed 100% in the “talent mindset” vs. “grow your brain mindset”, but around some areas I definitely had a mental block of sorts. For example, when you see a specialist in a field (not necessarily world class, but good at what he/she does), and you think “wow, I could *never* do that!”

The Grow Your Brain Mindset leads to the thinking “you know, if I was taught the fundamentals and then practiced my ass off, I just might be able to do that one day.” And sure, some things we have inherent abilities and in others we require much more training. (i.e. math always came easy for me, whereas I had to really study hard at english/writing skills)

{photo by barnabywasson}

Turning the Corner: a Few Examples

At one point I began making a concerted effort to step outside of a few comfort zones, but still around my particular area of expertise (programming / web dev). These are a few things that I would’ve probably never even attempted had I not adopted more of a grow your brain mindset:

* Developing a BitTorrent tracker in rails (more on that later)
* Server administration, including setting up dual-server setups (MySQL + Web/App) - one recently handled 130k pageviews in a day w/o breaking a sweat
* Building basic logos and tweaking design elements in Photoshop
* Building basic games in Flash

Limitations

I’m limited by what appears (on the surface) to be really painful (or could possibly be painful, i.e. rejection, etc).

For example — learning hard programming languages (C, C++ though I’ve dabbled before), pitching angel / venture capital investors for money, earning a Law Degree, playing guitar using more than just chords & power chords, etc.

Of course, applying the proper mindset you realize it’s just a matter of practice, though having this knowledge makes you no less nervous before you’ve made the first few attempts!

I feel bad for Monica. (via Valleywag)

It was Disability Awareness day at Fenway Park…

I’m working on a set of scripts that could come in handy for anyone who manage 2+ WordPress blogs.

Some of the tasks you face when managing multiple WP blogs:

1) Upgrading to newer versions of WP

2) Making sure upgrades go as smoothly as possible (limit breakage of plugins and broken plugins impact on the blogs)

3) Cleaning out comment spam from the database in an automated fashion (these days if Akismet thinks its spam, I’ll take their word for it, even if it means a few false positives slip through)

4) Automated database + static file Backups (you are backing up your database at least once in a blue moon, riiiight?)

5) Off server backups (Amazon S3)

—- Bonus round:

6) One-click install of a new plugin across X number of WP blogs (you know how time consuming this can be if you’ve had to do it before!)

7) One-click setting of a WordPress feature like, say, the permalink URL pattern to be “%postname%” for SEO-friendly URLs

I’ve actually managed to accomplish most of the above with a few Ruby scripts that I’ve cobbled together.

If anyone’s super-interested, drop me a line in the comments.

For now the scripts are a bit hackish; they assume you’re using cPanel + WHM and follow certain conventions when setting up your blog (i.e. username_wp for the DB, etc).

The normally cogent Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror writes in a recent piece on CAPTCHAs:

Not that they don’t deserve it– scalpers are evil, profiteering bastards, to be sure.

I won’t pick on Jeff here but rather that kind of thinking, which I’ve found is quite common, even among those who aren’t socialists/communists.

The clear problem with the sale of popular concert tickets, is that market demand far outpaces supply from the “approved” source of the tickets, which usually (as commenters have pointed out in the thread), is a monopoly itself.

Quite frankly, it baffles me that people consider this evil. I buy a ticket for a hanson concert for $60; you’re telling me it’s evil to resell that for $120?!?

It’s evil not to allow me that right. Scalpers simply take it to the next level. By the way — all these people who are complaining about scalpers, where are they exactly on Saturday morning @ 10am when these tickets go on sale?

Oh that’s right, it’s easier to whine about market economics a week before the concert than to, you know, get out of their soccer mom SUV and wait patiently like the rest of us who buy tickets the morning they go on sale.

The answer is simple — Ticketmaster and all major ticket sellers need to switch to auction-based systems. Extract the latent value from the tickets and let the artist / ticket broker reap the rewards rather than the scalpers.

Web2.0flow.com (great name) has come up with a list of 30 major sites that are still using tables (presumably, for layout structure).

# Yahoo.com - Clean
# Google.com - Tables inside
# YouTube.com - You don´t believe how many they have
# Live.com - Only one… Hmm… not bad at all
# MSN.com - Only one… Amazing!
# MySpace.com - A place for tables… and friends?
# FaceBook.com - Here hang out the tables too.
# Wikipedia.com - Tables, tables, tablepedia over here
…

You get the idea. Oh boy. I could really go off on the rant deepend here.

Let’s just say, table nazis drive me freaking nuts.

Best example: table nazi spends 2 hours trying to get things working correctly in CSS. Problem is, the CSS still doesn’t look 100% great in all browsers so every few days the floated sidebar div takes a shit and ends up at the bottom of the page, instead of in the top right.

So instead of working on real, new features, we’re wasting time debugging the same silly CSS issues day in and day out.

The solution? I spend 5 minutes using tables instead of a floated div; the right sidebar never takes a crap anymore, it’s always aligned at the top with a little valign=”top” love. Life is good… the only people who care? Table nazis who might happen to view source on our app!! Not, you know, the actual 80% of our users who are in IE6 who might happen to see the sidebar at the bottom of the page because some minor change borked things to heck at the time.

/end rant…

Wow. Just… wow.

It may not be much, but I whipped up this battles app in an hour using Heroku.

Heroku is pretty much the exact idea that I blogged about in February.

Now… is this the Visual Basic for the web? No, certainly not yet.

Heroku definitely still has some maturing to do before it will appeal to non-developers who want to whip up simple web applications.

Questions, and Where Heroku Could Go from Here

So… one possible use for Heroku is by actual developers, who simply want to quickly pop into their application’s code and change a few things, all via the web. I’ve wanted to do this on plenty of occasions. Under this use scenario, Heroku is simply a glorfied (though very slick) web-based IDE. Still cool though, but you’re not nearly leveraging all of the interesting thing’s they’ve hooked into re: deployment, migrations and database management.

Actually using Heroku for deployment is tricky. Are you expecting your app to never get more then 10,000 - 50,000 visitors a day? Can Heroku reasonably scale beyond that? What will they charge, if so?

For the use-case scenario of non-developers using Heroku as sort of a Visual Basic for webapps, tons and tons of video tutorials would be necessary to get these people up to speed.

Most free tech video tutorials you see are by developers for developers; the presenter speaks the same language and uses verbiage that would be foreign to the average laymen (who isn’t programming savvy).

To speak to would-be developers “like they’re two year olds” would take a professional team, or at least some painful recording sessions by Heroku team members. (not sure if that is what they had in mind when starting the idea)

So… who knows if Sandy the Office Manager would ever be able to buy “Heroku for Dummies” and build some basic CRUD webapps to manage her office inventory list. It’d be cool though… =)

I brought this topic up at work, but didn’t quite articulate the point the general was making exactly right. View the original article here.

The contrarian gist is that you want to hire as many clever, lazy people as possible, promoting them to leadership roles.

In fact, if the choice is between hard-working + clever, and lazy + clever, you actually want to find the lazy & clever types because, as Adrian Savage states, “laziness is the principal spur to creativity. Lazy people are always looking for easier, simpler, and less arduous ways to do things. If they are also clever, the chances are that they will find them, and make them available to everyone else. Lazy people are also natural delegators, and find it very attractive to let their subordinates get on with their work without interference from above.”

More from the article:

The German World War II general Erich von Manstein is said to have categorized his officers into four types.

The first type, he said, is lazy and stupid. His advice was to leave them alone because they don’t do any harm.

The second type is hard-working and clever. He said that they make great officers because they ensure everything runs smoothly.

The third group is composed of hardworking idiots. Von Manstein said that you must immediately get rid of these, as they force everyone around them to perform pointless tasks.

The fourth category are officers who are lazy and clever. These, he says, should be your generals.

I can see if you have an exact set of pre-determined tasks that you need to be done, then you simply want the hard-working person who will do exactly what is requested of them.

This reminds me, though, of stories where offshore developers are sent a set of specs, and perhaps they slightly misinterpret some of the things in the spec; what you end up with is something that kinda, sorta works but could be improved greatly. Sometimes it takes a little clever (or lazy) innovation on the part of the implementor to get things done as efficiently, and elegantly, as is possible.