This weekend, I was doing a bunch of digging into how to use some of the open source ORM (Object Relational Mapping) packages out there. That process of technical research follows a pretty predictable pattern:

• do a few Google searches
• open the best results into a bunch of tabs
• read the info
• come up with a few, more detailed questions
• repeat

As that loop progresses, the questions I end up asking Google get more and more specific. By the time I've been digging for an hour or 2, the bulk of the results are starting to come from forums, mailing lists and other discussions of the technology in question.

That's when one of my pet peeves rears its head. You put a fairly detailed question into Google, get a page from a forum where someone asked your EXACT question (including most of the nuance for your specific needs) and, after a few people saying they don't know how or aren't sure, the original questioner pops back in and says, "Nevermind, I figured it out".

And that's it. Nothing else.

Particularly gnarly questions yield more than one such incident. Even worse, there are often 5 or 6 people just as frustrated, asking this person exactly HOW they figured it out. 

To me, this is an online etiquette and/or karma thing. If you go asking other people to explain how to do something, and you figure it out on your own, telling them "Nevermind" is just the first step. It is now your responsibility to explain back to the forum/mailing list/etc. what you did to figure it out. 

Sure, your solution might not work for everyone who will stumble across the discussion, but it's a whole lot better than being mocked by someone saying they *have* the answer, but haven't shared it.

Photo: Dan Zen

I make a swing past a bunch of sites like Freshmeat, C Sharp Source, CodeProject, Codeplex and Sourceforge
every week or 2, looking for new and updated C# (and PHP, etc) projects and libraries that are up to interesting stuff.

One article on CodeProject today caught my eye. The article is entitled: Generate Complete Web 2.0 Applications in Minutes. That sentiment is all over the software development industry. The Microsoft Windows Server 2008/SQL Server 2008/Visual Studio 2008 launch last week showed the attitude at several different points.

Basically, it boils down to excitement at the ability to quickly build "applications" with little more than a wizard. That exact sentiment was expressed to me multiple times at a consulting company I worked with for a while. The person in question believed that if we just used one of these magical tools, our projects would go from a couple of hundred hours down to a single day.

The problem with this whole approach to software development is not that the tools themselves aren't great or that they promise something they don't deliver. It's that they're asking a question that doesn't matter in the context it's getting asked.

That's because neither I nor any software developer that I know is collecting a paycheck or getting an invoice paid for "building applications". At least, that's not what the payment is in exchange for in economic terms. Rather, I am getting paid for *solving problems*.

And, the thing about getting paid to solve problems and magic tools that make some kinds of problems easier to solve this year than last year (which is what most of these tools actually do) is that that just changes the problems that people pay for.

When tools that do easy CRUD generation or data entry applications show up in the marketplace, that doesn't mean that software developers magically get to use those tools to only work 2 hours a week and then coast for the rest. It just changes the kinds of problems that earn developers money.

I love this chain of progress. That's because it lets me solve ever-increasingly difficult problems with the same effort. That's very cool. However, it doesn't promise easy street and it bothers me when that's what's implied by this whole attitude.

There are a lot of common patterns in data that appear over and over again. When we can recognize patterns in our reality and match them to these known and documented patterns, we can much better understand what's actually going on and

Anyone who has sat through an intro to economics course even at the high school level has spent their fair share of time drawing and looking at supply/demand curves.

Similarly, if you've ever gathered statistics on nearly anything, you've seen a bell curve.  For those who have been following the book The Long Tail and the subsequent media frenzy, power law curves are likely very familiar.

It's that very media frenzy that can be described by a graph that I'm fond of and tend to see in lots of places. It's called the hype cycle and describes how lots of things, technology in particular, go through a pattern of enthusiasm, disappointment and maturation.

What's wonderful about this curve is that once you know about it and start looking for it, it shows up all over and really puts lots of breathless technical press into perspective.

Basically, the idea of the curve is this:

1. Someone invents new technology. (Hey, here's this thing called XML)
2. Some people start using it and telling everyone how great it is. (Look what you can use XML for)
3. People start buying into the hype and looking to use the new technology EVERYWHERE they can. (XML cures cancer)
4. Some of those places are deeply inappropriate and those who didn't recognize that end up disappointed. (Umm, no it doesn't cure cancer)
5. Backlash that leaves people rejecting even valid uses.
6. Things settle down and the technology lands in its permanent niche.

The trick is that when you realize that a given technology or product is on this track, it's much easier to avoid getting caught up in it.

All of that is to explain why, when I was reading this article at Techcrunch that I laughed out loud when the graph loaded. The article is about a technology was hyped heavily last year and the article talks about whether it's demise is happening or not. However, what I found funny was that the graph was fairly close to the hype cycle.

And, for the record, I see many things in today's tech world that are teetering on the edge of falling into the trough of disillusionment at this point. Among them is that I've seen a new outcropping of backlash articles on Twitter, Lifehacking, etc. These are pretty much right on track and predictable.

Nothing to see here.

Every Sunday morning, give or take a few, for the past couple of years, I have breakfast with my good friend Aaron (who I met 20 years ago in junior high). It's always an interesting conversation that covers lots of topics.

This morning, I came away with more notes than average, so I thought I'd share some of the stuff we talked about.

A lot of the conversation revolved around Aaron's master's thesis/project: Complexity Machine 1. He's doing some really interesting stuff that deals with the intersection of emergent behavior, simulated flocking behavior, generative architecture and computer science. Complexity Machine 1 is the software that's the result of his research, where he's asking:

My question to those of you who are willing to explore is: how can you imagine this software could be used to create architecture? Consider it a kind of speculative Rorschach test. Perhaps you don't consider it useful at all, or feel it needs some some vital piece of functionality before it's useful.

Along the way, Aaron mentioned that he'd picked up a copy of Seed Magazine (due to an article related to his research) and found it to be a really decent magazine. When I got home, I hit the website and think I might subscribe.

At one point, the conversation turned to non-textbook books that help in the understanding of how computers work. I mentioned that I think that anyone with an interest in the workings of computers should read the novel: The Diamond Age.

He seconded that recommendation and also through out The Advent of the Algorithm from David Berlinski as worth reading along with Berlinski's A Tour of the Calculus. Both were critical to his actual "getting" the topics.

I mentioned that I had a copy of The Turing Omnibus sitting on my shelf that I've been wanting to get a chance to dig into.

On my way to drop him off back at home, the topic of my quest to find a better way to create presentations that are destined for online distribution rather than live presentation.

Powerpoint, Keynote, S5 and others all frustrate me in some way and what I really want is something that makes it much easier to focus on the content of the presentation and still generate something that fits with the aesthetic that Presentation Zen is pointing toward.

Aaron mentioned that he'd messed with Quartz Composer, Soundslides and Quicktime for what I described. And, of course, with most of his thesis research being done in Processing, he sees some serious promise for a nice presentation system.

Photo: Duchamp

I'm about as big of an advocate of the use of Creative Commons licenses for my creative work as you'll find. Nearly everything I make online is licensed under either the most permissive of the Creative Commons licenses (for things like articles, photos, documents, etc.) or one of the most permissive software licenses (for code and software), like the BSD license. That enthusiasm with a shared pool of resource led to my recent Photos from the Commons project and really drives much of my online activity. There has, however, been a longstanding problem with Creative Commons licenses that is probably going to get worse before it gets better. This problem exists on one of the axes on which Creative Commons helps people apply copyright license control. Those axes are:

• Attribution. If you republish, repurpose or create something from my work, you can't claim it as your own. My name needs to be attached. All of the licenses include this protection.
• Keeping the work free. The ShareAlike axis determines whether any changes you make to my work must also be licensed in the same way. This is often called a "viral" nature in license like the GPL and works similarly in Creative Commons.
• Commercial use. This is where things go from nice and black/white to a nasty shade of muddy gray.

That tricky axis of commercial use is specifically why I am steering entirely clear of any photo that includes a NonCommercial clause for the photos project. The problem, articulated in a much better way than I would do here, is that no one can really agree on what exactly *constitutes* commercial use. That can lead to really nasty confrontations that I want no part in. Adding to the confusion is the fact that for photos, there's an additional dimension wrapped up in the commercial use that could actually get messed up even if the use is non-commercial. The actual reproduction of a photo is covered by copyright. If you wanted to make prints, posters, etc. you needed a copyright license. However, if your chosen photo contains recognizable people (and sometimes inanimate objects as well), and you're using it as part of packaging or advertising something else, you also need a model release. This is illustrated by an episode of Friends (which is scary to realize is now nearly 15 years old) where Joey had a photo taken only to discover it on a billboard with a caption along the lines of "This man doesn't even know he's got herpes". That issue has caught a few businesses using Creative Commons photos for advertisements, even though the photos in question weren't restricted from commercial use. Fundamentally, these are the kinds of problems where rapid changes in how the law works along with a massive increase in the number of people now affected collide. Unfortunately, changes like automatic copyright and extensions with no registration, while partly intended to handle the influx of work under copyright without additional staff at the copyright office actually amplified the problem by creating enormous piles of copyrighted works by people who have no idea how copyright works. Alas, I'm certain it will get much, much worse before it starts to get better.