Dan Weinreb’s blog

In his new book, Coders at Work, Peter Seibel interviews some of the best software developers in the world, asking how they work, what practices they follow, how they learned, and what advice they can offer. Because Peter is, himself, an experienced senior software developers, he knows most relevant questions to ask, the ones that have to do with how real programmers do their work. He engages in a real back-and-forth conversation rather than just presenting a questionairre. You feel like you’re sitting there with them, as he asks all the same questions you’d want to ask if you were there yourself.

How do you you find the best programmers? He ran his own little contest: he got a lot of nominations, and people voted. I am confident that this worked, because a lot of the people he interviewed are people I know to be among the best. I know Guy L. Steele Jr and L Peter Deutsch, and consider them two of the very best in the world. Most of the others I have heard of.

Peter is also the author of Practical Common Lisp, the best book to read if you want to write real programs in Common Lisp. His understanding of the language and its deep concepts are second to none. He has also done advanced software development at several companies, including BEA Systems and Kenamea. Having that kind of experience lets him ask probing and relevant questions that reveal what’s really interesting about how the interviewees work and think. There’s no other book like it.

John Kane will perform a hilarious one-man show called There, I’ve Broken My Neck! (An Evening of Theatrical Disasters), at 8:00 pm on Friday Nov. 7 and Saturday Nov 8. He performed this three years ago and everybody loved it; now he’s added many new funny stories of life in the theatre, and everything that can go wrong.

John is an amazing actor, as well as a writer of plays, TV shows (over 200!), and operas. He played the role of Puck in one of the most famous productions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, the Peter Brook Royal Shakespeare Company production of 1970, with Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley.

He wrote the liberetti of two of the operas we’ve performed at the North Cambridge Family Opera: Antiphony and Kids Court.

The performance features humorous anecdotes and readings suitable for audiences aged 10 and up. Tickets are $35. All proceeds will benefit North Cambridge Family Opera and Central Square Theater.

8:00 pm Friday Nov. 6 and Saturday Nov. 7
Central Square Theater
450 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139

And please pass on the word to your friends and family, so they too can enjoy an entertaining evening, while supporting NCFO and Central Square Theater.

Auditions have started for Springtime For Haman, which will be this year’s production by the North Cambridge Family Opera Company. It’s fun for the whole family, or for anyone!

This will be our eleventh year of doing family opera. By an “opera” we mean a story told through song. All of our productions are original, in English, and fun for both kids and adults to attend and to participate in. Our first opera was “Space Opera”, with lyrics and music by David Bass, which tells the story of the original Star Wars movie, now called Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. It was first performed in 1999, and then again in 2000, and most recently in 2005.

This year we are doing David Bass’s Springtime For Haman, which we originally performed in 2004. This is my favorite of all the operas we’ve ever done. The Haman story is a great plot; there are funny parts and poignant parts and suspenseful parts; there are all kinds of musical styles.

Auditions are happening this (three-day) weekend and next (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, 10/10, 10/11, and 10/12, and
Saturday and Sunday, 10/17 and 10/18) between 1:00pm to 7:00pm, by appointment only. To schedule an audition, call 617-492-4095 or email Auditions10@FamilyOpera.org.

Auditions are at the Deborah Mason School of Dance, at 32 Cottage Park Avenue in Cambridge (there are directions here). Here’s all the information about the show and the auditions.

If any of you deal with the technology press, i.e. want them to publish stories on your stuff, you may know about the concept of a “press embargo”, where you send them info and say “don’t release this until X date”. Last night at a panel I found out some interesting info about this.

These used to exist and be widely used. They let a company manage the time at which it’s “big news” would come out, and it let reporters have some extra time to prepare their story and make it higher-quality without risking being out of date.

However, lately the whole thing has broken down. TechCrunch and the Wall St. Journal, in particular, have been undermining the “gentleman’s agreement” that made this work. A tech jouralist now has to assume that by following the embargo, he or she will end up being out of date (“scooped” is apparently not really a term-of-art any more). In general, journalists do not like them, and will not honor any that is more than one week out. They worry that someone else will discover the news and not have agreed to the embargo, or the news will leak some other way, or someone will just ignore the embargo. Also, some journalists now consider them just too problematic and too much trouble and ignore embargoed press releases entirely.

So, take this into account if you were thinking of doing an embargo’ed press release.

The panel session was called “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping PR”. It was at last night’s Web Innovator’s Group meeting, at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, MA. The panelists were excellent.

Microsoft is complaining that Google’s deal giving them access to millions of digitized books is anti-competitive and monopolistic.

The idea of Microsoft demanding protection from monopolistic practices is utterly breathtaking in its degree of chutzpah and hypocrisy.

I suspect that Microsoft is trying to appeal directly to Christine Varney, the head of the anti-trust division at the Department of Justice, who has been an outspoken critic of Google. (I mean “appeal” in the colloquial sense, not in the term-of-art legal sense, of course.)

Lots more info about the Google case can be found in a recent Wired article.