Dan Weinreb's blog

Coders At Work, by Peter Seibel

Dan Weinreb — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:40:13 +0000

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.

There, I’ve Broken My Neck!

Dan Weinreb — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 08:54:33 +0000

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 for an extra special treat, join us after the Saturday performance for a wine and cheese reception with John Kane, at the home of Dina Mardell and David Sandberg, 166 Chestnut Street, Cambridge. Tickets for the reception are $20. Reception proceeds benefit NCFO.

To purchase tickets, visit www.FamilyOpera.org or call Dina at 617-492-4095.

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.

Join Our Performance of “Springtime For Haman”!

Dan Weinreb — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 21:16:24 +0000

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.

The death of the “press embargo”

Dan Weinreb — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:30:43 +0000

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 Discovers The Virtues of Anti-Trust Law

Dan Weinreb — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:00:39 +0000

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.

C++ Template Metaprogramming

Dan Weinreb — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:03:17 +0000

I have not used C++ in many years. It was so long ago that templates, in the way they are used today, were not in C++ yet. I hope I never have to program in C++ again. That said, it’s interesting to know that C++ templates are so powerful that you can write a compile-time Lisp interpreter in them!

The following is from the notes at Amazon about the book “C++ Template Metaprogramming” by David Abrahams and Alexey Gurtovoy:

“In 1998 Dave had the privilege of attending a workshop in Generic Programming at Dagstuhl Castle in Germany. Near the end of the workshop, a very enthusiastic Kristof Czarnecki and Ullrich Eisenecker (of Generative Programming fame) passed out a few pages of C++ source code that they billed as a complete Lisp implementation built out of C++ templates. At the time it appeared to Dave to be nothing more than a curiosity, a charming but impractical hijacking of the template system to prove that you can write programs that execute at compile time. He never suspected that one day he would see a role for metaprogramming in most of his day-to-day programming jobs.”

Thanks for David Mankins for bringing this to my attention!

I recently learned about Python’s powerful metaprogramming techniques, from a talk by Adam Baratz of The Echonest. This was very impressive and I hope to find time to learn more.

Adrian Belew Power Trio, with Julie and Eric Slick

Dan Weinreb — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 15:07:52 +0000

I greatly enjoyed the Adrian Belew Power Trio last night at the Natick Center for the Arts. I mentioned this concert in an earlier blog posting. Adrian Belew is a great electric guitar player and composer. He’s a member of Robert Fripp’s band King Crimson, and has performed with some of my favorite bands and musicians, including Laurie Anderson, Talking Heads, and Mike Oldfield.

The trio includes Julie Slick on bass and Eric Slick on drums. Julie is 23 years old, and her brother is 22. As a 50-year-old, I’m never quite sure whether to characterize people that age as “kids” or not. Friends of mine who I consider to be my age have children in their early 20’s, but these people are adults. I have to learn to change the way I deal with one of the most basic characterizations/classifications in life! Adrian referred to them as his “youthful compadres”. What I can say for sure is that I would have been quite impressed with their musicianship even without seeing them or knowing anything about them, but that they can play that way at such a young age is stunning. What will they be like in ten or twenty years? I definitely want to keep track of them!

Their mother, Robin, sold CD’s and tee shirts. Although I aready have enough tee shirts, as my wife keeps reminding me, I bought theirs, both because I want to support them and because I like the design.

For some reason, the otherwise-nice packaging of the CD of “e” does not include a track list. From what Adrian said at the concert, I expected to find five tracks named “a” through “e”. However, there were 11 tracks. The Gracenote CDDB did not find a track list; that’s also very surprising, as the CDDB has never failed me before, even for some pretty obscure stuff. I tracked down an email address for Robin Slick, who helpfully sent me the track list. It’s “a”, “a2″, “a3″, “b”, “b2″, “b3″, “c”, “d”, “d2″, “e”, and “e2″. I told iTunes to submit this to the CDDB, and I hope it’ll be installed so you won’t have to type these in manually. Thanks, Robin!

Julia and Erik studied at The Paul Green School of Rock in Philadelphia, which was showcased in the excellent documentary film Rock School (not to be confused with the fictional film School of Rock). The Paul Green school seems to be training a whole new generation of progressive rockers. The best-known is C. J. Tywoniak, who was so awesome in the Rock School documentary playing “Inca Roads” by Frank Zappa; he has performed extensively with Jon Anderson of Yes. (Eric Slick has also performed with Jon Anderson.)

The performance featured the songs “a”, “b”, “c”, “d”, and “e” from their new album, “e”. They also performed two King Crimson songs: Neurotica (from Beat) and Three of a Perfect Pair (from Three of a Perfect Pair). Here is a (low-quality) video of them performing Neurotica in Budapest, and you can find more such videos on YouTube. Here is an Animoto MTV-style video of the beginning of Three of a Pefect Pair from Eric Slick’s web site. They also did two of Adrian’s own songs, Big Electric Cat and Lone Rhinoceros, both from Adrian’s first solo album, Lone Rhinoceros, and several other songs.

If they perform in the Boston area again, TourFilter will let me know. TourFilter is a wonderful free service. You tell it what bands you like, and it tells you when and where they’re coming. Thanks to Chris Marstall for creating and operating this gem.

What Programming Language Do People Speak Well Of?

Dan Weinreb — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:42:33 +0000

I usually don’t write blog entries that are merely pointers to someone else’s blog entries, but I’m making an exception this time. A blogger named Lukas Biewald, in a blog called/of Dolores Labs, wrote an entry called The Programming Language With The Happiest Users.

He measured Twitter “tweets” that mention certain programming languages, and ascertained which were positive. I’m particularly interested because Lisp came in second place.

Interpreting this as “the programming langauge with the happiest users” depends on several tacit assumptions that seem dubious at best. We don’t know that the people writing these comments are actually users. The number of tweets sent about a language is not uncorreleated with the langauge; I bet there are fewer COBOL programmers using Twitter than Perl programmers. Not everybody tweets about how much they like or dislike their langauge as much as everybody else. He knows this and mentions some of these problems at the end of the post, so I’m not saying this to criticize him.

Yes, the title of the blog post is sort of misleading, but written to get the attention of readers. I cannot criticize him for that either, since I do the same thing. Sometimes it backfires; a lot of people seem to have seen my post named “Why Did M.I.T. Switch from Scheme to Python” without getting my points, which were (1) they didn’t make a high-level decision to switch languages, but rather this fell out as an end consequence of decisions that had nothing to do with languages, and (2) this is only for the freshman core courses, not the whole curriculum.

It’s hard to draw any hard and meaningful and useful conclusions from this research, but I still find it interesting and entertaining.

Rejoice, The Funding Returns!

Dan Weinreb — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 19:43:09 +0000

this article in Mass High Tech talks about early stage venture funding in New England. Here are the numbers that the article provided. I did some averages to keep all the figures “per month”.

Jul, Aug, Sept 2008: 6 deals, $34M total
Jan, Feb, Mar 2009: 3 deals, $17M total
Jul 2009: 15 deals, $97M total

James Geschwiler, executive director of Common Angels, is quoted extensively in the article, which ends: “After all, when the economy is down, investors should be taking advantage of the lower costs. [James] said: ‘I didn’t have to go to business school to learn “buy low, sell high.”‘”

Family Trip to the West Coast, Summer 2009

Dan Weinreb — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 11:30:47 +0000

I rarely post about day-to-day events, but this is an exception. My family is travelling out west. My wife Cheryl, and my son Adam (almost 18, going into his senior year of high school), are first going to Seattle so that Adam can attend residential Cybercamp for two weeks. We had planned to do this at Bentley College, as we did for the last two years, but the parent organization (Giant Campus) has shut down about half of the Cybercamps across the USA this year due to lack of signups. (Presumably this is due to the recession.) Adam very much wants to stay on his promotion track (counselor in training, etc) so that he can be a counselor next summer. Cheryl spent a long time researching alternatives, and this one works the best.

Cheryl and I spent all day yesterday getting her and Adam all set to leave. At noon, Cheryl said that she wanted a netbook to bring, so I went to Staples, bought one, and spent hours removing bloatware, and putting in a new firewall, anti-virus too, and the apps she needs. They left this morning at 4:00 AM for their 6:00 AM flight (she scheduled it, so don’t blame me). Adam is doing two weeks of Cybercamp, and Cheryl is having a good time and picking Adam up for the weekend a week from now (Cybercamp ends Friday afternoon and resumes Sunday).

I’ll be here through Thursday (8/6). On Friday (8/7) I have a 7:00 AM flight to San Jose. I’ll be staying at Bill York’s house for a week. Then Cheryl and Adam will fly down from Seattle on Sat (8/15), and we’ll see friends around S.F., the Bay Area in general, and Santa Cruz. We’ll all see the Hearst Castle for the first time, and we’ll be staying in San Luis Obispo (at the Madonna Inn, although they didn’t give us one of the best special rooms). We’re also signed up for the special nighttime tour of Alcatraz (Cheryl and I did the regular tour about 20 years ago). We have a long list of places to visit, some of which we’ll get to, including the Computer Museum, the Intel Museum, and the Winchester Mystery House (Cheryl and Adam have already been there, but Adam very much wants to go back and show me).

We will be back on the evening of Tuesday 8/25. Adam’s first day of school is Thursday 8/27.

To my friends in California, I want to see every one of you, but I don’t think I’ll manage to pull that off. If you would like to get together and have not already communicated with me about it, please send me email so we can try to work out a meeting. See you soon!

For those of you who got the “Change in status” mail from LinkedIn: no, I have not changed jobs. When I do an angel investment, I create a new “Current Job” item so that I’ll turn up in LinkedIn queries by company. LinkedIn does not provide a way to control the order in which these items appear; it’s sorted by how recently you added the item. I could remove and re-add ITA Software, but I’m not entirely sure that there would not be some undesirable effect. I’ll say more in a subsequent post about how I use LinkedIn.