Trevor F. Smith: Exterior

Cognitive Surplus

links for 2008-04-30

• Virtual Worlds News: EA-Land "Experiment" to Close Down; Ends Cycle of The Sims Online
  Hopefully we're approaching a time when we'll be able to invest our time and energy in online spaces so distributed that the loss of a single company doesn't decimate the entire culture.
  (tags: 3space 3pointD)

Change is the Only Constant

This past ten days has been a sharp, short shock to my system. Despite our best efforts, my wife and I have come to the conclusion that our marriage has come to its conclusion so we're switching to a binary household with my daughter and I staying in our house in West Seattle.

The life of a startup CEO is not conducive to that sort of arrangement (see previous references to travel and risk) so my time at the helm of Transmutable has come to an end. Cofounders Ian and Nicolas are considering a variety of directions for the company, and I have every confidence that they'll choose the best path forward.

As for me, I'm looking for a company in need of an experienced, results-oriented software engineer and technical leader with a history of shipping innovative, high quality software. If that's your company, I can be reached via my linkedin profile or via email at trevor at trevor dot smith dot name.

My Twitobit

@garyd is producing 140 character obituaries on demand:

John Ruskin on Systems

While looking at some of the more egregious scrollwork in a modern web stack I am reminded of this passage from "The Grand Style":

Much time is wasted by human beings, in general, on establishment of systems; and it often takes more labour to master the intricacies of an artificial connection, than to remember the separate facts which are so carefully connected. I suspect that system-makers, in general, are not of much more use, each in his own domain, than, in that of Pomona, the old women who tie cherries upon sticks, for the more convenient portableness of the same. To cultivate well, and choose well, your cherries, is of some importance; but if they can be had in their own wild way of clustering about their crabbed stalk, it is a better connection for them than any other; and, if they cannot, then, so that they be not bruised, it makes to a boy of a practical disposition not much difference whether he gets them by handfuls, or in beaded symmetry on the exalting stick. I purpose, therefore, henceforward to trouble myself little with sticks or twine, but to arrange my chapters with a view to convenient reference, rather than to any careful division of subjects, and to follow out, in any by-ways that may open, on right hand or left, whatever question it seems useful at any moment to settle.

Think of this when you're writing a factory for a model of a service to connect the tiers of an app which won't see the light of day for another seventeen iterations and which is essentially the translation of a database row into a line of HTML.

links for 2008-04-26

• Tiobe Index of Programming Language Popularity
  Ranked list based on number of working programmers, courses, and third party vendors.

links for 2008-04-18

• Books where the city plays an important role.
  The fiction discussion forum at Amazon covers the all important character: the city.
  (tags: urbanity fiction)

links for 2008-04-15

• Mac OS X 10.5.2 OpenGL Info
  Anyone who says that it's easy to deploy to Macs hasn't dealt with the mess that is OpenGL functions.
• My Challenge to Andrew Baron
  The only positive outcome for a lame experiment.

links for 2008-04-11

• Difference Engine Arrives in Silicon Valley
  The Memex is next.
• Flux player no longer open source?
  Not sure what the real story is here, but I see no source links on the Media Machines pages. The links to older tarballs from this post do work, though, so the LGPL'ed source is still in circulation.

GL Teapot on the iPhone

Yep, Newell's old Utah teapot has made its way onto my iPhone:

The iPhone has OpenGL-ES, WebKit, mDNS, and radios for WiFi and EDGE.

I'm just saying.