Trevor F. Smith: Exterior

The fonz jumps the stack

From an email rant I wrote earlier:

People who build web application frameworks are mostly feature bozos who don't seem to be bothered by constantly hopping up and down into one of the dozen abstraction layers they've placed between themselves and a web browser. At some point, when I was marking up a file which be used to generate an object which accessed a web service which looked in a database for a view description which would be used to render HTML with server side inclusions, I became delirious and took to drinkin'.

I'm spec'ing out some work for little web app and in the process decided to take another survey of Java web application frameworks (All you python and ruby weenies don't need to write me. I know, I know.) and I feel like something has been lost along the way as we stack turtle on turtle in order to ignore the minutia of the web to achieve 2.0-ness.

It seems like most of the innovations which excite people originate with the willingness to look at the minutia from which we're running and then tilt it all sideways. What if we used javascript and background threads to post and fetch XML? What if we paid attention to URL form instead of abstracting it in an CMS architecture's idea of state?

I've personally written more web application login systems than seems reasonable, but each time I do this I evolve my ideas about identity and community on the web. Perhaps on the Nth line of code when I set a cookie to expire yesterday my world will tilt and the others will follow.

My peeps and pubs

“Speakeasy: A Platform for Interactive Public Displays,” Julie A. Black, Jason I. Hong, Mark W. Newman, W. Keith Edwards, Shahram Izadi, Jana Z. Sedivy, Trevor F Smith. Position paper for Workshop on Public, Community, and Situated Displays: Design, Use, and Interaction Around Shared Information Displays, ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2002). New Orleans, LA, November 16, 2002. [pdf]

“Using Speakeasy for Ad Hoc Peer-to-Peer Collaboration,” W. Keith Edwards, Mark W. Newman, Jana Z. Sedivy, Trevor F Smith, Dirk Balfanz, D.K. Smetters, W. Keith Edwards. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2002). New Orleans, LA. November 16-20, 2002. [pdf]

“Challenge: Recombinant Computing and the Speakeasy Approach,” W. Keith Edwards, Mark W. Newman, Jana Z. Sedivy, Trevor F Smith, and Shahram Izadi. Proceedings of the Eighth ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom 2002). Atlanta, GA. September 23-28, 2002. [pdf]

"FLANNEL: Adding computation to electronic mail during transmission," Victoria Bellotti, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Mark Howard, Christine Neuwirth, Ian Smith, and Trevor Smith. Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2002).Paris, France. October 27-30, 2002, p. 1-9.

“User Interfaces When and Where They are Needed: An Infrastructure For Recombinant Computing,” Mark W. Newman, Shahram Izadi, W. Keith Edwards, Jana Z. Sedivy, and Trevor F Smith. Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2002).Paris, France. October 27-30, 2002. [pdf]

“Designing for Serendipity: Supporting End-User Configurations of Ubiquitous Computing Environments,” Mark W. Newman, Jana Z. Sedivy, W. Keith Edwards, Trevor F Smith, Karen Marcelo, Christine M. Neuwirth, Jason I. Hong, and Shahram Izadi. Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2002). London, UK. June 25-28, 2002. [pdf]

"Supporting Serendipitous Integration in Mobile Computing Environments" W. Keith Edwards, Mark Newman, Jana Sedivy, Trevor Smith. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. 2004 May; 60 (5-6): 666-700. [pdf]

"An Extensible Set-Top Box Platform for Home Media Applications", W. Keith Edwards, Mark W. Newman, Trevor F Smith, Jana Z. Sedivy, Shahram Izadi. IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 51(4) , November 2005. pp. 1175-1181. [pdf]

"Bringing Network Effects to Pervasive Spaces", W. Keith Edwards, Mark W. Newman, Jana Z. Sedivy, and Trevor F. Smith. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 4(3), July-September 2005. pdf

"The Orbital Browser", Nicolas Ducheneaut, Trevor F. Smith, James "Bo" Begole, Mark W. Newman, Chris Beckmann. CHI 2006, April 2006. pdf

"Recipes for Digital Living", Newman, M.W., Schilit, B. and Smith, T.F. IEEE Computer, 39(2), (2006)

"Providing an Integrated User Experience of Networked Media, Devices, and Services Through End-User Composition", Mark W. Newman, Ame Elliott, Trevor F. Smith. Pervasive 2008 [pdf]

And to round it out you might check out the current list of patents from PARC on which I'm listed.

New things

So, because I'm thinking mostly about secret things this week, I'll just mention that in my bedside bookstack are Rudy Rucker's Spaceland, the New Media Reader, Quantum Theory, A Very Short Introduction (it is apparently about 1/2 as short as my attention span, as I'm stuck halfway through), Bowling Alone, A New Kind of Science (which would be more fun if Wolfram didn't repeat the title at every opportunity and didn't claim to have invented dirt), and Hokusia and Hiroshige for when I fail words. I'm usually done quickly with fiction (e.g. Spaceland is a two "hour-before-bed" book) so the others fill in when I'm between fictions.

Tonight, I'd like to dream that I am Edwin A. Abbott's child and he is pressing me like a wildflower into a bible. I need some four dimensional sleep, where the 4th dimension is made entirely of layer upon layer of fine momen futon. Why (indeed, or why) weren't Lawrence Lessig and S. Wolfram guests with the White Stripes on Late Night with Conan O'Brien? Mark my word O'Brien, you missed out on the greatest quartet in history.

Hee hee hee.

So, I'm not allowed to talk about specifics of my work, but for the last few days I've been writing an application for our big plasma display that will show a map of the building floorplan, with nice floating labels for each device or service running Speakeasy. So, as you walk by the map you can see that my laptop and PDA are in the ubicomp lab, so that's probably a good place to look for me. As the Speakeasy deployment flows through the building like a virus, the map will bloom with more and more pretty floating labels.

In parallel, I'm trying to learn about the simplex method of linear programming. Basically if you have a formula with two or more linear variables and some constraints, then you can use the simplex algorithm to solve for either the minimum or maximum solution. Neat-o bandit-o. In my case, I have labels that should to be drawn as close to a room center as possible but as far from each other as possible, so that they don't overlap. The only constraint is that they be drawn inside the map area. This is a perfect problem for the simplex method. Here is an somewhat readable online tutorial on linear programming, if you like that sort of thing.

27

Some interesting internal things happened in my 27th year, and my one person suicide pact of early college (brought up by Big Mike) flitted lightly through my thoughts, categorized mentally with my unrealized plans to tattoo "FREAK" on my face, to wear nothing that detracted from my "natural scent", to live completely through electronically mediated senses, and to find a technology to enable me to sleep only when I'm dead.

I've always wanted to live a life never lived before, apart from paths laid out and tread by billions before me. These common paths include things like having children, getting married, being middle class, being an American in America, being known as "a nice boy", being straight, wearing mass produced clothing, driving a car, and having a job. As a young man, I made myself foolish, silly. sick, lonely, tired, and distasteful for ideas that were interesting. In other words, I've been a fruitcake and an alien.

Fruitcakes are willing to have bad breath because the toothpaste industry hides the fact that floride actually kills people. Fruitcakes smell bad because there are studies linking the heavy metals in anti-perspirants to loss of mental capacity in old age (And who wants to smell exactly like every other person in your marketing niche?). Fruitcakes carry zippo lighters to remind themselves that civilization might fall and someone has to bring back fire. Fruitcakes own what will fit in their car and always keep a backpack with survival gear ready to go. Fruitcakes dream of a future when people are enhanced via magic (technological, biological, or extra terrestrial) and are no longer primal.

Aliens spend their childhoods reading and building simulated realities in games and drawings. Aliens have more projects than friends. Aliens spend most of their time in their heads and don't exhibit emotive qualities. Aliens have a particular psychosis, in which they are disjointed from the larger stream of humanity and unable to walk onto the dance floor. Aliens have a stick up their ass.

But some aliens and fruitcakes calm down. I'm almost 29 (two years past my dead line) and I'm married, professional, middle class, white, American, not too stinky, and I live in a city with 750 thousand other people. I own a truck and I live with a dog. I wear levi's, and I've got a friend named Mark and another friend named Tim. I vote, for the love of god. Usually I think that I'm still thinking like a fruitcake, but then I suppose that's what a mid life crisis is supposed to squash. Around the same time that I realized (unoriginally, of course) that most people live a life of quiet desperation, I realized (unoriginally, of course) that we never stand in the same river twice.

So, after this bit of revealing text, here's my question: Who wants some hot wings?

Totally.

When we were giving thanks for a week in the Donner Pass, I really missed my wireless link to the net. I think that from now on I'll bring the airport and set it up to dial in or use some other local connection. Once I got used to just flipping open the iBook wherever I was and googling for info, I'm not satisfied with going into an entire other room, breaking up whatever conversation was taking place, waiting for login, and then googling.

It reminds me of the 1997 article that made me, a long time snubber of slow (expensive, fragile, unexpandable...) laptops, consider ditching place based connectivity. This and other things led me to read about ubiquitous computing in both scientific papers by Mark Weiser and in science fiction books like Eon, by Greg Bear. Now, my office is across the hall from Mark's old office and I pass the Mark Weiser memorial wall (which has pictures of him and prototypes of the PARC pad, slate, and tabs) on my way to get coffee. It is strange how pieces and parts of the world that seem as distant as Mars can end up in the office next door.

My heart is not unknown to pain.

Tim Bracey, of the band The Mendoza Line, spent one summer writing a song each day. Snatching snippets of conversations and experiences, he would hop out of the room to pen and hum another verse, bridge, or shoelace rock chorus while the rest of us went on with it all. "My heart is not unknown to pain" is the only phrase of mine that I remember him using, and I'm still waiting for it to appear on an album.

Having friends with public blogs are a lot like like hanging out with Tim that summer; with tiny moments translated into history, as saved Google and the Internet Archive Project. Random snaps and chats are flung around and read more rapidly and often than most 14th century royal declarations.

What are the publication mores of friemdships in a world of public blogs? Megnut's attitide is that you should ask permission of friends before referencing them by name or quoting them, and all links given by other blogs deserve a backlink. What do you think? Is this even a good question?

The web remembers. If you know where to look, you can find posts to listservs that I made as an 18 year old, detailing my proposed punishment for rapists. While the sentiments remain, the method was silly and unkind, and I assume that those bits can be used by anyone in any online discussion. Those bits will always remain a part of my textual context, should people know where to look.

Police records are sealed when we turn 18. People Cash's age and younger are spending their early teens online, and I wonder what discourse will be like when any forum can introduce the early writing and references of the participants. Silly game chats, icq boredom rants, dorky pages detailing the contents of their book shelves, photoshopped pictures of the president, blogs their friends wrote about them, and high school newsletter archives...

Oh, wonderful rewhack

One of the happiest times in a coder's life is the start of a version 3 grand rewhack. What is a version 3 grand rewhack, you might ask?

Well, for version 1.0, you whacked out some code to do some stuff that satisfies some people. Fast, stupid, and out of control. "Quick and Dirty" is a kind description for the spaghetti that is your code.

In version 2 you know a lot more about what you'll actually use the code for and how to make it better, so you rewhack it into pretty good shape and it feels a lot better.

In version 3, you're now a domain expert. You're living and breathing the code and you could rewrite most of it from scratch in half the time and half the code, so that is exactly what you do (market willing). You get out your hard hat, your lab coat, your Jacob's ladder, and start laughing like Dr. Frankenstein while laying down line after line of sexy, stable, tested, and elegant code. Where before you had four levels of abstraction in case you needed flexibility, now you have the right interface on the right classes because you know the right patterns. Your footprint shrinks, your network traffic subsides, your deployment headaches retreat, and your life as a coder has just improved considerably.

Man, I love version 3.

Other Version 3's I've known and loved:
UNIX System III
BeOS 3
Word 3 (pre bloat!)
Photoshop V.3

And then, there's version IV. The version that UNIX was smart enough to skip. Hell's Version. Most products don't make it through V.4.

Mmmmmmmmultimedia

We're building three little multimedia computational engines at work, and it is amazing what 2.2 Gigahertz clock speeds and a megabyte of RAM will bring to the table. We're streaming, rendering, persisting, and burning DVDs with ease. Some day I'll stop comparing new devices with my Timex Sinclair. Someday.

If any of you ever have children, be sure to make their first computers really really great, in case they turn out to be big nerds who will have to compare all future computers with that first one. While I'm mentioning how to make little nerds' lives easier, if you realize that your little boy or girl is going to be a nerd (and you know that you'll know) then go ahead and introduce them to nerd culture early. At least they'll know that they have a people, a peer group, and that there will be the modern equivalent to Dungeon and Dragons parties to replace the modern equivalent of keg parties when the time comes. Otherwise your little nerd will just make up a social fabric of hir own and next thing you know they're wearing tin foil hats and teaching their tadpoles the French national anthem in Esperanto.

comings and goings

What's this about people moving out of California? I mean, I can understand moving around inside this great state, or moving a similarly great state like Hawai'i, but moving from California to Georgia? That's some sort of crazy drink I just can't quaff.

Not only are politics in California more about your normal greed and intrigue than about bibles and traditional hatred, but the legions of "new age" (rhymes with sewage, I learned last night) nuts give it a surreal feeling that can't be beat.

In addition to weather that just won't quit (with more blue heat than a summer Harley convention in Las Vegas), California offers a wide variety of climates, from beautiful rain forest to beautiful ski country, from beautiful surfer's paradise to beautiful San Francisco fog. Did I mention our beautiful desert?

San Francisco is your basic mellow den of iniquity. You name it, we got it. We have forms of sin you haven't even dreamed were possible, complete with certification courses and community mixers. When upright people describe what a city of sin would be like (masses of naked bodies doing unholy rituals and sex acts in the streets), they're pretty much describing half of the street fairs you'll find here, yet for some reason it all seems like business as usual and everyone's having a good time.

If you want to explore new ways to energize and revitalize your body, California is a hotbed for spas, springs, salads, soy, and sutures. You can soak, toke, get poked, and never croak you'll be so well cared for. The beautiful weather allows you to exercise in the glorious out of doors pretty much year round, so runners, bikers, bladers, waders, hikers, hang gliders, and the occasional monkey scarer are well represented on our roads and in our parks. Plastic surgery gets its good name from the plastic people walking around in LA.

The future is invented in California.

TV and Movies come from California.

To recap: Awesome weather, fun people, tons o' fine fresh sin, health as a commodity, tech mecca, source of flicker-pop culture