Thinking Inside a Bigger Box

The TED conference has some amazing talks. If you never knew you were interested in car seats for children, classical music, or feet (yeah!), some of these talks will blow you mind.

A recent video that really moved me was Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. His insights and inspiration is invaluable for everyone who considers themselves a leader.

“The conductor doesn’t make a sound, he depends for his power on the ability to make other people powerful… I realized that my job was to awaken possibility in other people.”

I got this one from xkcd via Chris Searle. It’s now posted on the walls at work:

My presentation at JavaZone was riddled with technical difficulties this year. To make a long story short: I learned five minutes before the presentation the the projector would be inoperative for a while (turned out to be 30 minutes). This threw a wrench into my plans, as I had planned to open with a demo.

I have read many times on presentation zen about presenting without slides. But before I stood in front of four hundred people with nothing to look at except me, I didn’t really believe how effective it would be. I’ve never seen a more attentive crowd! Thanks, everybody!

I don’t know if I had dared to throw the slides away if I hadn’t been forced to do so. But my next talk, I want to do without slides, too. This really was a serendipitous mishap.

There will be a video available of the talk, sadly, I forgot this, and spoke in Norwegian when I learned it was an all-Norwegian audience. I will link to the video for my Norwegian readers as soon as it is available.

“I just feel that in this company, there’s too many chiefs and not enough Indians.”

“Sure. Now, if they’d only been Indian chiefs.”

Read the rest of this entry »

A few months back, I saw a presentation that has kept me thinking ever since. Nicholas Negroponte is currently in the completing phases of a project I think might revolutionize the world. The $100 laptop project, or, as it is known now: One Laptop Per Child (OLTP). The idea behind the One Laptop Per Child project is to create a computer that can be given to every child in developing countries. In order to do this, the computer has several innovations to overcome the limitations of its environment. There is little or no power available, so the computer has to consume dramatically less power than what is common, and it accessories will provide hand power, like a crank or a foot-pedal. Network capabilities will be weak, so the computer has spearheaded innovations within grid wireless networking. The size and ergonomics has to be adapter for children, but the computer will probably also be used as TVs by the whole family.

There are a few interesting sides to this. First: Prices for off-shoring to India have been increasing, and it has been years since the first time I first heard of Indian development sub-contracting with Chinese. India and China will probably have a limited lifespan as source of highly qualified inexpensive labor. But imagine a generation in Africa having grown up with access to good computers and the internet. In ten years, I think that’s where the off-shoring will go. That’s, of course, extremely good news for Africa.

Second, the computer is really cool. It is ultra-portable, Linux based, low-power, super-networked and in-expensive. Rumors are that non-third-worlders can buy one for the price of two - the difference will sponsor the laptop of a third-world child. I can hardly wait until they become available!

Now, to see an inspiring talk and vision, you can watch Nicholas Negroponte’s talk about the One Laptop Per Child project.

I finally managed to finish my article on testing web applications with JWebUnit and Jetty. The article is published on java.net as last Thursday’s featured article. Enjoy!

WordPress has not been good to me lately. For some reason, this site loads really, really slow now, and I’m still trying to figure out why. If you know why WordPress may be misbehaving, please let me know.

Until I fix the problem: All pages on the site still load, just give them some time…

“I really wish you’d stop using that word - I don’t think it means what you think it means.” (The Princess Bride - of course)

When my wife asked “are you a feminist,” I realized I don’t like words very much. To some people, “feminism” means women who dress like men, think pornography is destroying society and that all men are inherently evil. You know the type I’m talking about. To many others, including my wife, a “feminism” is “the radical notion that women are people”. I wish people stopped using the word “feminist”.

In an online debate, my brother called me a “utilitarist” (man, I can’t even spell the word). In his opinion, that is not a good thing to be - “utilitarianism” will “create a cold and heartless society”. I don’t know if I am a utilitarianist (or any kind of -ist), but I think a good society is one where people are happy and fullfilled - is that utility? A cold and heartless society is probably not a very successfull archievement from this point of view. I wish people stopped using the word “utilitarist” (if that is indeed how it is spelled).

Words, especially those naming complex ideas like “feminism”, “utilitarianism”, “software architecture”, “services,” “liberal”, “conservative”, “ethical”, “agile development” are short cuts. The ideas they try and describe are complex, and the words mean different things to different people. This means that it very easy (and fun) to fight over the issues, because you can just assume that you opponent means, for example “service oriented architecture means that local calls should be exchanged with web services”. This is a really stupid thing to think, so you can rightfully criticize him for the view when he says that “SOA is a good strategy for designing systems.”

And if you’re going to make up new words, at least use words that sensible people would be able to disagree with. Like “myopic software development” (if I may toot my own horn). More on this later.

I don’t like big words, though. It’s hard enough to reach agreement when I’m talking about the same thing as those I speak to. It’s damn near impossible when we talk about different things.

(PS: I apologize for the long quiet period. Exhausting month)

After I switched from Movable Type to Wordpress as my blogging software, the comment spam problem has returned from the grave. So I’ve looked for good solutions for WordPress: I ended on a verbal CAPTCHA with a math question (which may also keep stupid commenters out - not that I have any of those, of course). I am considering some of the “fight-back” solutions out there too: Maybe returning a really big response really slowly when spam is detected, like Spammer Tar Pit.

If you have any experience or thoughts on the subject (or if my CAPTCHA is broken), please let me know.

• What is the next letter in this sequence: A E I. And this sequence: A B G D? How about this one: B C D G J?
• A boy and his mother are in a horrible car accident. They are rushed to the hospital, but on the way, the mother dies. When they arrive at the hospital, the nurse exclaims: “But that is my son!”. How can that be?
• You’re in the basement of a house. There are three light switches. Upstairs, there are three light bulbs. The door on the top of the stairs will lock shut behind you when you leave the basement. How will you determine which switch goes to which light?

These sort of puzzles are often presented as an exercise in “thinking outside the box”. However, if I were to “think outside the box”, I’d drill a hole in the ceiling of the basement so I could see the light bulbs. Clearly, that isn’t the intended solution, and most people wouldn’t think it would be a fair solution, either. The trick is to identify what “requirements” are real, and what requirements are imagined by the puzzle-solver.

When solving software problems, same technique applies. For example, my client for a chat application requested a link to the help information in the status bar. This would require some layout changes that I considered a little risky. Now, if I had suggested that the users didn’t need the help information, I would really be thinking outside the box. Instead, we ended up enabling privileged users to send URLs in a normal chat conversation, which was a piece of cake to implement. This way, the privileged users could help others with finding the rules. I consider this thinking inside a bigger box.

This is why I don’t care about thinking outside the box. Instead, look for the bigger box.

PS: Finding the bigger box is often easier if you work together. I spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out the Petals Around the Rose puzzle. But when I sat down with my wife (who didn’t know it, either), we solved it in about 15 minutes (yeah, yeah, yeah, she solved it in about 10 minutes and only smiled cleverly until I got it 5 minutes later).