New Blog

I am now hosting my own WordPress install. If you’ve been reading Mullery please now visit my new blog and update your bookmark and/or feed URL.

Tumblr and Tumblelogs

There’s a new Web 2.0 kid on the block known as Tumblr that is a free tool for creating tumblelogs. What is a tumblelog?

Tumblelogs are blogs with less fuss and more stuff. Tumblr is your friendly and free tool for creating tumblelogs.

Think of a tumblelog like Daring Fireball’s Linked List. Its a place for quick posts that in and of themselves do not warrant an entire blog entry. The sorts of things you post to your tumblelog might also have been gathered together in a single summary post for the day or week. Unlike Twitter which I still don’t see the use of, Tumblr makes it easy to share little tidbits of information with people without derailing the flow of your main blog. They provide quick ways to post text, photos, quotes, links, conversations, and videos.

Now I just wonder how long it will take before someone creates a desktop client for the Mac like Iconfactory did with Twitterrific for Twitter.

Update: I’ve created my own tumblelog on Tumblr.

Obama at UNH

Last night my wife and I were fortunate enough to attend a “town hall meeting” type event with presidential candidate Barack Obama at the UNH Fieldhouse. The crowd was large and energetic and certainly seemed impressed with what Mr. Obama had to say. He began by outlining some of the problems we face going forward from climate change to energy security to healthcare to the war in Iraq. He then invited questions from the audience for the rest of the event and fielded them extremely well. I think it would be particularly unusual for any candidate to say exactly what you want to hear for every issue, but something about his responses for each question resounded with me. Mr. Obama may be a bit wordy for some people’s taste but I think he’s just getting into the groove and is going to gain polish over time. His responses were genuine and it was clear he had put thought into the issues that were on people’s minds.

There were only a handful of questions asked and none of those were anything specifically about climate change which was disappointing to me. But, Mr. Obama has recently signed onto the McCain-Lieberman bill to address greenhouse-gas emissions and he was able to highlight that at one point last night. He mentioned E85 and other biofuels, though personally I see these as little more than a stop gap. He also mentioned raising CAFE standards by 4% per year, which would be great, but even better if they were already at realistic numbers. There was only one question I felt he avoided and that was with regard to his lack of experience with foreign policy. His response was to outline the experience he does have and how it would be relevant to the presidency and that was probably more politically wise than simply conceding that he lacks experience with international affairs.

One person raised the question of gay marriage (I think the audience would have been better served with a question on climate change) and Mr. Obama’s response was sensible even if not what some wanted to hear. The short version is that he is in favor of civil unions with full legal benefit instead of gay marriage. Personally I’m all for gay marriage. Regardless of what many people may believe marriage is nothing but a legal agreement between you and the state you live in. You can have a religious ceremony, but it isn’t a requirement. A marriage certificate is. If two people love each other and want to be married it should be legal. But I really don’t see gay marriage as a presidential issue. Many states have already passed laws against it and so in order for there to be gay marriages that are accepted throughout the country the supreme court would have to declare those laws unconstitutional. I’m not sure why anyone would expect anything more than Mr. Obama’s response out of a serious presidential candidate. Saying you were in favor of gay marriage would instantly lose you some percentage (and probably a fairly large one) of your supporters or potential supporters.

I look forward to seeing some of the other candidates speak at UNH later in the year. I’m not ready to sign up for any campaign at the moment but I’m sure I will before the primary rolls around.

Programmers Don’t Like to Code

Jonathan Rentzsch has blogged that Programmers Don’t Like to Code and I couldn’t agree more with what he says. The gist of his post boils down to this:

Programmers don’t like to code, we like to solve problems. Coding is not problem solving, but software problem solving usually involves some coding.

Solving problems is far more interesting than writing code. Writing code is tedious and annoying half the time. And personally, once I’ve solved the problem I am very disinterested in the rest of the code that needs to be written to create a full application. I’m not really a finisher. Any projects I have finished took a lot of effort to push through the de-motivation of working on something I was fundamentally not interested in. When you’ve got a problem you want to solve you are generating ideas and ideas are fun to play around with. Once you’ve got a solution in mind finding how to implement it can also be fun (though not always). I enjoy writing prototypes and getting the guts of the solution in place but once it comes time to move beyond that I start to slow down. My interest wanes and my procrastination increases.

This isn’t only in relation to software projects. I enjoy the act of photographing and solving the problem of creating the picture I want but I rarely bother to print the result. The series of articles I want to write for this blog were a lot of fun to research and makes notes about but I haven’t sat down to write them yet. When I took my first course at The Workshops the founder of the school gave a presentation that resonated with me. He said it was quite alright that you not be a finisher so long as you form a relationship with a craftsman who is one. In photography this means finder yourself a master printer. I wonder if such detail oriented folks exist in the software industry? Perhaps I need to find one for my software projects.

The New Racism?

The New York Times is running a disturbing article - So Far, Obama Can’t Take Black Vote for Granted. I’m not sure what is more racist, the implication that an African-American candidate would automatically get the black vote (are they sheep?) or the main gist of the article which is that some (many?) black voters don’t think Mr. Obama is black enough (i.e. his ancestors weren’t slaves and his mother is white). What is tangentially shocking to me is that people still think Hillary is a good candidate. I’ll let Wil Shipley field that.

Let’s take a look at some of the content: