Author Archives: Terry Chay

About Terry Chay

light writing, word loving, ❤ coding

Notes from Checklist Manifesto

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In Montreal this summer, while making idle conversation, Paul asked me if I had read anything interesting. Here was my answer…

…

Five years ago, I met D. Richard Hipp because my friends were thinking of bundling a database he wrote into PHP. Since that time, besides being in the PHP core and thus about 40% of the web servers on the planet, SQLite is in every smartphone, in software such as Firefox, platforms such as Adobe AIR, and operating systems such as Apple Mac OS X. It is used by Oracle and Bloomberg.

I was curious how the unassuming man I met took the new-found fame of his pet software project. This is why, despite my hatred for all things database—they’re boring and talks about them are probably what it feels like to sit through a course on actuarial accounting—I popped into his talk at OSCON.

I was glad I did. It was about, of all things, checklists.

My brother and father are much more responsible than my mom and me. One things that separates them from us was in their methodical use of checklists. Watching his talk reminded me how important they are, how they can be used for so much more than I considered, and how thankful I was that I finally made a packing checklist before going to Portland (and Montreal). :-)

Read the article, and, if that interests you, buy the book.

With a little imagination, a checklist will change your life. Continue reading my notes from the book after the jump→

The Thunderscan story

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I’m surprised I never got around to mentioned this, when [I promised I would][nans second story]. Since it’s been years, go back and read it, and come back. I’ll wait.

…

In high school, I owned a [Thunderscan][Thunderscan]. For those of you too lazy to click on the link, this was a device that would digitize photos by replacing the ink cartridge of your ImageWriter, [a dot-matrix printer][dot-matrix printer], popular with Macintosh computers of the era.

(For those of you too young to remember what a dot-matrix printer is: in the old days, our printers were slow enough that you could watch an episode of [Cheers][Cheers] waiting for it to print out an article or “graphics” —the latter of which was whatever came out of [Print Shop][theprintshop]. And they were so loud, that a popular accessory was huge muffled box to place the printer in, in order to contain what can only be described as the primal periodical scream of the then nascent personal computer, “Why the f*&k do I have to be tasked for the next half our printing up a sinfully ugly banner for [your terrible P.T.A Yard Sale][review the print shop]?”)

Now imagine something that did the reverse (put print into the computer) by scanning it line by line. And realize that a typical “line” of text back then was actually 24 “lines” to this scanner.

This was a Thunderscan.

Continue reading The Thunderscan story after the jump→

Glom

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I found this comment amusing:

Finally, [Megan McArdle] as an approximately 6’ tall, moderately attractive woman — who likes guns — libertarian, objectivist, and conservative fan-bois glommed on to her like a million sperm all trying to fertilize the same egg, which provides its own kind of mockworthy spectacle

The college I went to had a 6:1 guy:girl ratio at the time. Being an institute full of socially stunted nerds just like me, they had their own word for when multiple guys talking to or associating with a single girl: “glomming.” While it has morphed beyond its original meaning—it is short for “agglomeration”—it has become part of our urban dictionary, and the above example shows it in its original definition.

One day during Rotation, I was hanging out on the Triple on the second floor, and watched “glom pools” forming around the night’s new batch of Freshman girls in the dorm’s courtyard below. The image of “a million sperm all trying to fertilize the same egg” is an especially apt description. I can trace a direct line to my intense shyness around women to that singular and instructive moment.

  • glom v.t. to accost a girl who is already surrounded by multiple guys
  • glommer n a male who gloms serially
  • glom pool n an aggregation of many guys around a single girl

Oh yeah, if any Techers at the time are wondering about all the hacked copies of CrystalCaltech Quest on campus—the one where ResEdit to add Caltechisms like the infamous and indestructable “glom monster” toward the end? That was me.

Crunchy granola-eating rib cages just asking to be nudged with a baton

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Stephen Colbert finds his humor best, when people are at their worst:

It’s amusing to read right wing defenses of these actions. My personal favorite is “the clip is too short”—as if you can’t use the googlez to find that the full clip is even worse.

Another interesting one is that this is okay because Berkeley “accepts about 10-12% public money (or 88-90% private).” A cursory use of the google shows that they’re one quarter state funding. The other three quarters are from public AND private funding. For instance, any professor who brings in a grant (most grant, but not all, are publicly funded), has about 40% siphoned off by the university as overhead. This has always been the case. The university is also supported by a $3.15 billion endowment.

(State funding used to be a much higher percentage of Cal’s budget, but was cut by the governator so the state could keep its prisons. The largest single private grant to the university was done by the hippies at British Petroleum. Those two facts explain why the “powers that be” at the University of California tacitly approved of these actions and the one in 2009.)

No matter, the discussion of “public” vs. “private” with respect to speech is a red herring. The Free Speech Movement, which began in exactly the same place, settled this matter. Arguing that “pitching tents” is a bridge-too-far isn’t really going to save a lost cause when videos of your police dragging people by the hair and beating 4’10″ asian girls in the stomach are going viral on the intarwebs.

But perhaps the most damning argument comes from this observation:

If we were to view the actions of police as Americans watching people attempting to gain their rights in a foreign country, we would find them appalling. Yet somehow there are those in this country who are all too happy to deny rights afforded to all Americans under the Constitution. The right of peaceful assembly is guaranteed and those who seek to deny them are ignorant of this “fact.”

Whether or not it is legal to “nudge with batons” to take down some students’ tents, it is clear what is right—which is why, I suppose it, is a Right.

“The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence.
—UC Police Capt. Margo Bennet

It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience.
-UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau

Good luck with that line of thought. Bull Connor approves!

Clearly these people needs to be “nudged” in the rib cage by a police baton.

Last-Place schadenfreude is short-lived

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It is said that the reason many poor are opposed to social programs that benefit them is a fear of coming in “last.”

If that is the case, the impending implosion of the euro, as predicted for years by center-left economists, offers a marked example of schadenfreude for us Americans.

Besides the obvious worry over whether the death spiral will reach our shores, there’s the question of how Rupert-Murdoch-on-steroids could run the third largest European economy (7th largest in the world) into the ground, what’s with right wing obsession with inflation in times of deflationary spirals, and why this prediction seemed to only have been made by liberals.

So my thinking is our laughter has a touch too much nerves.

Learning Programming Part 4: “Programming is Hard”

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Previously: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Programming, it turns out, is hard.
—Eloquent Javascript (and typical)

A few months ago, a girl expressed to me her frustrations about, in particular, the attitude expressed many engineers on her attempts to learn to programming.

“They act like learning programming is hard. They imply that if you haven’t been programming since you were seven, there’s no hope for you,” she explained.

I opined, “If someone can learn to program when they are seven, then it must not be that difficult.”

…

Think of all the things you couldn’t do when you were seven—programming is less difficult than all of those.

Super Tuesday

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When I first moved to San Francisco, the PHP meetup group hadn’t had a meeting in a year. That was before Touge took it up, and, along with Mariano, does the hard work of actually scheduling people to come shoot the shit.

Apparently, it’s time for my shit to be shot.

Tomorrow, I’m giving a talk at SFPHP on DevOps for PHP developers. I’ve giving this talk before as the closing keynote at PHP Community Conference and to sysadmins at OSCON.

Living without Your Linemen: The Programmer Becomes System Operator in the Cloud

If a website architect is the quarterback, then site operations is the offensive line—overworked, under-appreciated, and only noticed when it fails. They make you look good. However, four years ago cloud computing networks like Amazon Web Services and Slicehost have appeared. While deficiencies in frameworks in other languages have forced those worlds to adopt Infrastructure-as-a-Service, the PHP world—with it’s ultra-cheap shared-hosting (on one end) and tradition of dominance on some of the most trafficked websites (on the other)—has been slow to move. But as the technology continues to disrupt, modern web engineers will be expected to use their programming skills to not only build, but also provision and maintain fast, scalable websites.

The efficiencies of a web-based language and experience in scalable website architecture offer a unique opportunity for programmers to transfer their skills when wearing a sysop hat. Not to mention some of the best libraries for programming them are written in PHP! When going from a small pet project to a go-live site, maybe we can learn to live without our linemen.

Trust me, you’ll like it.

Please come!

Also, If you are an American citizen, go vote! :-)

Just keep shooting

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One brunch, I noticed that a trio of my friends all had single-letter twitter names. I asked them to activate their wonder-tweet powers. They obliged:

@a @c @k
@a @c @k Zazie’s, Cole Valley, San Francisco, California Olympus E-P1, M.ZUIKO Digital 17mm 1:2.8 Pancake 2 exposures, 1/60sec @ ƒ2.8, ISO400, 17mm (35mm)

After discussing the kissy ass face video, I asked my friends to pose one of the things that were “too dirty for College Humor.”

Do the kissy-anus-face
Do the kissy-anus-face Eddie Rickenbacker’s, SoMa, San Francisco, California Leica M8, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical 3 exposures @ 1/30sec, iso 320, 35mm (47mm)

One thing I like to do is keep shooting even after people are done posing, the smiles are more honest.