Author: Steven Garrity

Notes from the Gnome Summit in Boston

by Steven Garrity

Photos from the Gnome Summit in Boston

I drove down to Boston this weekend for the Gnome Summit. I have posted my photos from the trip and collected some rough notes on the experience:

  • The who/what/where/when/why/how of marketing open source software to normal humans (non-developers) is uncharted territory. I’m skeptical that we should worry ourselves much about marketing at all.
  • It takes about 10 hours to drive from Charlottetown to Boston
  • Americans like to express their partisan politics with bumper stickers. Some stickers noted on the I-95: “Veterans for Bush”, “Veterans for Kerry”, “Veterans Against Bush”. There was no “Veterans Against Kerry” – but I guess Massachusetts is a blue state.
  • The Stata building at MIT (photos) is fascinating, compelling, and beautiful. However, it strikes me as architectural masturbation.
  • MIT has really nice projectors in the class rooms
  • Harvard is bustling with culture and diversity. MIT is eerily sterile.
  • The Gnome Summit was held in the William H. Gates building. I was please that this was not the subject of as much mocking as I had feared.
  • Where my hos at, biatch? (translations: “Open source software is suffering from a significant gender bias that will hinder the long term prospects of the movement. Biatch.”)
  • Geeks can be really set in their ways. I met people who still think the classic Mozilla browser is “more usable” than Firefox because it has more options and someone (you know who you are) that thinks Gaim sucks (it doesn’t). The hard-core geeks were in the minority now. There is a growing respect for artists, usability-dudes, and general well-roudnedness.
  • I met my first AIBO.
  • My father drove down with me to visit some friends and relative in Boston. It was fun and strange to travel with my father as two adults. He said it was the first time in his life he’s been on a trip and one of his children has paid for the gas.
  • People were nice to me.
 

A Math/Physics Word Problem

by Steven Garrity

If you are walking from point A to point B in the rain, do you get more or less wet depending on how fast you walk?

Sounds stupidly simple, doesn’t it. Not so (for me, at least). Here are some things we can assume for the sake of the problem:

  • let’s assume you are rectangular – let’s say, 1 meter, 0.5 meters wide, and 0.5 meters deep
  • forget about dripping rain – any drop that hits you counts as one drop
  • the rain is evenly distributed and falls at a constant and consistent speed

The qestion is, over a given distance, does the rate at which you move (in a straight line, you can assume) affect how many drops of rain you come in contact with?

If you run fast, you’ll “run through” more drops, right? However, you’ll also be in the rain for less overall time (remember, we’re going a set distance).

It might help to think through the problem in two dimensions.

 

Highlights from a Modern Workplace

by Steven Garrity

I have spent much of the last five years working with a fine team of like-minded people. Fools and geniuses, we have managed to accomplish quite a bit. It has been, and continues to be, an interesting ride. Here are some random highlights:

  • There was a time when our CEO IM’ed in late to work several times citing a “laundry emergency”.
  • We spare no expense of corporate shwag (we now even have business cards that can stand up to the punishment of being in my wallet – not that I ever show them to anyone).
  • We play The Final Countdown by Europe really loud when launching significant websites. We really do.
  • In the heady dot-com days, we narrowly dodged two acquisition bullets, both of which were exciting at the time, but would have seen us living in a big city working as dish-washers by now.
  • We go out for a fine curry lunch every Friday (a tradition that started with Fajitas, before our local faux-tex/mex motif restaurant was replaced with a faux-east-side-NY motif and we were forced to seek more authentic lunchables).
  • We punctuate special occasions with low-quality cakes from local grocery stores (e.g. Exhibit A, Exhibit B).
  • We spend a weekend each December playing video games, eating fine food, and planning the next year out in Cavendish.
  • We don’t do all-nighters anymore, unless there is a hurricane or something (well, most of us don’t).
  • We take pleasure in smashing obsolete electronics (example photo).
  • We have met Jakob Nielsen. Some of us have shaken his hand. (I didn’t make this trip)
  • Our current vice is Madden NFL 2004 for the XBOX on a large LCD projector. Previous (and possibly future) vices include Counter-Strike and Mario Cart for the GameCube.