The magical world of NIPY

Respect

2011-08-13T11:04:00.000-07:00

Continuing a sport theme.

Today the England cricket team beat India by a huge margin, and so replaced India at the top of the world rankings.

Andrew Strauss has been captain of England since 2009.

The chief executive of the International Cricket Council, Haroon Lorgat [1]:

On behalf of the ICC, I would like to congratulate Andrew Strauss, Andy Flower and the whole team for becoming the number-one ranked Test team in the world. I know they were determined to be number-one and through careful planning and a series of clinical performances, they have deservedly achieved their goal. They were clearly the most consistent side in the world over the past few years as evidenced by their 19 out of 30 Test wins and only four loses.

At the end of a long series of tributes [2], a comment by former England player and journalist Vic Marks:

Strauss has done a terrific job as captain, they respect him so much, he's got no ego at all.

[1] http://icc-cricket.yahoo.net/newsdetails.php?newsId=16661_1313236380
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/cricket/14517827.stm

American capitalism and the common good

2011-08-06T12:25:00.000-07:00

This is from the last few paragraphs of "The practice of management" (1958) by Peter Drucker. He is writing from, and about the USA.

Two hundred and fifty years ago an English pamphleteer, de Mandeville, summed up the spirit of the new commercial age as "private vices become public benefits" - selfishness unwittingly and automatically turns unto the common good. He may have been right; economists since Adam Smith have been arguing the point without reaching agreement.

But whether he was right or wrong is irrelevant; no society can lastingly be built on such belief. [...]

Fifty years ago de Mandeville's principle was as fully accepted here as it is in Europe. But today it has become possible if not commonplace in this country to assert the opposite principle that the business enterprise must be so managed as to make the public good become the private good of the enterprise. In this lies the real meaning of the "American Revolution" of the twentieth century. That more and more of our management claim it to be their responsibility to realize this new principle in their daily actions is our best hope for the future of our country and society, and perhaps for the the future of Western society altogether.

Why you shouldn't use Google code

2011-07-16T13:23:00.000-07:00

Google code is the only commonly-used open source hosting site that
uniformly blocks access from countries subject to US embargoes -
including Cuba, where I often work. See the wikipedia hosting comparison.

You say 'oh well, they have to because they are in the US'. Not so. They are not allowed to distribute code providing encryption, according to US law. Sourceforge, when faced with the same problem, allowed projects to say they did not contain cryptography, and thus opt out of the blanket block.

Google's policy is contrary to the fundamental principles of open source - there should be "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups".

But in Google code, there is discrimination. Because if you're in Cuba, and you want to see a Google code web page, or any code, then Google will block you.

I don't know why Google has this policy. Maybe someone thought it would be easier to block Cuba so they didn't have to worry about getting into trouble. I suppose that person also assumed that you, dear reader, would not care too much about the loss of small liberties.

I hope you do. I hope you don't use Google code, and that you encourage those who do, to change, and explain why.

I care about open source, and I care about my freedom to share work with others. I care about this in practice, and I care about it in principle. If you care too, please, don't use Google code.

Planning and doing

2011-06-28T06:27:00.000-07:00

Planning and doing are separate parts of the same job; they are not separate jobs. There is no work that can be performed effectively unless it contains elements of both. One cannot plan exclusively all the time. There must be at least a trace of doing in one's job. Otherwise one dreams rather than performs. One cannot, above all, do only; without a trace of planning his job, the worker does not have the control he needs even for the most mechanical and repetitive routine chore. Advocating the divorce of the two is like demanding that swallowing food and digesting it be carried out in separate bodies.

Peter Drucker (1954) "The practice of management" Harper business edition, p284.

The Guardiola way

2011-05-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

Y'all remember the del Bosque way?

Barcelona just won the football == soccer UEFA Champions League in the final against Manchester United. It seems that everyone agrees that Barcelona is the best team in Europe, perhaps in a generation.

Barcelona's manager is Pep Guardiola, he's 40 years old, the youngest manager ever to win this title.

What is his management style? In the interest of deliberate practice, we take a short pause to guess. Then (Guardian article): "impeccable, almost exaggerated politeness", "skills and simplicity", "intelligent", "flexible and resourceful", "he keeps going until he gets it right, no matter what he's doing".

Switch then to Barcelona, the club:

Eight of the team’s leading players are products of its football school, La Masia. That includes Mr Messi, an Argentine who moved to Barcelona as a boy, and the team’s coach, Josep (“Pep”) Guardiola. La Masia is unique among football schools. It is a boarding school that puts as much emphasis on character-training as on footballing skills. The students are relentlessly instructed in the importance of team spirit, self-sacrifice and perseverance. They are also taught that Barça is “more than a club”: it is the embodiment of Catalan pride that kept the region’s spirit alive during the years when Spain groaned under the fascist Franco regime. Fans regularly sport banners proclaiming that “Catalonia is not Spain”

Very simple lessons return from out of the noise; have a simple idea, be disciplined, build a team. Beyond that, here and in other places, the organization and the leader are explicit about their purpose and their philosophy of work.

How to design and how to discuss

2011-05-27T15:22:00.001-07:00

I really like this post by Linus Torvalds on the discussion about git and the default behavior of the git commit command:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/32843

I see these rich themes:

Get the concepts right, and understand them. Proceed from the concepts and the rest of the design will fall out right. Then the argument for the default behavior of git commit is that the "[git commit] behaviour is absolutely REQUIRED once you get the whole "git tracks content" logic".
An argument that boils down to "I cannot imagine anyone doing that" is weak. Linus calls this the "argument from incredulity". Of course it disappears like mist in sunlight in the face of the counter-argument "The fact that you cannot see it doesn't change the fact that I use it all the time".

In a follow-up post, a classic:

I don't think people generally are all that stupid, and I think it's
actually counter-productive to try to basically lie about how things work.
It will just make it harder for people later.

Not a stinky product

2011-05-20T17:54:00.000-07:00

From the very beginning, we have been inspired by the thinking of Corky St Clair, in "Waiting for Guffman":

Mr Guffman brings with him a reputation, something bigger than anyone in this town has ever known, and if I am to get back to New York City on my terms, I cannot deliver him a stinky product.

Teams, funny

2011-04-21T14:41:00.000-07:00

I'm reading "The wisdom of teams" by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith.

The main pleasure of the book is a series of little biographies of successful teams.

Quoting from the end of their chapter 4: "High-performance teams: very useful models":

[High-performance teams] achieve beyond any measure of reasonableness, and they have fun doing it. The finely developed sense of humor in these groups seems to distinguish them as well. Not everything they do is laced with fun, and there may be some humorless high-performance teams out there. But we doubt it.

At this point obviously I should say something funny, but nothing came to me. I end the post on a note of self-reflective anxiety.

The GPL license is a artefact of war

2011-01-30T13:14:00.000-08:00

In the early 80s, a company called Symbolics split off from the MIT artificial intelligence lab. Richard Stallman stayed behind and wrote code to replicate features of the Symbolics software.

The GPL is an artefact born of this battle. It is a weapon for the academic or hacker community to use against proprietary developers.

Richard Stallman on why you shouldn't use LGPL

Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money; free software developers need to make advantages for each other. Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it.

The GPL smells of struggle and dispute. It is a finger raised to 'proprietary' where the second 'p' sends out a little spray of spit. I think I understand the dangers that the GPL wants to avoid, and I agree that there are real dangers. Is the GPL the best solution?

I (the man Matthew) don't like the way it feels to set up barricades. The thing that makes me happy, is to give away my stuff. If I give you something, and say 'promise never to give this to a bad person' - I feel bad - because it's not really giving it away, but something else.

If I try to generalize, I feel instinctively that the world will change faster under the influence of true generosity. I realize that not everyone thinks that is true or even meaningful. Still, what can we do, but say it out loud?

Parkinson's law

2010-11-25T14:06:00.000-08:00

Sorry - I just can't help but quote again from the master himself. This is his classic essay on the tendency for the number of administrators to increase whether there is work for them or not:

We may distinguish at the outset two motive forces. They can be represented for the present purpose by two almost axiomatic statements, thus: (1) "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals" and (2) "Officials make work for each other."

To comprehend Factor 1, we must picture a civil servant, called A, who finds himself overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial, but we should observe, in passing, that A's sensation (or illusion) might easily result from his own decreasing energy: a normal symptom of middle age. For this real or imagined overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies. He may resign; he may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B; he may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D. There is probably no instance in history, however, of A choosing any but the third alternative.

Killing passion

2010-11-25T13:57:00.000-08:00

Searching for a favorite painting, I found this article on diseased management in IT. It's a nice article and well written, but better still, it pointed me to Cyril Northcote Parkinson and his very funny essay on injelititis. A person suffering from injelititis is "an individual who combines in himself a high concentration of incompetence and jealousy".

The great sage Parkinson recommends three potential treatments: Intolerance, Ridicule and Castigation. My favorite quote from a very enjoyable essay:

Infected personnel should be dispatched with a warm testimonial to such rival institutions as are regarded with particular hostility.

Passion

2010-11-25T12:17:00.000-08:00

The engine of open-source coding is passion. I ask, seriously, it that not obvious? Kill passion and you kill the project.

I was very struck by this article by Ron Jeffries. I found it in a collection of writing about software. I can't help but quote from the end, with passionate agreement:

That’s what I think this movement is about: making a difference. That’s what I want it to be about: making a difference.

Here’s what I try to be, and what I like to find in those around me:
I want to stay the course with the people who converse with me, not just drift away as if no longer interested.
I want to argue passionately without rancor, let you call me names in the morning and drink in peace and affection with me that night.
I want to hold others in the true respect that allows them to be what they are, act like they will, while working as hard as possible to influence them to try other things.
I want to give my ideas away, confident that my little gift will come back to me manyfold.
I want to try every way I can to communicate with my colleagues, to get my ideas across and to get their ideas back in return.
I want to honor the passion that people feel, to honor the strongly held beliefs and ideas of others as much as I honor my own
I want to crash-test those beliefs and ideas hard against each other, confident that even better ideas will come out of the testing.
I want to assume that we do this from love, that we care about each other, and that we welcome the crackle of real passion, real work, the real interaction of ideas.
I do my best to be that kind of person. And I want to be with other people like that. Thanks for being around.

The 0SAGA software model

2010-11-16T16:30:00.000-08:00

I just made up this model. It seems like a good summary of stuff that has worked for me.

The idea is that any piece of software goes through the following 5 stages in strict order:

0 - zero - there's no software, there's just a programmer thinking hard about it but never getting anywhere.
S for 'sucky'. The software is embarrassingly bad but it does something.
A for 'adequate. The software is still fairly bad but now it's stood up to enough beating to be able go into bars without hiding in the restroom.
G for 'good'. The software has started to look a little like the thing it was meant to be. That probably doesn't have much relationship to the thing the programmer was thinking when when they were thinking hard about it at stage 0.
A for 'awesome'. I personally can't say much about this stage but I believe that it exists because I've used some awesome software.

The point is that there is seems to be only one path to A for awesome, and that goes direct through S for sucky. Hence the 0SAGA motto - 'shoot for sucky'.

Explaining git

2010-09-30T13:06:00.000-07:00

The git parable came to me as something like a revelation. Reading it makes you think like someone making a version control system. As you understand the decisions that need to be made, you begin to feel that the decisions that Linus Torvalds made for git are not only sensible, but obvious. You know that someone has done something right, when they do something new, and you look at it, and think, of course it had to be done that way. The git parable is a good match for git, because I had the same feeling - of course it had to be explained that way.

Part in poor homage, I tried to do the same thing myself with git foundations.

Good decisions

2010-09-30T12:57:00.000-07:00

I found this excellent quote in Tom Preston-Werner's blog:

"Truly good decisions are forged from the furnace of argument, not plucked like daisies from the pasture of a peaceful mind."

http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/03/how-to-meet-your-next-cofounder.html

The del Bosque way

2010-07-16T12:46:00.000-07:00

Vincente del Bosque manages the Spanish national soccer team.

http://sport.scotsman.com/football/World-Cup-2010-Vicente-del.6413225.jp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/europe/3016096.stm
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5781452,00.html
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/sid_lowe/07/15/delbosque/

About blogging in the 19th century

2010-06-19T09:23:00.000-07:00

The following is a quote from Soren Kierkegaard - 'the great Dane'. It written in 1846. It's wise and strangely prescient about the problem of too much hasty opinion when the means of communication are swift:

'Such a thoughtful one does not willingly pass judgment on many things, and just this helps him to will only one thing. He thinks it is not altogether an advantage to live in a populous city where because of the swiftness of the means of communication almost everyone can easily have a hasty and superficial judgment about everything possible. On the contrary, he looks upon this easiness as a temptation and a snare and he learns earnestness in order as an individual to be concerned about his eternal responsibility.

'"Even a fool might be a wise man if he could keep silent, " says the proverb, And this is so, not merely because then he would not betray his foolishness, but also because this self-control would hep him to become conscious of himself as an individual, and would prevent him from adopting the crowd's opinion. Or if he had an opinion of his own, it would prevent him from hastening to get the crowd to adopt it. '

From: Soren Kierkegaard "Purity of Heart is to will one thing" (1846) translated by Douglas V. Steere; Harper 1938.

Thank you to my friend Tim Clark for having this excellent book on the kitchen table and finding this quote.

Public broadcasting

2010-02-27T13:11:00.000-08:00

today repeated a program by and about John Wooden:

http://www.ted.com/talks/john_wooden_on_the_difference_between_winning_and_success.html

How the mightly fall

2010-02-09T13:51:00.000-08:00

is the latest book by Jim Collins: http://www.jimcollins.com/books.html

The book is a study of successful companies that had some significant failure, often resulting in terminal collapse. The five stages he identifies are:

Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success
Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More
Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril
Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation
Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death

In some ways the second stage seemed most characteristic. It seemed that the companies lost focus on doing a good job, and began to measure themselves by external markers of success that were not relevant to the job they were doing - such as growth, or stock-market price.

This reminded me of the feature of the successful companies that Collins calls 'the hedgehog concept' : "having a simple, extremely clear concept of what their business is".

Good to great

2010-02-08T15:52:00.000-08:00

is the title of a book by Jim Collins: http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-great.html

It's based on Collins' team review of 11 companies that fit the criteria of performing at stock market average for 15 years, then performing at least 3 times above stock market average for 15 years. Collins and his team compared these companies (Phillip Morris, Kimberley Clark, Walgrees, Wells-Fargo etc) with matched companies in the same area that continued to perform near the stock market average. Their interest was to find the things that characterized the 'great' companies compared to the 'good' (or rather average) companies.

There's a summary here: http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/16/good-to-great-why-some-companies-make-the-leap-and-others-dont

The most striking finding was that the company leaders were of a very characteristic, and in some ways surprising type - summarized in the page above as showing 'great humility' and 'professional will'. I take the last to mean, that the CEOs had an urgent personal investment in the company doing a good job, whatever that job was.

Another summary point was to emphasize the importance that the incoming (later successful) CEOs gave to hiring the right people, and the atmosphere that they created - one of robust open discussion. The teams seemed to allow for strong disagreement, full airing of all points of view, followed by consensus and disciplined action.

Other distinctive features of the successful companies were: brutal honesty and a strong desire for objective information; and patience. The last is what Collins calls 'the flywheel concept' - that is, slow, patient and disciplined improvement of process.

Guido van Rossum talks about Python 3

2009-11-05T12:28:00.001-08:00

Yesterday Guido van Rossum came to Berkeley to talk about Python and science.

Listening to him, I understood for the first time the importance of porting to Python 3K.

Open-source is not the same as commercial software. If Microsoft puts out Vista, and we don't see the need to change, we just don't buy it. It's not the same for Python 3K.

For Python, we benefit from the enthusiasm and - yes - enjoyment - of the Python core team. We want them to enjoy what they do, we want to share their enjoyment of something well-done, well thought out. That's how good work gets done, and it's the energy of a project.

Python 3K is important, because it's important to the Python core team. It may not yet be obvious that we need it, but we should port, because it's important for Python.

The five dysfunctions of a team

2009-09-08T14:57:00.000-07:00

The five dysfunctions of a team is a book by Patrick Lencioni. There are no data to justify its conclusions - but it's a convincing and enjoyable read. The five dysfunctions are:

Absence of trust
Fear of Conflict
Lack of Commitment
Avoidance of Accountability
Inattention to Results

See the five dysfunctions summary. The numbering goes in the order these problems must be solved (trust first).

The solutions for the team leader to try are:

Absence of trust -> Go first!
Fear of Conflict -> Mine for conflict
Lack of Commitment -> Force clarity and closure
Avoidance of Accountability -> Confront difficult issues
Inattention to Results -> Focus on collective outcomes

See the five dysfunctions model.

An explicit society needs a constitution

2009-09-07T18:35:00.000-07:00

We hold these truths to be self-evident...

There is something mysterious about a healthy society, in open source as elsewhere. From outside, it looks as if it just happened that way, particularly in open-source. It may be that some projects and societies are lucky with their people and the cultures they make. Maybe NIPY is such a project. But, our job is to defend our society, and our project, from decaying.

To do this, we need to understand the sources of decay, and that is what my previous posts were trying to describe. Without this understanding, we can make no sensible defense.

In the case of NIPY, we started with a naive model (one person in charge). For many reasons, that model has not worked well. We then need to make another model that will work better. To do this, we summarize the state we want to avoid, and then we regulate.

Law plays a fundamental role in making the rules of the society clear, and making agreement to those rules explicit. It provides a defense against arbitrary decisions, bullying and abuses of power; it reduces anxiety, and with it the motivation to seek power. It draws people together who have a shared vision of how society works, and what it looks like when it works well.

We need a constitution. What should go in the constitution? It should be set of principles that we consider important as a society, and the rules and decision making process that will hold us to these principles.

NIPY as an explicit society

2009-09-07T15:29:00.001-07:00

When I started writing this blog I didn't know what I would write, but I found myself writing about politics.

I'm interested in politics for many reasons, but there have certainly been politics in the distributed society of NIPY.

I notice, that, one strong opinion that comes up, expressed in various ways is:

We should not discuss politics in public

I suppose the reasons that might be given for this are:

it looks bad to outsiders
it's irrelevant to the problem we have

It is dangerous not to discuss politics. Open discussion is a defense against many forms of political game. When there are power games in play, the essential mechanism for keeping them in play, is to prevent them from being discussed. I leave the proof as an exercise for the reader.

The strong pressure not to discuss politics usually makes it impossible to discuss the fact that we are not discussing politics. Expressed with more poetry, the language of irrationality is silence.

In the spirit of free discussion then:

it looks bad to outsiders

This is an interesting point of view. There are two branches to go down, depending on whether the proposer agrees that there is a political problem. Imagine the proposer does think that the society suffers from political divisions and that this is a problem. Then the assertion that 'it looks bad to outsiders' is an expression of the hope that the outsiders will not notice the problem, and that the problem will go away if we don't talk about it. It contains an implicit judgment that outsiders will be alarmed by, and intolerant of, open discussion of politics. I am reminded of the famous parable of the grand inquisitor. The alternative point of view is that good citizens are drawn to honest and open discussion.

Taking the second branch means that there is in fact no political problem, and, by implication, the person who thinks there is a problem, is either oddly mistaken or possibly up to no good. This soon leads to the classic 'no man, no problem' fallacy.

it's irrelevant to the problem we have

This leads back to the first objection ('I don't want to discuss it'). Of course, it might be irrelevant to the problem we have, but how will we know, if we don't discuss it? Back then, to Python, because we know that:

explicit is better than implicit

in the realm of society as for code.

Next - navigating towards a healthy society.

Politics and power

2009-09-04T14:08:00.000-07:00

I think there are two modes in the way that we react to other people in organizations:

trust
power

Trust: the state we reach when we assume that our colleagues are competent and want the project to succeed. We may work independently, but we know that, when we need something to help our work from the others, they will listen and help. We wish that they feel valued in their jobs, and they wish the same for us.

Power: the other members of our team may not want what we want. Our job is to make it more likely that we get what we want. Others will surely do the same; the winner is the person who does it with the most success. Success comes from having powerful people agree with you, so that you can make less powerful people do what you want.

An interest in power comes from anxiety. This in turn comes from a potentially unlimited threat from a poorly regulated society.

The two do not mix; that is, a significant part of the team working for power will destroy trust. Increase in trust makes the desire for power irrelevant or ugly.

The clearest example I can think of is the analysis of companies that become successful in Good to Great by Jim Collins. Companies that shift from mediocrity to prolonged success differed markedly from comparison companies in the character of their leaders. The book describes the successful leaders as being 'level 5' and elsewhere 'servant-leaders'. These leaders seemed to have an unusual lack of interest in personal power. From the Wikipedia article on servant leadership :

The highest type of ruler is one of whose existence the people are barely aware. Next comes one whom they love and praise. Next comes one whom they fear. Next comes one whom they despise and defy. When you are lacking in faith, Others will be unfaithful to you. The Sage is self-effacing and scanty of words. When his task is accomplished and things have been completed, All the people say, ‘We ourselves have achieved it!’

From Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching, trans. John C. H. Wu (Boston, Massachusetts: Shambhala, 2006), 35.

Open-source as a self-regulating society

2009-08-29T14:56:00.000-07:00

Maybe community open-source projects have social advantages over projects developed by organized work teams.

it is usually obvious who is charge because most projects start as an individual effort
being a member of the team depends very much on how much work you do
because of the above, the person in charge has usually done a lot of the practical work
the team members rarely meet so that working relationships are almost exclusively about work, and power games are hard to sustain.

I like Joel's analysis of why programmers don't like politics - half way down his field guide to developers.

Meditating impatience

2009-08-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

Is impatience a bad thing?

"I need to be impatient with myself to get work done".

I think this convincing statement is false. Consider that, the times that we have been particularly impatient, have been times when we have found it very hard to work. Without thinking more, we might assume that we are very impatient because we have so much to do. Then roll it round the other way, and ask, what was the cause of all the time we wasted when we could have been working? Think of the times we have had, that were most productive, and worked best, and think of the difference.

In practice, our habits of mind are so overwhelming, that these thoughts are difficult to have.

It may be easier to say this:

impatience is a work-style that you may prefer for yourself
impatience is destructive of teamwork, and we should make every effort to make sure our own impatience does not affect those we work with

How do we recognize the effects of impatience?

lack of productivity
blame

This is so, because impatience is the symptom of blame of self. It is natural that impatience in teams leads to blame of others. Blame differs from constructive criticism in that it:

is most clearly expressed in private to people other than the target of the criticism
concentrates on the working or personal characteristics of the people responsible for the problem, rather than the specifics of the problem
is self-sustaining, because blame leads to poor working relationships and low productivity
tends to come from the people doing the least practical work on the project
is difficult to express coherently in writing (because the content is more emotional than the originators want to believe).

The expression of blame has a characteristic tone. It sounds like a pompous teenager impersonating an adult. There is a good example in this absurd email that started the famous split in the NetBSD project.

The three great sins of a open-source programmer

2009-08-26T18:51:00.000-07:00

The engine of open-source is enjoyment of work well done. As more people join the project, the enjoyment increases, because we share the pleasure of work well done. If we are lucky, then our society is a happy and ordered place for new members. The written and unwritten rules seem sensible and straightforward. The group members are respectful, helpful and generous. Enthusiastic but ignorant new-comers are treated with indulgent warmth, and irritable or ungenerous emails are dealt with firmly but politely.

I suspect that is the natural history of a successful project.

What happens though, when our society is not yet like that? What do we do? How do our societies deteriorate and why?

I suspect it is because the team has not yet learned to deal with the three great sins of a open-source programmer.

laziness
impatience
hubris

Maybe you have read something like this before: LazinessImpatienceHubris

Laziness is the what happens when we know that someone has worked on this problem before, but we lack the energy to look at what they have done, and we start again. We deprive our fellow programmer of the nectar of shared work Laziness is the dark side of the desire for something efficient and well-made.

Impatience is the output from our distress because of laziness. Impatience is the name of thing that causes problems on mailing lists. You want to use someone's software, but you have not got time to contribute. The software does not work the way you want and you send an irritable email. The small attack makes the society feel just that little bit more tired and less enthusiastic to help you, or each other. Impatience is what we feel when we realize that our problem is hard, but we lack the energy or hope to solve it. Impatience is the atmosphere of a failed desire for productivity.

Hubris is to confidence as vanity is to courage. Hubris is when we get so worried by the possibility of failure, that we start making up a whole new fantasy world where we are succeeding. Of course this happens often, but when we see it, in ourselves or others, we know that there is a large problem, and, unless we are brave, we walk away.

Luckily, there seem to be many brave people in our open-source world. Luckily, it is possible to return to efficiency, productivity, and courage.

What to expect?

2009-08-26T18:39:00.001-07:00

I started this blog without being sure what would go in it. I expect that I will update it rarely with thoughts about the problems that we have, and the solutions we have tried.

NIPY is a rather ambitious project to make a new library for functional brain imaging analysis using Python. It's a collaboration between Stanford, Berkeley, MIT and Neurospin (in Paris).