Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

WordPress’s Pyethon trap

by

One of the most drudge-like tasks of writing a book is assembling the endnotes, but if there is anything even more tedious, it is converting those endnotes into HTML. But I promised readers of Dreaming in Code that I would do so — so many of the references are Web-based, it makes a lot of sense to provide them with working hyperlinks.

I’d hoped to have this done before the book was published, but I’ve only just finished. Ed Yourdon wanted me to do it; how could I let him down?

But in posting this material, I discovered something very odd. Sometimes WordPress simply did not want to upload a page (I’m using WordPress’s static page feature for the whole Dreaming in Code site). At first I thought I’d hit some undocumented limit on the number of characters, or maybe number of links, on the page; or, I thought, there’s so many links on these pages, maybe it’s overloading the cool WordPress pinging/trackback stuff, so I just turned all that off.

No go. Certain pages just would not save properly, the browser would just hang. By removing chunks of text I slowly zeroed in on the problem: three notes that contained the word “Python,” as in the programming language, were causing the trouble. If I removed them, no problem!

I just tried to post one of them here as an example and this instance of WordPress won’t allow it either — it generates a “file not found” message, oddly. A quick hunt through WordPress’s documentation “codex” offered no clue. Anyone have an idea? Is WordPress’s dedication to php so intense that it will not even allow a mention of the competition?

I couldn’t even use the word “Python” in the headline of this post — it caused the same error! I had to misspell the forbidden name in order to get this post to publish properly. Very odd.

UPDATE: Thanks to the commenters who pointed me to apache’s mod_security, which is plainly to blame, and not wordpress itself. A little creative escaping of the “P” in “Python” and I now have restored the previously unpostable endnotes. Live and learn…

Salon coverage, Portland anecdotage

by

Salon is where Dreaming in Code started, and so it’s fitting — and wonderful — that my colleagues are featuring the book there now. There’s a Q&A with me by Andrew Leonard (with beautiful art by Mignon Khargie, another one of Salon’s founding gang) and a brief excerpt from the book as well.

Tonight I returned from Portland from the final trip of my two-and-a-half-week quasi-pseudo book tour. I moderated a panel on “new media” at the American Booksellers’ Association Winter Institute, which gathers the people who run independent bookstores and tries to equip them better to deal with increasingly volatile times in their biz.

As I told the crowd, I found it funny that we’re still calling this stuff “new media” — a term that first came into vogue 15 years ago, when it typically referred to CD-ROMs. It was great to try to peer into the crystal ball with the other panelists — Amanda Edmonds of Google, Madeline McIntosh of Random House and C.J. Rayhill of O’Reilly.

I was to be introduced by a gentleman who is the CIO of Ingram Book Co., the mega book distributor based in Tennessee who supplies many of those book stores with their stock. He quite nicely asked me if I had a copy of Dreaming in Code that he could hold up to the crowd; foolishly, I was not carrying one. Unwilling to sacrifice this tiny opportunity for promoting the book, I dashed across the street to a humongous mall that contained a branch of a certain giant chain bookstore — and there, somewhere behind giant stacks of Bob Woodward bestsellers and the “Cosmo Kama Sutra,” I found one precious copy of my book, which I purchased and carried triumphantly back to the hotel.

When I handed the volume to the Ingram exec, he noticed the reference to The Soul of a New Machine among the blurbs on the back. “That’s one of my favorite books!,” he declared, and asked me if he could keep Dreaming in Code. The coals-to-Newcastlishness of the proposition struck me as amusing — Ingram is, as its site says, “the world’s largest wholesale distributor of book product” — yet what could I say but “Of course”?

More soon. Tonight, I sleep.

Mace’s podcast, Kedrosky’s plug

by

It is now two weeks to the day from Dreaming in Code’s in-store arrival, and I’m still trying to catch my breath. I’m going to write some fuller posts responding to some of the questions and criticisms I’ve received both in person and online. And I promise I’ll get back to Code Reads soon! Here, first, are a couple of quick pointers to more recent coverage and interesting stuff:

Scott Mace, whose Calendar Swamp blog has been an invaluable resource, interviewed me early on during my media marathon for the Open Source Conversations podcast, and the interview is now available. This was one of the deepest and fullest (and longest!) interviews I’ve done to date; many thanks to Scott for his enthusiasm for the book and his willingness to dig into some of the details.

Paul Kedrosky is both extremely smart and, I tend to think, at the harder-nosed end of the tech-pundit spectrum, so I was delighted to read his post calling Dreaming in Code “excellent.” “Rosenberg’s new book,” he wrote, “is sobering and required reading for anyone naive enough to still expect miracles from large-scale software development.” Thanks, Paul.

“Code” on Marketplace, in Washington Post

by

While I was stuck with my family at an airport for hours today waiting for the airline to figure out how to start the plane’s engines (no kidding), elves were at work extending my national sway. Or at least, I could say, work I had previously finished was making its way toward the public.

The Marketplace interview is online now, here. And I’ve got an op-ed in tomorrow’s Washington Post. Both of these are pegged to the occasion of Windows Vista finally heaving itself across the finish line.

Dreaming in Code on Marketplace

by

If all goes as planned, today’s edition of Marketplace, the Public Radio business show, will include an interview with me about the book, Windows Vista, and the challenges of making software. I had an enjoyable talk with Kai Ryssdal, the host, last week. I’ve been traveling with my family this weekend, but I’ll be posting more soon…

Meanwhile, back at OSAF…

by

Anyone who reads Dreaming in Code through to the end is going to want to know what happened at the Chandler project in the time since the conclusion of the book’s narrative (it ends at the end of 2005, with Chandler at version 0.6, ready to begin some limited “dogfooding,” or use by inhouse early adopters).

Some of the early reactions to my book have presented Chandler as a total bust and proceeded on the assumption that the project is dead. That’s not at all the case. For the moment, Chandler remains a program that most people aren’t going to download and use, and it’s still not going to break any speed records. But it plainly has made steady progress over the past year. OSAF is now planning what it’s calling a “preview” release in April.

A lot more of the project’s big-picture features are now at least partially implemented — particularly the Dashboard, a sort of universal “inbox” for sorting tasks and calendar events and email according to “Getting Things Done”-style principles.

I sat down with Katie Parlante, Sheila Mooney and Mitch Kapor right before Christmas to get an update on what had happened at OSAF with Chandler during 2006.

[Read more…]

Notes from the actual road

by

In the past several days I’ve been talking nonstop about Dreaming in Code to radio hosts and bookstore crowds and a roomful of people at Microsoft Research in Redmond.

I am continually delighted by the interest people are showing in the book and its subject. Most wonderfully, I am finding that the radio folks are actually reading the book (or, you know, some of it, anyway!). I know how crazed their work schedules are, so that tells me that either (a) there are a lot of closet programming geeks out there in the radio world or (b) maybe I achieved some of my goal of taking this dauntingly arcane subject and making it approachable for people outside the field.

Tomorrow it’s Google for me, then I’ve got a long-planned family vacation over an extended weekend. But I’ve also got a backlog of stuff to post — so I’ll try to get to it all soon.

Notes from the quasi-road

by

Thanks to all the people who showed up at Kepler’s Thursday night to hear me talk about Dreaming in Code. It was my very first event as a published author, and it was great to see so many interested faces and hear so many intelligent responses. I’m even getting the hang of signing books as a left-handed person (binding gets in the way, ink smudges, etc.). In the Murphy’s Law category, my car battery died on University Ave. in Palo Alto where I’d stopped for coffee beforehand; fortunately, I knew my way around well enough to hike to Kepler’s in time to make an only slightly sweaty appearance. (Triple A took care of getting the car started for the trip home to Berkeley.)

Yesterday I had a similarly invigorating event at Yahoo — what seemed like more than 100 Yahoo folks brought in their lunches and heard my talk. I’ve got several former colleagues and longtime blogger acquaintances at Yahoo, and I was glad to have the chance to talk about the book, and software, to such a knowledgeable, and attentive, crowd.

Tomorrow (Sunday) I’m out at the Pleasanton Library at 2 p.m. in an event sponsored by Towne Center Books, so if you’re in the (farther) East Bay and interested, come on by!

Ed to Amanda to George

by

First, Ed Cone was reading my book so he could interview me. Then, Amanda Congdon was dropping in on Ed to record a promo for the ConvergeSouth conference. Congdon was thumbing through Dreaming in Code at the start of the promo, so they worked in a little reference to the book. I found it amusing and posted it on my blog.

Now George Coates and his dramatic crew at BetterBadNews have taken this brief video clip and deconstructed it in a bizarrely funny way. “‘Dreaming in Code’ is probably one of those rare works of literature of the sort that you really have to read to enjoy,” the deadpan announcer begins. By the time the commentators have done picking the clip apart — “A dog? A guy without a head?” — we’re in David Lynch-land.

This tickles me in multiple ways, partly because I know Coates’s work from many years of covering the multimedia extravaganzas his theater company used to present, but mostly because I love the process by which this little meme has propagated — and now, mutated. (Thanks to Dave Winer for the link.)