The Internet is not the devil

I once watched a man leave his wife and three school-aged children over his Everquest addiction. Our victimist society pities the man destroyed by such a vile influence. Yet somehow, the other two million players were spared from such consequences. Step back objectively for a moment, and ask yourself this: Is it more likely that two million unrelated people spread across the world simultaneously and independently survived a grave threat, or that one person negligently allowed his family relationships to slip away while distracted by a video game? Our age of technology should be respected, not feared. Take responsibility; absorb the good in it, and spew out the bad.

Why GitHub is taking over the universe

I use a lot of open source software. I use Linux, Apache, PHP, Firefox, Netbeans, Eclipse, and hundreds of less-notable software packages. And in some sense, I'm aware that those projects are run in a way that allows outside contributors to find and fix problems. Yet in the decade or so that I've enjoyed the benefits of the open source movement, I never contributed a single line of code. Until just a few weeks ago--thanks to GitHub.

Traditionally, open source projects are hosted either in private repositories or in read-only repositories on SourceForge. As a potential contributor, I'm intimidated by the prospect of getting hold of the latest source code, writing a fix, producing a patch, submitting it through the right channels, and then watching it disappear into the ether (as I'm the only one who cares about my fix).

The whole SourceForge mindset feels similar to the ill-fated Nupedia project. Nupedia was to be a carefully curated online encyclopedia, with only experts contributing. Of course, Nupedia hardly merits a glimmer of recognition these days; it was wholly crushed by its accidental offspring Wikipedia. The key was Wikipedia's openness about amateur edits.

GitHub has gotten it right in every way. I recently found a use for a few projects that happened to be hosted on GitHub. In most cases, if I want to make a minor fix or change to an open source library, it means cutting all ties with the upstream project to maintain my own slowly-obsolescing copy. With GitHub, I quickly saw that I could clone my own copy, make edits, and hit a big button to ask the upstream project to pull in my changes.

And just like that, I became a contributor to open source. The best part was yet to come, though. While my request was still outstanding, a whole thread of comments started to accumulate on my pull request, with other users affirming that my patch did in fact help. Each of those people had their own clone of the project, and they'd pulled in my change directly. That's right, they didn't have to wait for some approval from on high to start using my latest work, and its rapid spread through other users of the project helped push it through to the project's main contributor that much faster.

If GitHub keeps up its current momentum, it's poised to fulfill many of the original promises of open source: Rapid development among a large, loose network of users, each taking advantage of each other's work without waiting for The Project Owner to declare something ready. I'm excited, as I haven't been in a long while, about contributing to something great.

Seventy-Five Trillion Dollars

Offer what I want, and I will buy it

I love great TV shows. I loathe their delivery mechanism. There is no technical reason why I should not be able to watch all the episodes I want, when I want, with interruptions only for advertisements within my interests. If such a service were available, I would happily cancel Netflix and Dish Network the very next day and pay the provider of such a service $100+/mo for the privilege, even with advertisements. Unfortunately, the only people interested in providing such a service do so without allowing me to pass along any revenue to the shows' creators. Please, Big Media, let me pay you for what I want to watch!

If you hate computers, they probably hate you back

Some people just don't like the idea of tinkering with code. According to Paul De Palma, those people are women. Paul's argument is that we should arrange the presentation of computer science in a more self-contained, mathematical manner in order to attract more women to the trade. I've worked with people who think computer science is neat and tidy and manageable, and they all share one common flaw: They're wrong. Don't make computer science what it's not. If women as a demographic prefer biology to computer science, let them continue to categorize Siberian worms. They don't really want computer science; don't force it on them.

How much do computers really need us?

Just 10 years ago, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints launched FamilySearch, a marvel of technology meant to unify all the genealogical records available in one central, searchable database. And just a few months ago, the Church launched its replacement, now capable of allowing millions of people a day to instantly find and associate data about their ancestors--even if they start with little more than a misspelled name and a decade the deceased might have been born in. At what point do we humans become unnecessary in the entire endeavor of the organization of knowledge? Google seems to have already perfected their psychic search, nearly always returning what I wanted, rather than what I'd asked for. Is that degree of inference possible in the field of genealogy?

[note: This post comes almost a week late, due to some unforeseen circumstances, shown below]

Computers: No respecter of persons

I recently started working with the engineer formerly responsible for architecting the LDS Church's new FamilySearch.org site, a free service helping millions connect with their ancestors. And just a year ago, I worked with an engineer from a company that performed so many fraudulent credit card transactions that they opened a new merchant account nearly every week--that is, until they were entirely shut down by federal investigators.  I'm fascinated that the rise of high technology so efficiently allows the benevolent to rise, while simultaneously allowing the leeches to burrow deeper.  I suppose the Internet causes bits to flow to the evil and to the good, and lets users fall on the righteous and the unrighteous.