Brugge Blog

The nominees are set, so Bill Moyers can’t be president this time around, but it seems like he should be put in the running for vice president, or cabinet position or some place where he can have the influence he deserves. Or perhaps he should just be left alone to do what he does best: stand up to the blowhards and show what is good. That’s what he did last weekend during the National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis when Bill O’Reilly’s man tried to badger him (there’s a full segment and a slightly shorter piece from Keith Olbermann’s show that shows clips of O’Reilly’s spin on it.) He didn’t acquiesce, or ignore, or shout, he talked to the Fox person with dignity and respect and a forceful truth. And as Olbermann said, he had “the special ingredient of being 100% morally and factually correct.”

For a fuller picture of his vision, and his challenge to us all, watch his keynote address. As he reminds us, “you are not alone.”

The PBS Frontline crew has helped keep the story of the Guatemalan National Police Archives alive by airing a segment about the ongoing work being done, in what may be the first significant television coverage since I first heard about the story two years ago.

Along with the story of the archives, they do a brief profile of Benetech, the Palo Alto non-profit that’s providing the software and expertise to catalog all of the records. Although I think they do a great job of telling both stories, I’m not unbiased. I’ve had the privilege of working for Benetech for the past six months, and while I haven’t been involved with their human rights program, my experience of working with the folks who make up the Bookshare team has been that the organization as a whole has a potent mixture of strong technical savvy, committed, passionate people, and business acumen. They are in a niche that they’re largely carving out themselves, and I think the interviews in the segment give a good flavor of that.

The story of the archives looks like it is one that will (and should) go on for quite a while. Besides just the massive amounts of paperwork to process, there is still the unanswered question of what will come out of all of the data. It’s not clear how much data there is already, but there must be a fair amount for all of the time being spent, and yet there hasn’t been any outside access allowed or even hints or summaries given. Something will have to come out, the question is when. Hopefully when it does there will be outlets in the mainstream media who will send it out for people to hear. This is a long and important story, one that’s not simple or complete.

It isn’t easy writing down what you believe, to commit to words the feelings you hold, either strongly or vaguely, but at least privately. Words may not be the best instrument, but they’re what most of us can use, and they give you boundaries to work within. And I think that what a lot of people find is that the act of writing helps clarify your thinking, if not for others then at least for yourself.

Taking the next step, actually sharing these beliefs with others, is a second challenge. To me it seems to be an act of both strength and vulnerability, like an opening up of yourself to show that which is most vital. It’s also an act of honesty that connects you to the many others who read it, and connecting is so much of what our lives are about.

Reading the book “This I Believe” certainly made me feel connected to a number of people, folks who expressed something that rang true to things that I feel are important too. Then I went to the web site where anyone can contribute, and I was reminded how strong the connecting urge flows both ways - people who felt moved both to read and to write, to take in and to respond.

Here are excerpts of some that grabbed me in one way or another. The fuller essays are richer, so taste here and then explore on your own.

In Praise of the “Wobblies”, Ted Gup

It had let me know that it was okay to be perplexed, to be torn by issues, to look at the world and not feel inadequate because it would not sort itself out cleanly. In the company of the confident, I had always envied their certainty. I imagined myself like some tiny sailboat, aimlessly tacking in whatever wind prevailed at the moment.

But in time, I came to accept, even embrace, what I called “my confusion,” and to recognize it as a friend and ally, no apologies needed. I preferred to listen rather than speak; to inquire, not crusade. As a noncombatant, I was welcomed at the tables of even bitterly divided foes. I came to recognize that I had my own compass and my own convictions, and if, at times, they took me in circles, at least they expanded outwards. I had no wish for converts–where would I lead them?”

I’m Not the Mountain I Thought I Would Be, Marcus

Father, husband, teacher, part-time photographer. Somehow, as adulthood ensnared me, my dream of being an extraordinary photographer dissipated. Pulitzer Prizes gave way to soccer games, faculty meetings, and week-long family vacations. Nobody ever told me I couldn’t have it all.
…

The awards and honors I once envisioned have been replaced by refereeing arguments about which child touched which, by being the designated family member that gets the heels from the loaf of bread, by trying keep the lawn mower running, and never knowing for sure if somebody is going to barrel through the bathroom door at an inopportune time.

But once in a while the beauty is celebrated in arenas I never imagined. Theatrical productions in the front yard, listening from the van as my daughter successfully navigates her piano lesson, and in another anniversary with my wife.

A Balance Between Nature and Nurture, Gloria Steinem

So I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe that a unique core self is born into every human being — the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.

…

But the real answer is a balance between nature and nurture. What would happen if we listened to children as much as we talked to them? Or what would happen if even one generation were raised with respect and without violence?

Always Go to the Funeral, Deidre Sullivan

“Always go to the funeral” means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don’t feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don’t really have to and I definitely don’t want to. I’m talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex’s uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn’t been good versus evil. It’s hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

I Agree with a Pagan, Arnold Toynbee

Since we can never be sure, we have to try to be charitable and open to persuasion that we may, after all, have been in the wrong, and at the same time we have to be resolute and energetic in what we do, in order to be effective. It is difficult enough to combine effectiveness with humility and charity in trying to do what is right, but it is still more difficult to try to do right at all, because this means fighting oneself.

In the world of Java development, the two top choices for build tools are Ant and Maven. Like Coke and Pepsi, or any other good two-headed field, the choice provides endless voice to discussions of which is better. What is interesting to me in the threads, though, is that when people praise or defile Maven, it’s often not an either/or sentiment, even when it’s passionate. When talking about Maven, it is not uncommon to both love it and hate it. And here I used to think I was the only one.

What’s to love and hate? The Zutubi guys summarize it well:

• The people who love Maven love the theory.
• The people who hate Maven hate the reality.

See? There you have it, two aspects of the same tool: something you can love, without having to dismiss the hate.

I’ve used both Ant and Maven on decent sized projects, and I can talk up the positive side of both of them. A basic Ant build can come together quickly, and you can have it grow as the project grows. A Maven build can come together quickly too, and when you add dependencies along the way and find that things just work, you start to take the lack of build friction for granted. Maven is great, you say.

However, I have also had to wrestle with each of them. The feeling of wrestling with Maven that makes it different, though, is that Maven can beat you. With Ant, you can work up some way around a problem, mainly because you’re working at a low enough level that the tools you have to work with are basic and well understood - copying, compiling, packaging, a whole bunch of simple and flexible tasks. It may not always be pretty, and the challenge (and not a small one) is to make this maintainable, but the slowdown in project work is usually on the order of hours.

With Maven, it’s a completely different story. You’re working both at a higher level of abstraction, and in descriptive rather than procedural form (”use these pieces to build my project” rather than “build this part of my project by doing A and then B.”) That means that you have much more leverage from small changes, but you have to know where to, and how to, make that small change. And therein lies what I think is the biggest rub for Maven users: you have the goal in mind, it seems like you are oh so close…and you can’t get there. You search the Maven docs, Google on terms or a stack trace message, look through the Maven books, and find nothing but crumbs. If you’re lucky some one else has had this problem, and if you’re even luckier there is a suggested workaround or solution. But just as likely is that you strike out, and have to troll through Maven debug logs looking for clues that you can understand.

You might say that this is nothing new to Maven, that debugging problems with any tool follows the same rules - use log files, Google, source code and forums, and get your hands dirty. And it is, but since Maven’s ambitions are so much larger than Ant’s you are in a much larger world of many more moving parts, with untold and varied ways that things can go wrong. Which is perhaps why I agree with a colleague who once said that Maven was great, when someone else is managing it. Once you start getting serious with what you expect, or want to get, from Maven, you better have a “Maven maven” on your team, or else be prepared for build breakdowns that are measured in days.

The other curious thing about Maven emotions are that people don’t “like” Maven or “dislike” Maven. No, the sentiments used are that you LOVE Maven, or that you HATE Maven, or feel both at the same time. Maybe it’s because Maven itself is big that the feelings it brings forth are big tool. Howard Lewis Ship’s “fool me once…” blog, and the ensuing comments, seem like a good example.

Lastly, one of the points often made when calmer heads enter the Maven and Ant debates is that Maven is much more than “just a build tool,” that it really covers a lot of project management ground as well. Describe your project once and you can have Maven both build your system artifacts and your project website, with information for end users, managers and developers. Heady stuff, but just like everything else in Maven, there is the theory and the reality. As someone who loves generating feedback reports from code, I have to admit that Tim O’Brien makes some good points about using Maven to create a project site:

So, I’m going to tell you what I think Maven is, and it isn’t the orthodox line: Maven is a build tool. Forget, “Maven is a project management system that allows you to cook, clean, and effectively leverage your synergies”. It’s a build tool, and if you really want to use it generate a site, go straight ahead, but, be warned, the sites it creates are pretty poor looking and customizing the presentation consists of applying CSS styles to poorly crafted mark up.
…

Your project’s web site is important, it is a central piece of the community you are creating, and this form letter approach to project documentation is no better than just relying on the default sourceforge project page. Here’s a helpful rule I’ve stumbled upon in documentation: if it isn’t worth having a human write it, it isn’t worth having a human read it.

Going beyond the project management parts of the site generation, there are also flaws in the documentation that we don’t want humans to write, the code analysis pages. Here, something sorely missing from Maven is a summary dashboard to be able to see the forest in the set of trees that you so easily planted with a few plugin descriptions. I love the fact that I can get PMD feedback for my entire project with a half dozen lines of plugin config. I hate the fact that I have to drill at least two layers down to see it. Maven 1 had such a thing, but it never carried along to Maven 2. Andy Glover sagely pointed out once at a JUG meeting that people will be really excited by your code quality reports if you generate them, but only the first day you send them the link. If you can’t help people see more than raw data, you aren’t going to get far.

Maven will continue to seduce, thrill and disappoint me, I’m sure. It’s just a roller coaster ride that I wish I didn’t have to take.

It barely got to zero degrees today, so it feels like time to stay indoors and do some cleaning up. From real and virtual scraps of paper, here are some excerpts from books I’ve wanted to keep around.

From Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. At one point he’s talking with a Pakistani friend about the fighting and violence
that has grown since 2001.

“People like me are America’s best friends in the region,” Bashir said at last, shaking his head ruefully. “I’m a moderate Muslim, an educated man. But watching this, even I could become a jihadi. How can Americans say they are making themselves safer?” Bashir asked, struggling not to direct his anger toward the large American target on the other side of his desk. “Your President Bush had done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years.”

“Osama had something to do with it, too,” Mortenson said.

“Osama, baah!” Bashir roared. “Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source or your enemy’s strength. In america’s case, that’s not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. The only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever.”

From Armed Madhouse, by Greg Palast. The man sent to Iraq to oversee the oil ministry, and stop the neo-cons from privatizing the Iraqi oil industry and further destabilizing the region, explains the single-mindedness of oil companies: keeping the price of oil high.

“Many neo-conservatives have certain ideological beliefs about markets and democracy and this, that and the other. International oil companies, ” [Phillip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil] explained coolly, “without exception, don’t have a theology, they don’t have a doctrine.”

There’s a certain attractiveness to amoral avarice: In war zones, the greedy are the peacemakers.

From The Power and The Glory, by Graham Greene, are a handful of ideas, beautifully expressed. These are from the Penguin Paperback edition.

“He had an immense self-importance; he was unable to picture a world in which he was only a typical part - a world of treachery, violence, and lust in which his shame was altogether insignificant…. It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization - it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.” (p. 97)

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity - that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair gres, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.” (p. 131)

“What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days - and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins - impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity - cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt…” (p. 139)

From Words I Wish I Wrote, by Robert Fulghum, there are plenty of pages I’ve bookmarked, but here are a couple. Quoting Franz Kafka’s Diaries,

If we knew we were on the right road, having to leave it would mean endless despair. But we are on a road that only leads to a second one, and a third one and so forth. And the real highway will not be sighted for a long, long time, perhaps never. So we drift in doubt. But also in an unbelievable beautiful diversity. Thus the accomplishment of hope remains an always unexpected miracle. But in compensation, the miracle remains forever possible.

Quoting Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,

Thomas Merton wrote, “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

These aren’t the essence of the books, just nuggets to chew on.

One of the most dangerous time for a project is the day immediately after someone has been to a conference. They’ve been wowed by some new tool or technology and can’t wait to use it. “Man, we should be using WangDoogle4J instead of Struts. I went to a session about it, and it blows everything else out of the water. It is really cool!. And it’s going to have a second Alpha release real soon now.” Run away.

So now that a couple of weeks have passed since NoFluffJustStuff in Chicago, I feel like it’s safe for me to talk about the conference, because it was, as always, full of ideas to stretch your thinking, and my own post-conference excitement has mellowed to a safe level.

What I’ve come to like about these conferences is the mix of the expected and the unexpected. When I look through the session list ahead of time, there are enough things that look interesting that I now I won’t be bored. But I’ve come to look forward to the surprises just as much, the sessions I wouldn’t have considered, or that didn’t look that interested, but which open my eyes to something I’ve been missing.

Some parts that were high-points this year, and which I looked forward to ahead of time:

• Stu Halloway. He can bring just about any topic to life, so unless there’s something killer in the same time slice, I can bank on getting wisdom about something I hadn’t considered before. This time it was Javascript. A lowly language with a bad rap, this was a wakeup call to give it its due, especially if you want to do Ajax well. He also had a followon session on Prototype that gave me a better grokking of it in 90 minutes than I could have got in a day of reading the docs.
• David Hussman. This guy walks and talks the agile walk and talk, and at a deep level. He’s not about tool and technique formulas, but about listening, hearing, adapting, connecting, refining and growing, for the team, the individual, and the company. His message is hard to get across, because it’s not hard technology, but social dynamics. And yet he does, and he fields any question you can throw at him with honesty and thought, and I leave feeling energized.

Some parts that were unexpected, the pleasant surprises:

• NetKernel. It was described in the session summary as something that could give you a new way of looking at XML processing, but that turned out to be a bait-and-switch tactic (there has also been some revisionist history going on, because the presentation title on the NFJS site nows says nothing about XML processing, but the slides I have in front of me do). When the speaker, Brian Sletten, has six slides on “What the heck is NetKernel?” it’s clear that this is something that’s defying the categories we are used to. It felt like you were in the Steve Martin and Bill Murray skit, “What The Hell Is That?“, because just when you thought you had a handle on it, he would point out some other perspective, and you would go back to “what the hell is that?”
• Reflection basics. This was a Sunday session with Ted Neward, who knows more about whatever topic he’s talking about than you do (really, he does). Unfortunately, it ended up being a Reflection 101 session and didn’t get to some of the things the session summary had described (annotations, dynamic proxies) so I was mostly tuned out. But then at the end someone asked an innocuous question about classloaders, and Ted pointed out that you can get the name of the location where a class was loaded from, not from the classloader, but from the security system’s ProtectionDomain. Since that seems to be an equally interesting question when debugging strange errors (”where the heck did this class come from???”), I was amazed at how simple the solution was:
  
String classLocation = this.getClass().getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource().toString();

  It’s little tidbits like this that fall out unexpectedly that remind me of the sometimes serendipitous value of conferences.

It is interesting to think of how much of the speaker lineup has changed in the past few years with the migration of many of those folks to Ruby work, but the speakers that Jay brings in are still really strong, well-prepared and engaging. As long as he can keep doing that, I’ll keep going back.

There are plenty of map projections that show the world on a piece of paper, but when you apply scaling measures that aren’t geographic, you get something very different. You get Worldmapper.

The maps there are powerful. Newspaper stories with tables of numbers or even bar graphs of measures such as wealth or disease are data, but envisioning the information involves trying to explain the numbers, not just present them. With one of these maps, you have compelling visuals that tell a different story than a table of numbers. Place a couple of maps side by side and you can tell even more stories.

A couple of examples:

• Wealth Growth. We often hear about who the wealthiest people or countries are, but just as compelling is to see the trajectory: where is the wealth heading. It is certainly not an even race.
• Absolute Poverty (up to $2 a day). The quote by John Kenneth Galbraith on the page is worth the visit: “Trickle-down theory - the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”
• Secondary Education. Sending children to school beyond primary schooling is not that easy, for any number of reasons. This, though, is where people are taught more than the rudimentaries of reading and writing, and where real independence and power begins.

So Bill Lueders, the long time news editor for The Isthmus weekly newspaper, has finally discovered Farley Mowat. Bummer. He is someone you want to discover early if you want to have any chance of catching up with his output. And I guess I haven’t been paying attention, because he apparently released another book just last year, Bay of Spirits.

Farley Mowat is one of a small group of authors that I love, not just because their books are so wonderful, but because they are also so prolific that I can have a bunch of mini-binges of them over the years, and never repeat myself. I can binge on someone like Barbara Kingsolver, but that means going back and reading ones I’ve read before; with Mowat, it seems like you never run out. I’ve probably read less than a dozen of his books, which still leaves lots of choices for the years ahead. (And if I’m getting too much Mowat, I pick a John McPhee book at random and get ready to be fascinated by something I had never considered before. )

Which is the other quality that makes Mowat’s books so enticing: from native tribal life, to wildlife, to human aggrevation, to childhood stories, I’ll either be laughing, crying, steaming, or sighing. But never bored. A steady diet of a single author does crowd out the chance to read others’ ideas and stories, but with someone with as varied a taste and life experience as Mowat, you can forget that you’re reading from just one life.

For the last few years, I’ve found myself in a reading rhythm where I finish one book and immediately pick up another. Not the next day, but the next minute. It doesn’t feel like I’m racing to get through them, just that I’m somehow thinking that I can squeeze more books into the day. I doubt that it has really made much difference, other than keeping me from pondering what the story really meant. There was a time when I was taking time at the end of a book to actually put down some of the impressions it left on me. It was a discipline that I fell out of, and one that I didn’t notice as that useful until I would try to remember just what some book was about; the thoughts weren’t profound for the ages, they simply remind me of the why it was that I really liked that book.

In the spirit of trying to get back in shape, this is what my summer reading this year left in me.

I finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle with mixed feelings. At times it was a heartfelt journal of a journey with unexpected wisdom emerging, and at others it was a dry textbook of facts and how-to tips. When she was telling stories of their life, I felt that I could lean back into it and have a sense for the shape of their life. And when she spoke of the larger issues that their year was part of, I listened close, because she has a way of putting things that often casts new light on an issue. For instance, at one point she is thinking about the politics of place and class, and the way that rural communities of people fit into our modern world.

Out uneasy relationship between heartland and coasts, farm and factory, country and town, is certainly real. But it is both more rudimentary and more subtle than most political analysts make it out to be. It’s about loyalties, perceived communities, and the things each side understands to be important because of the ground, literally, upon which we stand. Wendell Berry summed it up much better than “blue and red” in one line of dialogue from his novel Jayber Crow, which is peopled by farmers struggling to survive on what the modern, mostly urban market will pay for food. After watching nearly all the farms in the county go bankrupt, one of these men comments: “I’ve wished sometimes that the sons of bitches would starve. And now I’m getting afraid they actually will.”

But when I got to the interludes, where her husband described food or environmental issues with a drier bent, I felt like I should be sitting up taking notes. And when her daughter offered her short takes on the teenager’s view of it all, along with recipes to try, it felt like reading the folksy, lifestyle section of a newspaper. None of these were bad writing at all, they just made for a mix that broke up the flow.

In the end, the gift that this book brings is her ability to convey that this is not about making grand gestures or heroic stands. It is about living in line with your values, keeping your eye on the small things and knowing that it does make a difference. What difference does it make to eat tomotoes grown in your yard, as opposed to those trucked in from California? Probably more than you imagine, starting with happier taste buds and leading into deeper personal space that may be harder to notice but none the less real. If that sounds too much like new-age drivel or personal rationalizing, perhaps it is, but it’s also an opening to consider how our choices affect not just the world, but ourselves.

I share with almost every adult I know this crazy quilt of optimism and worries, feeling locked into certain habits but keen to change them in the right direction. And the tendency to feel like a jerk for falling short of absolute conversion. I’m not sure why. If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It’s the worst of bad manners–and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society–to ridicule the small gesture. These earnest efforts might just get us past the train-wreck of the daily news, or the anguish of standing behind a child, looking with her at the road ahead, searching out redemption where we can find it: recycling or carpooling or growing a garden or saving a species or something. Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren’t trivial. Ultimately they will, or won’t, add up to having been the thing that mattered.

Mark Harris’ book Bang the Drum Slowly ended up being a great read during Saturday morning free time - that extended time during swim team meets when my kids weren’t in the water. The first thing I realized was that Roger Ebert is right when he counters the standard review of the story (”this isn’t a baseball story”), saying that it really is a baseball story. That is, the story lives in the world of a baseball season, and the narrator’s world that he shares is that of a baseball player. The thing that makes it much more than a baseball story is that you end up caring more about what is happening to Bruce, the catcher dying of Hodgkins Disease, and about how the other players are changed by it, than you are about how the baseball season is going.

His writing style takes some getting used to, and at first I wondered if it was really bad writing or really good writing that imitates how a bad writer might write. It is certainly unique, and effective. There isn’t much sugar coating of the dialogue that goes on, so the feelings that come through stand out as genuine, such as when Bruce has an episode late at night where the cancer is starting to affect him, and they’re staying in the team hotel.

“Is the doctor coming?”
“Yes,” said I. “Goose went after him.”
“Why Goose?” said he.
“Why not? said I. “He was the first person I thought of. He has a heart of gold underneath.”
“It just never really showed before,” he said.
“People are pretty damn OK when they feel like it,” I said.
“Probably you told him or something,” he said.
“I never told a soul,” said I.
“Probably everybody be nice to you if they knew you were dying,” he said.
“Everybody knows everybody is dying,” I said. “That is why people are nice. You all die soon enough, so why not be nice to each other?”

After reading Mark Harris’ description of the making of the film version, and how much he liked what came out, I thought I’d watch it and see what a great baseball movie could be. I’ve got to say that I remain in waiting for a movie that comes anywhere close to being as good as the book. The movie wasn’t bad, but to me it was still a pale cousin of the book.

It was interesting, then, when I moved on to Original Zinn, a set of interviews between Howard Zinn and David Barsamian that ranges over a wide range of topics, including a discussion of movies and books. The best part is at the end of his answer.

David Barsamian: Talk about the value of literature and the printed word… For example, you ask someone, “Did you read The English Patient by the Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje?” And they say, “No I didn’t read the book, but I saw the movie.”…

Howard Zinn: I sometimes say that myself [Laughs] But most of the time I do read the book before I see the movie, and most always I am disappointed because if you have a really good book, movies will rarely do justice to it…. I’d often use this test to confirm my belief, hardly based on scientific inquiry…that the visual media, as sensational and glamorous and mesmerizing as they can be, do have the lasting influence that books have…. Many people have told me, “I read this book and it changed my life.” Many people have told me that about various books. Nobody has ever said that to me about a film.

One things that seems to make Zinn so special is that he doesn’t only talk about history as a view of the long, lost past. Instead, he reminds us that we are and can be a part of it. History isn’t detached, made by other, bigger people, it is here and now, made up of the lives of all of us.

Barsamian: Molly Ivins, the syndicated columnist and author of the bestseller Bushwhacked, reports on citizens who say they are not interested in politics and have this sense of resignation and hopelessness. What do you say to people who feel there is no use in getting involved?

Zinn: Well, like Molly Ivins, I hear those cynical comments a lot. It’s interesting because I may be speaking to a college audience or an audience of community people, fifteen hundred people, and someone gets up from the audience and says, What can I do? We’re really helpless. And I say, Look around. There are fifteen hundred people sitting here. These fifteen hundred people have just applauded me very enthusiastically for speaking out against the war or for speaking out against the monopolization of power and wealth…. So keep in mind that all over this country there are many, many people who add up to millions of people who care about the same things you do.

Now, whether their caring can have an effect is something you can’t judge immediately. Here is where history comes in handy. If you look back at the development of social movements in history, what do you find? You find that they start with hopelessness. They start with small groups of people meeting, acting in their local communities and looking at the enormous power of the government or the enormous power of corporations and thinking, we don’t have a chance–there is nothing we can do. And then what you find at certain points of history is that these small movements become larger ones, they grow. There’s a kind of electronic vibration that moves across from one to the other. This is what happened in the sit-in movements in the sixties. This is how the civil rights movement developed. It developed out of the smallest of actions taken in little communities….

The other book I planned to start this summer with, iWoz, is still sitting there. I may have to wait until I’m not so used to good writers before tackling that. Instead, I’ve found myself drawn back to a few others that I read years ago.

• Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, by Martin Prechtel, a story of a life experience in Guatemala unlike any you’re likely to hear. It’s even a different experience for me now than reading it ten years ago, mainly because I have a different minds-eye view of the village he was in after having visited it a few times now.
• The End of the Road, and The Big Garage on Clear Shot, by Tom Bodett. We were short of library books for the ritual bedtime reading I do with the kids, so I tried out one of the stories, and my oldest son got hooked. They take a little explaining at times to a 10-year-old, but for Sara and I it’s like revisiting an old set of friends.

Software development is a team sport. Places can try to hide that fact with cubicles and individual assignments, but the fact remains that putting a system together takes a diverse group of people to pull it off: managers, developers, users, testers, writers, the list of roles goes on. But how often is thought put into how to create and maintain the effectiveness of a team? Most organizations don’t seem to be too far past the idea of team members as replaceable resources. The most common strategy is “hire the best people and put them together.”

Bob Sutton, though, describes how that is not quite right in Fight The War For Talent Right. He points to studies that show that a team that is working well together should be kept together. This is the kind of obvious conclusion that is no surprise at all to those who have been on teams, but it is quantitative results that might resonate with those who have to make more detached management decisions.

…while HR practices turn attention to individual stars, study after study shows when people have experience working together – and have learned who knows what, how to read those little signals that people send off, and can communicate ideas quickly and efficiently – their teams and organizations perform better.

I’ve had the chance to work on a few teams like that, where the cohesiveness that started on one project carries over when that same team starts on another project. You don’t need to learn who is the go-to person for database questions, or who can help figure out a weird server issue. The most elusive and valuable quality of a team is its ability to gel, to be more than just a collection of people doing their own pieces of the puzzle. When you have a team that has gelled, you want to maintain that. As Bob Sutton puts it, the team, then, should be the unit of hiring when possible.

If you are going to hire some “talent,” don’t focus on just landing that lone star – focus on hiring as much of his or her team, or network, as possible. You win the war for talent by bringing aboard talented sets of people, not talented solo acts.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that this advice is just as valid for recruiting or retaining people inside your company - keep success together and you’ll go farther, faster.