Brugge Blog

A wonderful story came by last week, the kind that catches you immediately with a simple and clear wisdom that it shares. It’s an old story, but one I hadn’t heard before. And it was told during the children’s message time at our church, but it caught many more than just the children.

It’s a story attributed to Native American tradition.

One evening a grandfather was teaching his young grandson about the internal battle that each person faces.
“There are two wolves struggling inside each of us,” the old man said.
“One wolf is vengefulness, anger, resentment, self‐pity, fear . . .
“The other wolf is compassion, faithfulness, hope, truth, love . . .”
The grandson sat, thinking, then asked: “Which wolf wins, Grandfather?”
His grandfather replied, “The one you feed.”

It turns out that this wisdom was graciously shared with President Obama on inauguration day as well, by Rev. Sharon Watkins. While she is urging him to remember this when acting on a large stage, it’s a reminder to all of us, in ourselves and in our communities every day: feed the good wolf.

It was a year ago last November that I got the chance to step in to a different kind of working world, and I’ve got to say it’s been a life changer. Benetech, where I’m working on the new generation of Bookshare.org, is out to change the world, but in places that very few other high-tech startups consider as “markets.” The focus of Benetech ventures is places you would see the traditional non-profits: environmental stewardship, human rights, literacy. The difference here is that Benetech is finding ways to blend in technology as a leverage bar to give the same power and advantage to social causes that’s given to your usual business problems. It’s really just a broadening of the imagination of what problems can be worked on with technology, as Tim O’Reilly would say.

The founder and head of Benetech, Jim Fruchterman, is a tireless and eloquent champion of this world view. His Beneblog is what first pulled me in when I started reading it about two years ago. He chronicles a vibrant and energetic world of social entrepreneurs who are drawing the vast array of technical tools we have into forms that make amazing differences in the lives of people, not just through Benetech but through new organizations around the world.

Some examples of the waters that Benetech is swimming in:

• Giving convservation organizations tools to better work with the land they help protect.
• Helping Guatemala sift through a mountain of National Police records to better face their most recent history.
• Working with the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission to catalog and analyze the human rights history during their recent war.
• Taking on the challenge of how to make technology available to people who need it, in whatever social, physical or economic condition they find themselves in. Lofty? Yes. Important? Certainly. Possible? Don’t count them out.

That’s just a slice of a world where others are just as imaginative and ambitious:

• Literacy and visual impairment work on the scale of India
• Bringing books to rural areas in China by backpacking “voluntourists.”
• Using cell phones to provide basic banking services to the underserved in Africa.
• Sharing ideas, lessons and inspiration to other social entrepreneurs at gatherings like the World Economic Forum and through groups like the Social Enterprise Alliance, to keep the energy going. And then celebrating champions with the San Jose Tech Museum Tech Awards.

The wonderful part is that viewed from the inside of the movement, within the day-to-day work of building the new Bookshare.org, it is just as exciting. Working with top-notch engineers, quality tools, and an entire team focused on something that everyone feels is worth being passionate about, you can’t call those kinds of days drudge work.

In four presidential and vice-presidential debates, you could say they were as telling in what was not said as in what was.

There was plenty of talk of energy and drilling, but little about the environment or global warming.

There was plenty of talk of anger and fear, but little about compassion.

There was plenty of talk of the rich and the middle class, but not a mention of the poor and the hungry.

There was plenty of talk of war, but none of peace.

When will we talk about these?

A Google search may have found it for me, but it would have taken longer and more weeding, partly because I didn’t know what to call it: “what does the electoral college landscape look like?” is what I was thinking. Because as surprisingly close as the popular vote polls seemed to show it to be, I wondered what that looked like where it really counted, in the votes that decide who wins. And then I saw a blogger who had the same question and found the answer: FiveThirtyEight.com. There are other sites out there doing this as well, but the combination of presentation, analysis, and depth of numbers at FiveThirtyEight beats any of the others. If you don’t want the details, the graphics at the top tell you what you need. As you go down the page, things get progressively more detailed, until you’re down to the raw numbers, state by state, with source references and calculations.

You could spend all day there, or just a few minutes. That’s information design done right.

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.