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Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

The Truth Machine (A Blockchain History)

Posted in Books, Computers, Future, Society and Class, Software Development, tagged , , , , , , on 09 Mar 2018| Leave a Comment »

There’s been a lot of churn lately over the price of Bitcoin. There’s also been much talk about uses (commercial and otherwise) for the blockchain technology that underlies it. I’ve taken an interest, as of late, in the subject and I found a promising source of information in the Michael J Casey, Paul Vigna book The Truth Machine.

If you’re looking for a book on how to write blockchain software. This book isn’t going to be of much interest to you. If you have interest in the history of the technology, its applications and societal impacts, you will find it to be a solid read.

Bitcoin and  Ethereum, and the like are discussed with enough depth to provide non-developers a good sense of use cases. This is after all the point of a technology. Otherwise you’ve got yourself shelfware. All the major players are discussed running the gamut from crypto-anarchists to Wall Street bankers. I find the dynamic of these two extremes battling over this technology fascinating.

One definitely comes away with the sense that the technology is still very much a work in progress. Personally, I find it unfortunate that the public sees it as another get-rich-quick methodology. This loops back to the volatility of the Coin markets.

Another, and arguably more important, takeaway is that the systems currently in place do not scale (or at least have yet to be proven to scale). That Bitcoin can process six transactions per second in a world where Visa processed ten thousand is quite telling.

The underlying problem of who’s in charge comes to mind. Without some form of human governance, poor programming will result in bad actors taking advantage of the system. Nowhere does the book address the issue of longevity. The thing about paper (or animal hide for that matter) is that it has a permanence that has proven itself outside of our advances in storage technology. If we did move to a blockchain-based system of ownership tracking, what happens when another, better one comes along? What will the impact of quantum computing be in a world where work is proportional to CPU expended? What happens when people decide that it’s easier to steal the resources used to mine the coin?

I only have a few issues with the book.

First, for a book on a complex technological subject, I expect extra fact checking. I noticed two rookie mistakes in this department. ASIC is defined as ‘Application-Specific Integrated Chips’ whereas it should be ‘Application-Specific Integrated Circuit.’ It also doesn’t require quotes. In the realm of techno-history, the authors attributed Public-Key Cryptography to Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. This is of course incorrect. That distinction belongs to James H Ellis (at least until the NSA owns up to when they started using it). Although his work was once classified, it have been publicly recognized for some time now.

Second, the book wanders off the path of techno-history and into the realm of  conspiracy theory and political opinion when they introduce ‘speculation’ of hacking in the MH370 incident and spend the bulk of the last chapter on the latter.

On the whole, I found the book to be a very good and current survey of the landscape of blockchain technology and its history.

 

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Mind the Gap: da Vinci the Man

Posted in Books, creativity, Education, science, tagged , , , , on 26 Dec 2017| Leave a Comment »

I just finished reading Walter Isaacson‘s biography of Leonardo da Vinci. As with his previous biographies, this one is just as well-researched and presented.

Leonardo is one of those one name people. Long before Prince, Madonna or Usher (funny how they’re all designations of some sort) the name da Vinci was attributed to only one individual. All this fuss over a distracted, self willed, person who started far more things than he finished.

Yes, he was a prima donna. Yes, he tended to tinker over a thing far after the commissioner expected it to be complete. Yes, he was distracted by, well, just about anything. But, what a mind.

Best of all, he just didn’t seem to give a damn. About expectations, glory or money. Which is not to say that he didn’t care about comfort. He liked pretty things (and pretty people). But one gets the distinct impression that what he really wanted was to have a patron (patron sounds so much nicer than sugar daddy) who would appreciate the quality and not quantity of his work. He wanted the freedom to explore the universe (such as it was in the late 15th and early 16th century).

He loved pageantry. He loved to learn, to teach and to collaborate. He was a self-promoter who appears to have been not really up to the task.

He was always stretching, always reaching beyond his understanding. He was always reinventing himself.

People would commission him based on his past works. Many times this lead nowhere for them. With da Vinci, they should have been thinking about what he might do rather than what he had done. How poorly would he fare in today’s world where people are hired to essentially give repeat performances. This being especially true in the technology sector. Kind of like wanting to visit an exotic land where you stay at Holiday Inn, eat at McDonalds and everyone speaks English. Or in perhaps more relevant terms, you invest in a startup that’s going to change the world with a guaranteed return and no risk.

Leonardo was the definition of the deep bench. It wasn’t until the end of his life that he found in the king of France a person who got that you don’t “hire” a Leonardo for what he does, but rather for who he is and how he changes those around him. I find it quite disappointing they expectation that people have of being assured an immediate return at a cut rate. This is the measure of mediocrity in both the individual and business worlds. People want to be given a fish and have no patience to learn how to fish themselves. How much better would the world be if we sought out and nurtured those capable of creating a multiplier effect?

He was also very human. He could be unreliable and ill tempered. His relationship with his relatives was the stuff of reality television.

Isaacson does an excellent job of putting meat on the bones of this icon of creativity.

I’ve read quite a few treatments of da Vinci’s life s one is by far the best. So many seem to be intended to ride the tide of get-genius-quick that is so pervasive today. Nothing like everyone being above average. He didn’t become the man come icon overnight. He became who we know over a lifetime, with the attendant work. As Isaacson noted, he is seen as a genius rather than a craftsman because, but certainly not solely, of his habit of not releasing his work until it was perfected. Granted for most people this would be attributed more to OCD than genius (and with good reason).

Isaacson’s narrative style is engaging and I hope that someone takes the time to translate it to a long-form, visual format.

Overall, I came away with the sense that da Vinci was a real person who inhabited a real world. I can’t say I’d’ve liked to have lived there, but it’d’ve been fun to visit.

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Principles in Practice

Posted in Books, Leadership, tagged , , on 29 Oct 2017| Leave a Comment »

Whenever I take long trip I try to bring a book to read. When I went to CppCon 2017 in September, I brought Ray Dalio‘s Principles. Ray founded the world’s largest hedge fund. His company Bridgewater, is the exemplar for his book. [29 April 2018 Note: I’d actually completed the book during that trip, but got distracted by other things. I let this linger for far too long.]

At this point, I could assert that having created an organization a large and successful as Bridgewater would be justification for following the methodology he espouses. After all, isn’t that what we do, chase success is search of our own? If your desire is to leverage Ray’s book for that, you’ve failed before you’ve even started.

The information you will find in Principles is slow burning. Everything about his methodology requires tremendous time, effort and attention to detail. Let’s look at how the book decomposes:

In the first part (of three), he gives his personal backstory. This takes about 120 pages of the 550 or so page book. That’s a lot of exposition for a book ostensibly about life and work being able to be systematized. Then again, this isn’t a “here’s a fish” kind of book. If someone is going to purport to present a set a principles leading to success, you need to establish that you actually have the chops. And those chops don’t come from those whose success is inherited or the result of random chance. As has been said in many forms, “you learn nothing from success, but you learn everything from failure.”

The second part (about 150 pages) is devoted to life principles. The takeaway here is that work success is an extension of who you are. Your work, as opposed to your job, is not a coat to be put on, like some bulwark against the financial storms of life. To many his life principles are quite Machiavellian. While having clear goals is the basis of any true achievement, and root causing problems and designing solutions around them are in service to that end; both not tolerating problems that stand in your way and doing what is necessary to achieve results fall into the ruthless bucket. In no way am I opposed to his principles. In fact, I wouldn’t have personally accepted his work principles had he not been ruthless in his personal ones.

The third part is the thing we came to see, it covers his work principles. Here again, we see the division into thirds. They are culture, people and organization.

In the area of culture, first and foremost are the dual concepts of radical truth and radical transparency. On this foundation is having meaningful work and relationships. Next, and where I’ve seen many companies fail miserably, the culture needs to accept mistakes but demand that people learn from them. Once things are spun up, you have to keep everyone in sync. This goes back to the ideas of radical truth and acceptance of mistakes.

On the people front, you must hire the right people. Hiring the wrong people will kill your company eventually. In that vein, who the people are (life principles) is more important that what they know. People with a good foundation can be built upon. Those without can’t. Finally, you must constantly refresh people’s skills. This rigorous regime of renewal is not something that everyone can embrace. When people don’t … well, we’re back to Machiavelli.

Lastly, he addresses the organization itself. In many ways, his approach to the organization is identical to that of a person. The same issues of goals, problem tolerance, evaluation and improvement apply. That may sound like I’m short changing that part of book, but given Ray’s premise that work is an extension of the self, it’s only natural that the organization is an extension of the people working there.

This book is one you will either embrace as an affirmation, or reject as too demanding. As to why I don’t believe that there’ll be any middle ground, the title says it all. You either see the material in the book as principles or you don’t.

I, for one, do.

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The Play’s the Thing: Glimpsing the World of Claude Shannon

Posted in Books, Computers, tagged , , , , , , , , on 22 Oct 2017| Leave a Comment »

The early years of computing were a like a Renaissance dance, lots of people who somehow manage to get to dance with each other at least once. A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age gives us yet another place to stand and watch that dance.

Claude Shannon is one of those people who fundamentally changed the way we look at the world. The problem with fundamental change is that we tend to be on one side or the other of it. Today we speak of information theory as though it’s as obvious a concept as making paper. Kind of the same way we obsess over software developers being able to write code to sort numbers or reverse linked lists. At some point, the fundamental reality of the existence of high-quality libraries and data structures will make these queries as relevant as requiring people to explain a tape sort. But I digress.

He was a researcher, tinkerer, teacher, juggler, and for all appearances didn’t seem attached to labels. He had Vannevar Bush looking out for him. As an MIT professor, he had Danny Hillis and Ivan Sutherland, among others, as doctoral students. He worked with Alan Turing during World War II. And the box-switch-thing that turns itself off. That was him.

Reading the book, you get a sense of possibilities explored. So often people either dismiss or defer possibilities. He literally had a basement full of them. If only he’d know Ron Popeil, every home might have a few of them.

I don’t know how well he would fare in the world today. In his time, Bell Labs basically paid to have him around. He had cachet. He also helped focus people’s ideas. He brought this sensibility to MIT with him as a professor. We get so terribly wrapped up in being hyper-specialized, in know the what but not the why. To often we come across the proverbial Gordian knot and turn away. People are either unwilling to try, or believing themselves to be special, simply act as though the problem does not exist. (Treating people poorly and flaunting violations of the law fall into this category.) Few people are willing to question the fundamentals. What do you need? What do you have?

The interesting people are those who solve problems and help other people solve problems, not by merely telling them what the answer is, but by enabling them to see that solutions can come from places that aren’t necessarily rooted in the past ways of doing things.

In our day and age, when we focus on special skills and special languages and special hardware, it would behoove us to remember that there is no best skill or language or hardware. There is only the universe of problems. It is far more valuable to be able to help others see the shape of the solution than to be an individual capable of providing a answer to a well-defined question whose value will in time expire.

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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Posted in Books, General, tagged , , , on 15 Jul 2017| Leave a Comment »

I just finished reading Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. Perception is a fickle thing. When IBM created a text editor for their mainframe terminals, they ran into a weird problem. They we too fast. Changes were applied to the screen faster than people would perceive them. In order to nudge the brains of their users, they made the screen flash when a change occurred.

Working in an industry where people want high returns on low risk, I find myself at a loss to explain my sense of what is the right or wrong path. On more than one occasion. I have spend days preparing presentations to give decision makers warm fuzzies in dealing with issues which seem perfectly obvious to me. It takes days because there is a long way between perfectly obvious and the breadcrumb laden trail that people seem to need.

Unfortunately, you can’t Google yourself into a state of experience. So the question becomes, you do want to understand or just cover you ass? A paper trail does this quite nicely. At some point, you must make the decision.

If you want to glimpse the process, read the book.

 

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Code Warriors: A Cryptic Tale

Posted in Books, Computers, security, tagged , , , , on 27 Jun 2017| 1 Comment »

I’ve just finished reading Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union by Stephen Budiansky. It tells the story of the US National Security Agency (NSA) up through the end of the Cold War.

Given the number of dry histories of the people and agencies who deal with cryptography and spying, this book is reasonably readable. If you’re looking for a less arch, and more human view on how things got to where they are; you’ll like this book.

The takeaway from the book is that the biggest hindrance in the world of security is people. People who are control freaks or don’t believe that rules apply to them, or believe that the “other side” is stupid, or are just too damn lazy to do the simple things that would avoid issues are the problem. You can’t design your way around them. If you try, you’ll only make things worse.

You can’t pretend you have the moral high ground when you’re collecting enough information to make the US National Archives, the Library of Congress, Google and Facebook look redundant. I’m not picking sides, I’m just saying that if you’ve got a hammer and you use the hammer, own up to the fact and don’t go around telling everybody and their brother that they shouldn’t use hammers and that in fact that hammers either don’t exist or are illegal (or would be if they did actually exist, which they don’t).

Along the way, you’ll be introduced to a cast of well-intentioned, clueless, brilliant and ruthless individuals. There are miscommunications, denial of responsibilities, bruised egos, moments of insight and face palm moments.

Please keep in mind Hanlon’s razor.

 

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On Point

Posted in Books, Computers, Future, Society and Class, Software Development, tagged , , , , on 26 Jun 2017| Leave a Comment »

The Chrysanthemum and The Sword is an exploration of what makes the Japanese tick. At least from the standpoint of a early 20th century scholar. Ruth Benedict was one of that era’s foremost anthropologist.

I could go into the interesting discussion of how the American and Japanese cultures are compared and contrasted. Or how she describes the Japanese approach to Buddhism as being free of non-corporeal entanglements. I’ll leave those to the earnest reader.

What made the greatest impression on me was the lengthy and detailed exploration of on (恩) and giri (義理). These can broadly thought of as debt and obligation. In the west, we have a fixation on equivalent exchange. We like to pretend that there is nothing which cannot be fully bought and paid for. The Japanese fully recognize that this is not the case and have build a society around the concepts of overlapping obligations.

One that I have always found difficult to explain is that of shogimu (諸義務) or obligation to one’s teacher/mentor. This is always an asymmetrical relationship. The apprentice has nothing to offer in exchange in comparison to what they are given. In the west, we, as they say, “just take the money and run.” This is especially true in regard to the attitude of Googling for the answers. People have come to believe that they can monetize the collected knowledge of the world without cost to themselves. The problem comes not to this first generation, but to the second and finally fully realized in the third generation of internet users. The problem is that of who supplies the knowledge.

One of the big complaints of the pre-internet era was how big companies hoarded knowledge, making it available only at a premium. Should it not be free to all? Between the small band of developers (relatively speaking) who contributed to open source, the internet and google, we find ourselves in a place where you don’t need a master to monetize. And so rather than having to pay for software as a function of complexity and craftsmanship, we tolerate mediocre software because it’s free (with ads or in exchange for our personal information).

Meanwhile that high quality software we wouldn’t pay for when it was $400 with a year of updates, we will pay for when it’s a $120 annual subscription to a cloud service. Except that now if we stop paying, we lose access.

But back to the thorny question. Do we really believe that the Google-for-code and I-built-it-all-from-other-people’s-stuff crowd are going to give back to the community? What will happen when those who made all these goodies possible and available retire? If we take the C++ community as an example, there are hundreds supporting millions. This doesn’t scale.

Answers? Nope.

Thoughts? Some.

Personally, I’ve got a bucket full of on, so I should get back to it.

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Failure Is Not An Option, It’s A Requirement

Posted in Books, Software Development, tagged , on 11 Jun 2016| Leave a Comment »

One of the nice things about taking months or even years to finish reading a book is that it gives me plenty of time to reflect on it. Sure, I could binge read, but the material is far less sticky. The longer I spend with a book, the more connections I can make. “Failure Is Not An Option,” which I just completed a few days ago, is a good example of this.

The book itself is a retelling of history of the manned space program from the point of view of someone intimately familiar with the events. At first blush, it would appear to have nothing to do with the process of software development. The Apple Pencil I’m using at the moment probably has more computing power than anything available at the time. So, what is the connection?

It is absolutely true that when dealing with matters of human life that failure is not an option. When you look at the history of American manned space flight from the outside, the only thing you see is the ultimate expression of this. You see successful execution, even in the case of unforeseen situations. And that’s the key, it’s from the outside. Success was not achieved because perfect people perfectly executed perfect plans using perfect equipment under perfect conditions. Yes, there were times when the execution, equipment or conditions were perfect. Most of the time, success was ensured inspite of less than perfect conditions. For me that’s the story.

During the space program, failure was a mandate. When you exist in a world of constrained resources, the best way to ensure that you will be successful is to see how you respond when the resources that you depend upon are available. But, wouldn’t you always being everything you needed and have it on hand? One would hope so, but let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you didn’t. What then? If something bad happens, how much time do you have to get things back on track before it’s game over? Well, that depends on what happened, when it happened and how important it was.

Okay, sure, fine, but what did they do and what does it have to do with software development?

In the case of the space program, failure was ensured before the mission. Every possible they could conceive of. Teams of people had the sole job of enducing failures during mission simulations. We’re not talking SimCity or Second Life here. These simulations were conducted in physical hardware as identical as possible. The difference is that this user interface was driven not by physical sensors, but computers. Crews were made to experience failure over and over until their responses were second nature. When you think about it, this is no different from any physical endeavor. The more you train yourself to respond to situational changes, the better your performance becomes.

As of late, I believe that many of the problems with software and hardware have been coming about because of a focus merely on the “happy path.” The idea that we should worry first about making it work and then later about failure conditions. Unfortunately, once management sees something that “works,” they  are unlikely to allocate time to break things. The situation has been made worse by the attitude that software will be tested in beta.

As a result, not only is inferior quality software being produced, but the software is being used in environments which expose their data to exfiltration. We see this is malware infecting point-of-sale systems. We see it in OpenSSL and other open source code. Software being widely adopted under the assumption that someone else must be testing it. Entire generations argue for speed over safety.

So, why has this attitude taken hold? Is it harder to design for failure first? Not really. In fact, it makes unit testing easier as it builds in the failure paths before the actual implementation. But doesn’t this make the code slower? Not implicitly. Between the use of modern tool chains and profile guided optimization, the cost of fail first, fail fast is minimal. Why don’t we do privilege segregation? For the same reason we don’t apply principles of  MVC, MVVM or VIPER. People sit in front of a screen and type. They use the excuse of doing “agile” development on short cycles for not properly planning. Now, I have nothing against short cycles, but to be used properly, you have to accept that not every problem can be evaluated, solved, implemented and tested in 2 or 3 weeks. Some things are hard. Some things can only be accomplished by specific individuals. Some tasks have dependencies on outside resources. Software isn’t building IKEA furniture. There are high level of indeterminacy that can and do crop up.

Neither can we pretend that the software we create lives in isolation or that security is the responsibility of the user. Holding onto data simply because it would make the developer’s job easier during development is not enough of a reason. Not using OS provided encrypted data storage because it makes it harder to debug is simply lame. Transmitting data in the clear or without access control just invites both data exfiltration and command-and-control injection.

Here’s the thing. If you want to succeed, you must fail. You must fail first and you must fail fast. Failure helps to characterize the system. It helps in the creation of documentation. It helps validate the design. Failure makes gives you a better understanding of the problem space. In short, failure is not an option; it is a requirement.

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Inferno

Posted in Books, tagged , on 25 Aug 2013| Leave a Comment »

My fiction to non-fiction ratio is in general fairly low.

That being said, I do like the occasional Dan Brown novel.

Inferno is one of those books that begs to be made into a movie. It doesn’t so much have chapters as it does scenes. It’s not Dickens, but Dickens isn’t what I would consider as my go-to author when I’m traveling.

As one might expect, there are plentiful historic references, plot twists and general dashings about.

Robert Landgon has become the Henry Jones, Jr. of modern fiction.

In general I find it to be a guilty pleasure.

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Dale Carnegie: The Man Who Influenced Millions

Posted in Books, Leadership, tagged , , , , , on 16 Jun 2013| Leave a Comment »

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Giles Kemp and Edward Claflin’s book “Dale Carnegie: The Man Who Influenced Millions.”
Having been a member of several speech clubs in the past, as well as having made a lifetime worth of presentations, I really didn’t think there was much to be learned from Carnegie’s course.

I came across a review of Carnegie’s book that mentioned that Carnegie left out a chapter on dealing this toxic personalities. This is the book referred to.

To some extent, I find Carnegie’s life to be ironic. To the public, he’s perceived as being the the perfect speaker and someone at ease in any situation. In reality, he was uncomfortable outside of his “school’s” environment. He created a mechanism that allows people to be more self-assured and better at dealing with others. But, being able to teach others does not imply mastery of the techniques being taught.

In my reading of impactful individuals from the last 300 years, I am saddened that there is very little possibility for someone to replicate their path in today’s world. Carnegie never completed junior college ant yet was able to achieve great success teaching even the captains of industry.

Unlike the traditional biography, vignettes are presented from contemporary (1989) Carnegie classes.

The book is well worth the read.

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