Thaumato

I’m a big beneficiary of other people’s problems.

I’ve solved many technical mysteries by looking through the gothic horror stories of other people’s grisly disasters. And it could never have been possible if folks hadn’t posted their problems online, and received a reply containing the silver bullet to put in their gun and fire into the werewolf’s chest. So this time I thought I’d give back, just a tiny bit. I had an issue with my subversion repository locking up. I would get this error:
svn: Connection closed unexpectedly

whether I used the svn commandline interface or tortoise. Fortunately this post exists. Thank you AdamGreenfield.

The trick is - copying verbatim from Adam:
-bash-3.00$ cp -raf repos repos.orig
-bash-3.00$ db_recover -h repos/db/
-bash-3.00$ svnadmin verify ./repos/

Basically db_recover unlocks the db which is behind svn. After I did this everything worked fine.

As I was closing the reddit browser window for hopefully the last time (though I know I’ll probably go back) I thought what might keep me from returning (besides the endless political hyperbole) would be if I could transfer the karma I have over there to hacker news.

I know its totally meaningless, but I think it would be cool if karma could be exchanged between any site which cares to participate in such an arrangement. I think what’s been missing from the many attempts to create artificial online currencies is the freedom to move your currency between worlds. In fact, it would be really cool if you could move the experience gained in say, World of Warcraft into the new Warhammer online game coming out. It would be tricky to manage, but it would establish that gamers and online denizens are not just wasting time but actually building wealth. The key to realizing that wealth is the ability to move it about. It could also substitute for the efforts to create some kind of artificial online reputation - your online wealth would vouch for you. Your karma or facebook gifts or digg votes or whatever would be traceable, and tradeable. If the exchange was minded by an independent group or corporation and traded in all sorts of online currencies you might actually get IPO’ing of invites to a new beta or something - a place where people could track the rise or fall of startups and online life and perhaps the creation of a currency that could be used to solve the spam problem.

I know Joel suggested 1cent - what about 1/1000th of a karma point? At least then the spammers would have to be bringing some good to the online world they pollute. It’s almost gnostic.

…Is the greatest album of all time.

Not that this is news to anyone -but my laptop runs Vista and it sucks big time.
The main reason it sucks so hard is that it can’t even be relied on to do the normal, regular, day-to-day computer stuff I need it for.
Sure its slow, that I could live with if it was stable. But left alone for more than 30 minutes and there is a 90% chance that when I return it will have frozen up. I will need to hard power it down and boot it back up. This cannot be good for the disk. Also - about 5% of the time when I am browsing the file system using Windows Explorer, explorer itself crashes - the program! WTF!

I use this machine for development and its configured with all the ssh keys I need for my subversion repositories and for communicating with ec2 - but I am very seriously considering moving over to Ubuntu. Just to get something solid to work with.

I had an interesting intuition the other day that humans are not just ’social animals’ but instead actually become new symbiotic selves when they interact -that the identity of a single person in isolation is not a true picture of their underlying self. It is similar to the Uncertainty Principle - people are really only who they are when they are with others. Others make the self what it is. You cannot study the self without taking into account the influence of others upon it.

I think this helps explain the joy I feel when in the presence of a huge singing crowd. I feel a sense of elation. It is as if the entire crowd is morphing into one being, a being with an expanded sense that allows it to experience the music at a higher plane. The abandon that crowd members feel, the release of autonomy into the all-self, or rather the larger self is indicative of this symbiosis. We are actually being assimilated, reconstituting our selves into cells.

Anyway - the crowd example is fairly obvious, but I think the same kind of dynamic is at work in almost every level of human interactions. I have a group of friends from college and when we get together, wherever that get together happens to be, it feels like a home coming. It is as if a friendly spirit has been summoned, our interactions blending together in a fine gestalt. Everyone has old friends that no matter how much time has passed since you last saw them no awkwardness has ever intruded into your relationship. It is as if the bond itself exists in some physical realm. As if the social sense is detecting and transmitting these feelings of love and brotherhood, discomfort and disdain the same way our skin relays the sun’s warmth or winter’s chill.

Ok - I am fairly new to the REST vs SOAP debate. I hadn’t seen the SOAP stack in progress, but I have an instinct for simplicity and so I was definately rooting for the cause of the REST folks, even if I didn’t fully see what the big deal was about. Anyway, at my day job now I am working on a project which will need to expose a web service to an external vendor. Should be pretty interesting stuff.

We have some very smart people who run the infrastructure side of things where I work, and I thought we might be able to give REST a try for our service. They were sympathetic, but ultimately the security mechanisms we have in place support SOAP very well and while there was no reason REST couldn’t be used it was presented as “not trivial by any stretch of the imagination.”

So - SOAP it was. Document Literal. WSDL. Things I had only vague notions about. So I’m now on a mission to run the SOAP stack gauntlet. I’m actually happy to be doing so. I can feel my brain connecting new neurons. Plus, its good to actually dive deep into the muck to understand the real motivations for people’s aversion to SOAP. I think it is becoming a mantra to diss SOAP out of hand, and so many people are probably not even giving it a try, or understanding why (if?) it sucks so bad. At least at the end of this project I’ll have used it enough to form my own opinion.

Getting up to speed has been challenging, but in a good way - as I mentioned. According to recent studies learning new things exercises your brain and forges new pathways which can help offset alzheimers in old age and keep you sharp well into your 80s. Both good things and likely enough positive mojo to counter whatever frustrations SOAP has in store for me.

Today I am trying to write WSDL. I have decided to try the “Top Down” approach. Its amazing how much more I understand the structure and intent of the WSDL after writing one. Reading it engages an entirely different part of your brain. Its so much more passive than doing. Reading the WSDL spec and trying to slog through some of the documentation on Webservices Profiles was completely boring. I could tell nothing was sticking. There was no residual structure left after going through the stuff, no mental framework left behind at all. But doing is a completely different story. I’m forced to engage the concepts and try and implement them - making many many mistakes along the way. Each mistake involves more and deeper understanding to correct it. At the end I’ve got a fairly good, though by no means thorough, understanding of the WSDL structure.

Just wanted to post this, mostly since I just completely realized it myself after programming in Rails/Ruby for a couple of years. Amazing. Also, wanted to post something since this blog isn’t very bloggy. Also wanted to get this onto teh internet more - just in case some poor bastard out there is wondering, maybe this will save him 2 seconds. Who knows, it could add up. We all need to do what we can.

Anyway - in Ruby you cannot overload methods like you can in Java. Ruby won’t complain if you do, I believe it will just use the last implementation of the method it loaded. And when you pass the wrong type in, it will just blow up. This has been the hardest part for me, in transitioning to Ruby from Java. I still use Java for my day job and one nice thing about it is when something goes wrong the stack trace usually tells you exactly what caused it. Ruby’s stack trace has the answers as well, but you need to figure out exactly what you did wrong. Ruby will give you the rope and let you hang yourself. Ok its not that dramatic, just requires a different kind of debugging.

Software systems have a hard time reaching 100% uptime. Apart from the various bugs in the code which contribute to its capricious nature, the pieces the software itself depends on may crash, break or burn as well. They might behave in a completely unexpected unrecoverable way. Stuff happens. It seems to be the nature of the beast.

A few years back when I was working on a large, +1 year late project with a number of other consultants Ravi, a wise, older programmer, compared software construction to building construction and said that the reason the latter was so much more predictable was that it had been around for 10s of thousands of years while software construction was still in the infant stages. His eyes lit up as he spoke of a future where the same degree of dependability could be found in both fields, and we all wondered what developments would have to occur first. Frameworks, components, not reinventing the wheel every time, process, methods, the list of potential silver bullets went on and on. Its been 5 years since that conversation and while new technologies abound software’s essential difficulties remain. 99.999% uptime is more than most systems hope for, and getting there is an extreme challenge.

But if you look closely at the building/software construction comparison there is a singular advantage builders of human dwellings have over builders of logical dwellings: the stability of their materials.
Wood has 100% uptime - not 99.5. This is no chance that a steel beam could get stuck in an infinite loop. Nails aren’t going to throw stale database connection errors. Cement will not stop working if the cable in the server cage becomes unplugged. Latex paint works with all versions of sheetrock.
The basic building block of physical structures is matter. The basic building block of software is logic. Matter comes with a built in runtime guaranteed by the God. People are often amazed that software works at all. To even begin to reach a level of parity with building construction we would do well to first solve the metaphysical problem of permanence. Too often Berkeley’s hunch is correct in software. But perhaps Werner Vogels and the folks over at Amazon are starting to change that.

The idea of Dynamo has gotten me breathless with excitement. Its birth will be matched only by sliced bread in importance. What they are planning to deliver is nothing less that the metaphysical underpinnings for permanent logical structures, a kind of operating system that could function as the laws of physics and reality function for wood and steel, a new universe where unbounded by time, space, crashes or data loss developers could unleash applications not as creatures into wild mother nature but as intelligent atoms into reality 2.0. Perhaps the singularity is near after all.

Listening to the Velvet Underground today and starting to find that their music, their themes and lyrics jives with how Campbell describes the alchemists from the 12th century. The philosopher’s stone represents a revelation, the ultimate result of some long involved process, some goal which could not simply be plucked from a tree, but instead must itself be conjured. And the Underground’s music is the result of the same kind of process. Ok, let me explain.

So today I am listening to the Velvet Underground again, their seeming obsession with seediness and discord had at times annoyed me in the past but I had a feeling that today things were going to make more sense. Last night while reading Campbell’s chapter on alchemy something shifted in my mind. Something clicked, a stone slipped into place and a new lens came to rest before my eyes. I can now see the Underground’s journey to the fringe for what it is, a desire to shake off the ruthless narrative of conventional society and immerse themselves directly in the flow of existence, where the ancient forms are more accessible, where the cosmic wind can whisper unfiltered into their ears.

As a non-artist and burgeoning JimJim I was becoming more and more dismissive of this kind of artistic slumming, thinking it no more than posing, an excuse to slough off responsibility, a weak surrender in the response to the insidious challenges of modern life. And though posers many of them may be, the VU were originals.

So, the song “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, was a song I guess I never really understood before. I always thought it was a straight forward song about a hanger-on at Warhol’s factory who lost their true nature in their obsession with partying and clothes. Or something like that. Something vaguely derogatory. But now “I am beginning to see the light”, and I see that I was wrong. “All tomorrow’s parties” refers to the rest of your life, and the choice you are going to make about what to wear is actually the choice about what you are going to be for the rest of your life. The lyric bypasses the argument about whether or not we are wearing costumes, and instead tells a story about a girl who is making the choice. The song is incredibly eerie in that context. As on many of the other songs on the album Reed’s guitar evokes some perverse middle eastern ceremony. My mind’s eye brings up an image of a girl before a metaphysical mirror and wardrobe. The abyss itself just outside of the light splayed by her vanity.

As a song, amazing and utterly unique. Complete genius.

“A hand me down dress, from who knows where.” perfectly describes the situation we still find ourselves in, heirs to an old trunk of once splendid, loose fitting costumes and clothes.

What is the point of a work of art?

To build something permanent, a structure of mind and ideas and craft and space and time, a structure under which generations of people may pass or pause to take refuge from the rain.

What prompted this:

I was listening to ‘Alone in Kyoto’ by Air today and was looking at the cover. The two men are wearing gloves as if they are about to engage in some kind of esoteric labor. A diagram behind them hints at the hours of research and experimentation which they have spent building their sound.

I was struck by the wistful, far off look on Dunckel’s face (the guy on the right) - the prototypical dreamer, and for a moment my thoughts turned unkind. I began to chide his lofty aspirations as being all style and no substance, immaterial castles of air, upon which his gloves would find no resistance. But, as the music continued on I understood that I was in fact listening to the realization of his efforts, and that a castle of ideas had in fact been constructed and was not flimsy or fleeting but quite whole. The structure had been built and the photo is of an artist admiring his creation.