All in all, it is a politicized perspective of the Fannie Mae situation and who is to blame. Which is fine; I believe in free speech. I just hope that educated people — i.e. people reading this blog — will think critically about it.

The presentation has some serious factual errors, as well, which I am not going to go into here.

More importantly, I hope people are especially skeptical of email forwards. It is no coincidence — here’s why forwards are dubious: Often, there is no master source. As different versions circulate, the author loses control — the recipients can change the text however they want. Accountability is lost, because the original author hasn’t kept control. Perhaps there have been corrections or updates — but it doesn’t really matter, because it is hard to find the most up to date version.

Who is Dennis Jantz?

Being a good skeptic myself, I originally wondered if the author of the presentation (cited as Professor Dennis Jantz) really existed! I expected that a professor who was willing to attach his name to a presentation would be relatively easy to find on the Web. However, I did considerable searching but didn’t find anything conclusive about a “Professor Dennis Jantz.”

On a hunch, I emailed Instructor Dennis Jantz of the UNLV English Department this morning. I didn’t expect it to be the same guy — the title didn’t match, and I didn’t expect the author of a presentation about Fannie Mae to be at the English Department.

He wrote me back and claimed ownership of the presentation. He clarified something to me in the email:

For the record, I am an Adjunct Instructor at my University, not a full professor. My Masters is in Educational Leadership … The views expressed are solely mine as a private citizen, and in no way intended to represent any position of the university or its staff.

I’m glad he cleared up his title. It is not a good idea to let a misrepresentation of one’s title persist. In academia, there is a significant difference between an instructor and a tenured professor.

I wrote back to Jantz and said:

In the interests of increasing public debate, I would ask if you would be willing to:
1. post an authoritative version on the Web, preferably as a Web page where one doesn’t have to have PowerPoint.
2. take credit for it publicly, so that people know who you are and what perspective you bring
3. open it up for discussion using online tools, such as discussion boards

In order to follow the spirit of learning, sharing, and teacher, Jantz should make his writings available on the Web on a place where he takes ownership and accountability for what he writes. He should open them up to scrutiny and debate.

In this day and age, anyone who is serious about sharing their work (especially someone at a university) knows how to give it a permanent location on the Web so people can find it. Spreading information through email with no “master” source is the stuff rumors are made of.

sudo port install memcached libmemcached

Now, for the memcached gem — not quite so easy for me on Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard):

sudo gem install memcached
Building native extensions. This could take a while…
ERROR: Error installing memcached:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
…
extconf.rb:21: shared library ‘libmemcached’ not found (RuntimeError)

Thanks to this thread I was able to figure out something that worked:

sudo bash
# This next command belongs all on one line
# And forgive my blog’s smart-quoting, it knows not what it does
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/local/lib INCLUDE_PATH=/opt/local/include ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386″ gem install memcached
exit

If everything works right you should be able to:

irb
require ‘rubygems’
require ‘memcached’
# => true

I had to `sudo gem install echoe` before the above worked.

If you know a more elegant way, please let me know!

It is going to be an interesting debate. We have found in trying to check the two vice presidential candidates that Senator Biden offers lots of factual statements that we try to verify and sometimes are right, sometimes aren’t.

Governor Palin has been a little trickier for us because .. if you look at her recent interview with Katie Couric, there aren’t a lot of facts that she states. So we’re not sure that we’ll get a lot of facts to check from her. But we’ll be watching and folks can get politifact.com and see what we found.

Another (more established, I think) fact-checking site is factcheck.org. I wonder if they will fact-check the above statement?

I could not bring myself to file this in the “Public Policy” category, so I am filing it in “Politics.” That’s the best I can do given the realities of the situation; i.e. she was chosen primarily for electability and less for Vice Presidential qualifications.

Ruby DCamp is coming up on October 11 and 12 in Washington, DC. It will be an unconference, which means that the participants will drive the event.

It has a big emphasis on participation from Rubyists of all levels, whether new or experienced. DCamp is being planned by some very involved people in the community, including Evan Light, Keith Bennett, and Chris Selmer of Intridea and an organizer of DCRUG. We’re going to have some great interactive sessions where everyone feels comfortable contributing ideas and working together.

I encourage you to register right away.

a. “But my wise old aunt Selma, now 91, often reminds me that the sins of omission are greater than the sins of commission, and that the greatest evils in the world, like mass poverty, are more the result of inaction than that of direct brutality.” -David Bornstein, So You Want to Change the World

b. “French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday world came within “a whisker of catastrophe” during the recent financial crisis and that those responsible for the crisis must be identified and held accountable.” -Express, 9/25/08, by The Washington Post

Certainly there is plenty of blame to go around. But identifying the “culprits” (or their whiskers) is not quite so easy. Who is responsible for the crisis due to their actions? Due to their inactions?

The culprits?

1. What about homeowners who got mortgages that they could not afford? Are they completely innocent? Perhaps many were tricked or did not understand variable rates. But if we are assigning blame, we should be willing to perceive shades of gray.

I will note that assigning blame is sort of like bringing donuts to the office — if you bring them, you better bring enough for everybody. So while we are blaming, we might as well not discriminate against the “less noticeable.”

2. Moving “up the chain” so to speak, we next arrive at the lenders. Financial institutions that offer loans without the proper diligence put their firms at risk. This is true. So do we blame the institutions themselves? Perhaps we should also blame the people who work there?

3. The individuals that work at these institutions are supposedly intelligent and properly incentivized, right? If so, on the whole, they would not promote their individual short-term gains over the institutions.

4. But what if the organization has the wrong incentive structure in place? Perhaps the organization “had it coming” to them. Call it karma or call it statistics. But management has to realize the impact of its choices.

5. Let’s move “across the food chain” now. Since these financial institutions are highly connected in the financial markets, they put other institutions at risk as well. In economic terms, this might be considered an “externality”, a cost that one “organization” can impose on another. The problem with externalities is that the organization affected was not responsible. A typical example is air pollution. If Mexico pollutes and the wind blows it into Texas, Texas is harmed but Mexico is not. Is the creator of the externality to blame? Yes, in some sense.

6. But in another sense, the recipient of the externality sometimes can pursue strategies to minimize the effect. Doing so is part of the cost of doing business. Let’s think about this in a bilateral transaction sense — a connected institution can reduce its potential for damage by being skeptical — asking tough questions about institutions that it depends on, hedging its bets, and having alternative plans ready.

7. If the ecosystem as a whole is built on strong bilateral understandings, conventional thinking would say that the ecosystem should not be damaged by the loss of a few “bad apples.”

8. This raises another question — maybe we are too quick to assign blame to individual firms! Perhaps the whole financial ecosystem wasn’t as strong as we gave it credit for. Perhaps we are merely scapegoating when we complain about Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, or AIG. Chaos theory probably could offer scenarios in which such an ecosystem, even if strong at the bilateral level, could still have failure modes.

9. What about regulators? Don’t they have a responsibility to oversee the financial markets? Don’t they have the intelligence and foresight, and thus, the responsibility to act?

Conclusion

In practice, the person that throws the second punch is most likely to get caught and blamed. But what about the first punch? What if it wasn’t a punch, but a stinging insult? What about all the actions that led up to the conflict? Assigning blame to the most visible offense is overly simplistic.

Let’s use our brains instead of just finding scapegoats. Let us understand the nature of the problem across the whole system — and then correct the problem using as-specific-as-possible, targeted interventions.

/usr/local/bin
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin

Then I restarted my Terminal and inspected the path. No change. That’s strange. My principle of least surprise felt violated.

Thanks to a nice write-up (also mentioned here), I got a handle on what was happening. My solution was to change /etc/profile to look like this:

# System-wide .profile for sh(1)

if [ -x /usr/libexec/path_helper ]; then
    PATH=”"
    eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`
fi

if [ "${BASH-no}" != "no" ]; then
    [ -r /etc/bashrc ] && . /etc/bashrc
fi

In my opinion, the key ingredients of being a rock star are mediocre talent, a massive publicity machine, and an insatiable ego. These are not qualities that I want to see transfer into the software world. Software development, in its ideal, is about curiosity, teams, and skills. It should be about merit, clear thinking, and sharing. It should not be molded after irrational cult followings, record company influence, boy bands, or beat-it-into-your-brains radio station overplay.

I agree that good software development might have things in common with a good music. Developers must perform! But the nature of the audience is different — it involves other software developers (who read the source code) as well as people who use the software (who probably don’t care if the programmer has a mohawk, leather pants, and a life expectancy of 27 years).

So let’s not use rock stars as our model. Only a select few rock stars, in my opinion, are masters of music. I would take an average jazz musician over the average “rock star” any day, because the jazz field encourages real-time improvisation and understanding music on many levels. Let’s find programmers who can deliver (similar to performance artists) but also understand the culture and history of programming (similar to musicologists).

There have to be more useful metaphors for greatness in software development. They should be fresh, specific, and (hopefully) strange or funny. Here’s an example I just threw together: “I’m looking for a software developer that is a direct descendant of Perseus. Someone who can refactor some horrible code (i.e. slay Medusa) without turning to stone.”

P.S. Ever met someone who proclaims their own greatness? Perhaps it is better to let someone else to credit your skills than to wave a flag brandishing your mighty abilities. I hear that a sign of true greatness is humility. Putting yourself on a pedestal is probably counterproductive, unless you want to surround yourself with other arrogant people. Instead, aim to be approachable. This opens up a learning frame of mind, which allows you to become even better in the long run.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. … The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

I think Carr’s article is a must-read. It covers a lot of ground, and I do not have the time or space now to address all of its points one by one.

But let me say one thing: I am saddened to think that the Net itself, driven by its current revenue model of advertising and ad click-throughs, is probably profiting from the ADD of its viewers. This is why I believe that people must guard their attention and spend their time with Web sites that provide real value. I also hope that the next round of Internet entrepreneurs will offer Web experiences that truly enrich people’s lives rather than sending them careening around the Net aimlessly.

That said, I don’t think there is ever an excuse for releasing codes that been given a severe beat-down by the ugly stick. I’m talking about screwy indentation, splatterings of unnecessary whitespace, jumbling up spaces with tabs, using fugly variable names, and lines that are 120 characters long. (Of course, this doesn’t matter for minified or packed JS.)

Is it unfair of me to judge code in this way?  Perhaps.  But I have found that first impressions can be useful: code that is ugly-on-first-sight probably won’t fail to disappoint later.