Bicycles for the mind... A Steve Jobs talk from long ago.

1980

In the Introduction talk to Udacity CS101, Professor Evans mentions Steve Jobs having compared computers to "bicycles for the mind".

I think I've now stumbled across the talk where Jobs more or less said that. Run time for the Jobs talk is about 20 minutes. The bicycle reference is around the 6 minute mark in the Jobs video. Evans attributed the quote to circa 1990, but the talk is said to be from 1980, and given Steve's youthful appearance in the video, I believe the 1980 date.

Speaking of small errors, one of the annoying things in Jobs talk is he speaks of meeting with some 4th and 5th graders, but he then calls them 4-5 year-olds. I think 9-11 year-olds would be a lot closer to correct. 20 kids and 6 Apple computers? What a depressing student/machine ratio that would be these days!

Jobs mentions Visicalc in his talk like that is something that everybody in the audience knows of. But here we are some 30+ years later and I'm no longer sure that you all know what Visicalc was. Happily, Wikipedia remembers. Even if you remember Visicalc, I recommend that you visit the Wikipedia page. It has some wonderful interesting links, including one that lets you download a free copy of Visicalc for your x86 Windows PC. That version was written for DOS 1.0 so it only works within the current directory. DOS 1.0 didn't have directories, just disk drives. Most folks back then didn't have disks with any more capacity than a 5.25" floppy disk. In 1980, that would have maybe been 140KB of storage space.

One other link to particularly take note of is the one that asks "What if Visicalc had been patented?". If you haven't been paying attention to the arguments about software patents and why they are not good for the economy, you really should Google up some background reading for yourself, maybe sit through a Richard Stallman talk or 2 about "intellectual property". Be forewarned that Stallman's talk is a 2 hour talk, so take a bathroom break and get yourself a fresh mug of coffee, tea, or whatever before you fire up the Stallman talk.

If I'm going to mention Steve Jobs and Richard Stallman in the same blog post, it is probably appropriate for me to point also you to this short video where Stallman contrasts his own accomplishments vs. those of Jobs and of Bill Gates.

Time marches on, but progress?

Listening to Jobs 1980 predictions for what the heck we'd do with even more computing power, I can't help but be disappointed with how little real progress we've made on that front. The computing power has, of course, materialized as predicted, and I suppose the graphical user interfaces of Windows, MacOS and web browsers is something of a usability improvement compared to DOS 1.0, but I was sending e-mail and posting netnews items aplenty back in 1980 and it isn't like that process is hugely different today. To keep things in perspective, the Macintosh computer was introduced in 1984. Here's an early 1984 video of Steve Jobs giving a timeline leading up to the Macintosh. It's only about 7 minutes long and includes the famous "1984" teaser ad for the Macintosh; an ad still worth watching, in my opinion. Here's a 10 minute video of Steve Jobs actually introducing and demonstrating the Macintosh.

Still, if you have a problem that you want to solve with a computer, are the barriers to solving your problem significantly lower today or about the same despite the powerful GUI computers that are now available today? If there's an existing product that fits your needs ("there's an app for that"), your path is easy, but if you really need custom software, perhaps a custom database, I expect you still have a rough road ahead. "Cobol is to Visicalc as Y is to Z", but what are Y and Z?

Comparing the Python language to the programming languages of 1980 (C, PL/I, Cobol, Fortran) I guess there's some evidence of our having learned to apply plentiful compute power to making the programming job a little easier, but there's still a steep hill to climb to bring computers to bear on your problem, whatever your problem might be. The Internet, the World Wide Web and search engines seems to be the most evident signs of progress in the computing world since 1980. I do wish the world had more progress to show on reducing the barriers to applying computers to solve problems given the passage of 30+ years since that Jobs talk. Are there specific improvements in the computing world that I'm overlooking here and not giving proper credit to? Should smartphones get mention or are they just scaled down screens with battery powered small computers.

If I was better at HTML, maybe I could rig this article to provide background music as you read the previous paragraph. Or am I being too sentimental about lack of technological progress?

If you are completely unfamiliar with Stallman's contributions to the notions of "free software", you might give a quick read of a past blog post of my own as a way to get started at understanding software licensing and Stallman's GPL in particular: See "Copied Code or Unfortunate Coincidence".

06/11/2014 - Updated: The Steve Jobs talk link went bad! Why didn't anyone tell me with a comment so I'd know? Anyhow, I found a link that works (today).

Control Engineering?

My Master's degree

My MSE is from U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor. As I previously explained in a STEM post, I was there in a program sponsored by Bell Labs called "One Year On Campus". Within a maximum of 12 months, it was a requirement for my continued employment to complete a Master's of Science, Engineering degree. The Labs imposed a few additional requirements on the courses I was to take. I was to take an information theory and communications course (modulation techniques, etc., etc.), a digital logic course, and I'm not sure what all else. My main interest was in studying computer science, but the University had a requirement that X% of your courses had to be from within the department of your major. For broad studies of computing, that was a problem as the computing courses were spread throughout the University. The digital logic, machine architecture and assembly language courses were over in the Electrical Engineering department. The computer graphics courses were in the Industrial Engineering department. Operating systems, higher level languages and compilers were in the Computer Science department. Database courses were way over in the business school. So, the Engineering school created the "CICE - Computer, Information and Control Engineering" department to cross list all of the above courses. By majoring in CICE, I was able to take a broad variety of computing courses and still meet that X% within my major department requirement.

So much to do and only a year to do it. So, I admit that the edge of the CICE curriculum where I did not fit in many courses was control engineering. I had some exposure to it, but just enough to hum along if someone decided to sing about the subject. I couldn't even confidently promise to you a competent explanation of the topic if you asked me about it.

TED talk/demo of control engineering

So, I was excited today to find a most excellent TED talk demonstrating control engineering with a set of "Quad copters". The talk has some very impressive demonstrations of software control of the copters. I could wish for a more technical explanation then they offered. I'm not at all sure how many processors of what kind they used to track and control the copters. I'm pretty sure there's more real-time computation going on there then would comfortably fit into one processor, but that's just my gut feeling and not based on any real experience.

And so, for your entertainment and to convey to you what the heck "control engineering" is about, I share with you Raffaello D'Andrea: The astounding athletic power of quadcopters from June 2013. Run time of the video is about 16 minutes.

Want to know more?

I did some mild Google searching to try to find the source code for the control programs, which I assume are likely to be "open source". I didn't find exactly what I was looking for. But I did find some useful info. There's a Wikipedia article about Quadcopters and from there, there are plenty of links to additional information. I found this article about the lab where they test their stuff to be interesting. I was heartened to learn that they do have a safety net to catch the falling copters when the software is still under development. The article does give me the distinct impression that they've developed custom hardware to do the control algorithms fast enough. That is a potential major obstacle for a casual hobbyist who wants to play. If the Wikipedia article doesn't give you enough leads to follow there's an existing Pearltree specifically about quadcopters. I did find some open source (Arduino controller) quadcopter projects. e.g. this one and another one.

If you try your own Google searches, be careful about people in other fields of research with names similar to Raffaello D'Andrea. e.g. I found a biology PhD candidate at U. of Michigan named Rafael D'Andrea - Not the same guy. Oh, and I did find some Cornell U. work in the field of quadcopters too: Autonomous Quadcopter Docking System. Oh my, on page 11 of that report, the guy strapped his Android Smartphone to the quadcopter to add a camera to the configuration. That must have taken guts! (I wonder if he has the "Send me to Heaven" game on his Android phone? Not me!)

If you want to get into the math of control of a quadcopter, this looks like a reasonable place to start reading: Estimation and Control for an Open-Source Quadcopter. Or just sit back and enjoy the demo video that I pointed to in the previous section. Not everyone has to be a DIY engineer with amazing toys.

The public does remember scandals, even in NYC?

I'm writing this the night before the NY primary elections. A couple of the current races had been troubling me. One is the Democrat's field competing to be on the ballot for mayor this November. The other is the Democrat's field competing to be the NYC Comptroller on the ballot this November. How could Anthony Weiner and Elliot Spitzer be regarded as serious candidates after they'd been thrown out of previous high-office positions for plenty good scandalous cause.

Background

In case you have been sleeping under a rock or perhaps simply aren't from the NY area, here's a quickie background on these candidates.

Spitzer, a married man, was a well regarded governor of the state of NY 2007-2008. But then it was discovered that he was paying huge sums for the services of high priced prostitutes. It was widely reported, his wife stood by her man, and then he resigned from office under fire. He resigned from office rather than risk getting dragged through impeachment proceedings.

Far as I can tell, Spitzer was never prosecuted nor convicted on any of the charges, but I've seen nothing to so much as imply that he is anything less than 100% guilty of exactly what he was accused of.

Weiner, also a married man, was a U.S. congressman representing Manhattan's 9th district from January 1999 to June 2011. But then it was discovered that he was sending photos of his private parts to various women. Amid all the hoopla, he resigned from office.

I'm not upset with these guys resigning from office, though I do wonder about how no one bothered to prosecute them for their misconduct. But the huge shock to me is that they would then have the nerve to throw their hat into the ring to run for public office again. My one comfort is that recent polling numbers show both Spitzer and Weiner trailing in their races, so maybe their comeback attempts are ill-fated after all. Goodness knows the late-night talk shows have been having great fun with those candidates, especially with Weiner.

So, not much longer to wait to see if these comeback attempts fail as clearly as they deserve to fail. From my point of view, neither of these guys should have embarrassed us by running for office again. Or am I just being an old fuddy-duddy?

Election Night Update 09/10/2013

Well, the polls for today's primary election have closed and results indicate that Weiner came in a distant 5th place in a field of 5 candidates. Weiner got 5% of the vote. Bill Deblasio got 40%, just enough to win the Democratic ballot slot for NYC Mayor without needing to campaign for a run-off election in 3 weeks. (40% was the magic number to avoid having a run-off of the top candidates in the Primary voting).

Spitzer also lost with Stringer winning the race for the Democratic ballot slot for NYC Comptroller, but just barely. I was happy to see Spitzer lost, but would have been happier to see him handed a more decisive defeat. "Name recognition" is valuable when trying to get votes, though Weiner shows there are limits.

Perhaps it mattered that during this campaign, Weiner asserted that his checkered past was now behind him, but then the whole "Carlos Danger" brouhaha hit the fan during his comeback campaign. Maybe the difference was that there was no fresh scandal from Spitzer, just the old scandal that at least some folks have not yet forgotten.

SOLID software design...

My hopeless backlog

One of the bad habits I have is accumulating lists of things to read. Google Reader used to be a handy place to categorize and keep my "subscriptions" to blogs and so forth to read. Unfortunately, Google pulled the plug on that service in July. Fortunately, another web service, theoldreader.com provided a very similar free service. In fact, their service was designed to look like an earlier version of Google Reader. Some time ago, Google removed some "social" aspects of Google Reader and the change irked some of their users. theoldreader.com sprung up to undo the perceived damage of Google's changes. When Google announced the planned demise of the Google Reader service, Google at least was kind enough to provide a mechanism for retrieving my list of subscriptions, so I opened a free account with theoldreader.com and submitted my subscription list. But so did a zillion other people, so it took literally weeks for the site to get around to processing my subscription list. In the fullness of time, they did get the subscriptions into their system and it seemed usable enough, but then their servers crumbled under the newly stepped up load. (Well, I think that the story is more like they made changes to beef up their servers and in making the changes someone tripped over a power cord or something). More days and days of noticeable downtime before things got back on the air and seemingly stable again.

My point in mentioning Blog subscriptions is that the universe conspires to generate "interesting" blog articles faster than I manage to read them. "Another day older and deeper in debt...". My backlog of unread blog articles is quite hopeless, but whenever I have nothing much to do, instead of turning on the boob-tube in the living room, I fire up theoldreader.com in my browser and try to read up on what I've been missing.

If you've got your own solution to tracking new blog articles, I hope my blog here is on your subscription list. If not, please take a moment to sign-up my blog onto your list. Go ahead and do it now. I'll wait for you to get back. (Full disclosure: No one has ever told me of positive or negative experiences from subscribing to my blog with their favorite RSS tool. I'm assuming that blogspot.com does the right thing, but if you run into a snag, I'd sure like to hear about it).

Emily's "Coding is Like Cooking" blog

One of the blogs that I do try to keep up with is from an expert on test-driven-development (TDD) named Emily Bache, an Englishwoman who now lives and works in Sweden. Her blog is called "Coding is Like Cooking". I like it because it tends to be quite well written and covers relatively recent software development topics that I might otherwise miss out on. i.e. Stuff that I didn't learn in school back in the days when Structured Programming was still somewhat controversial, and that I didn't pick up by osmosis in the later years of my employment at Bell Labs. I freely confess that Test-Driven-Development wasn't part of the quite informal methodology that "we" in Math Research were following. The mathematicians tended to find the underlying math of the problems far more interesting then the structure of the code. I also found myself unexposed to a great mentor for Object-Oriented-Programming. Java got some use in our projects, but I knew enough to recognize bad use of the language when I saw it. So, now I'm retired and still have much to learn. The web has no shortage of material for me to learn from and by reading Emily's articles and saying "Huh?" when something comes up that isn't at all familiar to me, I find lots of great stuff to learn.

One of my "Huh?" moments came from her mention of the "London School". I followed her link and picked up a book for my Amazon book Wish list: Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests

SOLID Principles and TDD

So today I was reading an article of her's from September, 2012, SOLID principles and TDD. I didn't get very far into it when my brain complained "Huh? What does she mean by SOLID?". So I opened up another window thanks to a link she provided and read the Wikipedia article on SOLID. It isn't a particularly excellent Wikipedia article. It is dense with off-putting terminology - might be the fault of the SOLID acronym and not really the fault of the article - I've got to forgive the Wikipedia article because it has some excellent links to reference material.

Uncle Bob's principles of Object Oriented Design

One of the links from Wikipedia that I followed was http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob.PrinciplesOfOod. Still more links to clarify the mysterious-to-me parts of that SOLID acronym. This summary article looks especially good: http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/articles/Principles_and_Patterns.pdf.

And just to make sure I don't run out of things to read, there's a book mentioned and even recommended by another reader - Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices that I've added to my Amazon "Agile" book wish list to remind me I really need to take a look at it.

In closing...

So, my situation is quite hopeless if the goal is to finish reading the stuff on my list. If I'm reading anything interesting, it tends to add more things to my list. And that doesn't even count the time to actually try the tools and techniques that I'm reading about. I hope you found some of this material interesting enough to add to your own read-and-try list. I guess I have a bit of a sadistic streak to want to inflict my backlog on other folks.

Learned anything interesting lately?