moblog

My talk at Seattle GTUG

2009-11-22T17:48:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned earlier I spoke at the Seattle Google Technology User's Group last week about the gadgets.sharedstate API and AppEngine XMPP support. The video of my talk has been posted. Enjoy!

Tic Tac Toe bot with AppEngine/XMPP and gadgets.sharedstate

2009-11-16T22:16:00.000-08:00

Add 'motactoe@appspot.com' to your roster on http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/sandbox. Then, send it an IM. The bot will reply with a Tic-Tac-Toe gadget (and witty repartée).

Be forewarned: this bot is the worst Tic-Tac-Toe player in the world.

I'll publish the code once I clean it up.

Speaking tomorrow night at StartPad

2009-11-15T18:09:00.001-08:00

Hey all, I'll be giving a brief talk tomorrow night about chat gadgets and the AppEngine XMPP API.

I'll talk about how to write gadgets that are usable inside orkut chat and the Talk Sandbox, how I implemented my "game lobby" for chat gadgets, how to use the AppEngine XMPP API, and probably a little bit of history and other info about the Google Talk team.

I think the talk is full, but the waiting list is short. It'd be cool to see some (more*) familiar faces there.

*Mike Koss, who was the development manager for Outlook when I worked on it in the early/mid-90s, runs StartPad and will be there.

Directory of shared gadgets

2009-11-09T21:48:00.001-08:00

Over the weekend, I used the XMPP AppEngine API to hack together a showcase for gadgets that use the gadgets.sharedstate API that I've talked about before on this blog.

Here's the directory: http://chatgadget-directory.appspot.com/index.jsp

Basically gadget authors can list their gadgets, and users can sign up to "play" the gadget with another user. The app serves as matchmaker and message-relay -- its bot relays the XMPP messages (which are contained in stanzas) between endpoints. Doing so introduces a little more latency than Google Talk alone has, so this is much more suited to turn-based games than to anything "realtime".

You can only "play" these gadgets on the Talk Sandbox (http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/sandbox) or the orkut sandbox right now.

A caveat: as I mention on the text on the site, your email address will be exposed so if you're not comfortable with that, don't use this page, or create a test account.

There's a lot still in progress here, mostly related to detecting when the other player is online (I could be smarter with a queue of players who sign up to play only when they're online), and UI tweaks and so on, but it's mostly functional and I think interesting.

Enjoy, and let me know if you have any questions!

Also: I'll be talking about XMPP/AppEngine, the gadgets.sharedstate API, and other Talk-related stuff at StartPad on Monday, November 16th. Here's the link for more info.

A nerdly confession, and a chance to get a T-Shirt

2009-10-22T08:17:00.000-07:00

I started programming computers when I was in 5th grade, and bought myself a (crappy) computer in 6th grade with money I'd saved from a paper route coupled with "matching funds" from my parents. Believe it or not, this is not the nerdly confession referenced in the title.

When I was in 8th and 9th grade, I got really excited by computer graphics and animation. Join the club, right? If you're a kid who's into computers, there's a high likelihood that you want to make pretty pictures.

Anyway, I wrote all sorts of cool (in my mind, at the time) mathematical pictures, and plotted them on my crappy little Radio Shack plotter, or animated them with some kludgy hack.

So anyway, being in 8th or 9th grade, and a giant socially-awkward nerd, I of course had unrequited crushes on any number of girls. Obviously I was in no position to impress anyone with my athletic prowess or conversational skills so in my mind my only hope was to impress them with my programming acumen. How ludicrous this is must have occurred to me because thankfully I never actually tried this.

However! If you are the 2009 version of me in 1985, and use orkut, I am working on the tools to let you do something awesome! I've been working on making it easy to embed gadgets -- that you can write yourself! -- into IM conversations. So here is my formula for wooing a girl, young nerd:

NOTE: If you're a girl, just s/girl/boy/ below. Or you know, s/girl/boy/ at your discretion, no matter your gender.

Join orkut. (you could do this all on facebook or probably most other social networks, too, but without the real-time awesomeness)
Sign up for the orkut developer sandbox.
Make friends online with a girl. This is way easier than being friends in real life!
Make sure said girl is also on the orkut developer sandbox. Hopefully she's a nerd too.
Write an awesome gadget. See the orkut chat gadgets documentation for more info.
Send this gadget to the girl you're friends with.
Impress her with the excellence of your programming skills.
If you used the gadgets.sharedstate API, interact with the girl in real time!
Figure the rest out on your own, buddy!

If you do this, PLEASE LET ME KNOW (with a link to your gadget). While supplies last, I will send you a Google T-shirt. These are way hotter than varsity jackets, trust me.

What I've been working on

2009-05-28T08:52:00.001-07:00

I've been working on a javascript API to let gadget developers use realtime communication. I'll write in more depth later (I'm in the keynote at Google I/O right now).

Here's the documentation and here's a link to the discussion group.

There are a ton of cool things this will let developers do. For now, this is a developer preview and the feature's only available on the Talk Developer Sandbox, but it will be available soon in orkut and iGoogle. We wanted to get it out to developers as soon as possible for feedback on the API and to let you get a head start writing gadgets before we launch this to the public.

At SXSW

2009-03-14T13:14:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Austin for the weekend at SXSW. I'll be at the Google both (421-423) in the exhibit hall from 4-6 today -- come by and say hi if you're in town!

Also I just added the FriendConnect "followers" gadget to my site -- try it out to follow me in reader and discover friends who also follow this site. FriendConnect's pretty cool and I hope to write more about it soon (when I'm not sitting on the floor at the convention center).

Interested in trying out some early Google tech?

2008-12-16T15:02:00.001-08:00

My first post in a very long time, and I'm shilling :)

The project I'm working on is doing a limited invite-only release, and we're looking for some javascript developers to help test it. If you enjoy writing gadgets and want a chance to try out something fun, email me or leave a comment here!

UPDATE: please leave me an email address if you comment. I won't publish these comments so no worries about spam.

New experimental version of Talk

2008-04-05T08:04:00.000-07:00

We just launched a version of Talk to Labs:

Talk Labs Edition.

Enjoy!

Chatback launched!

2008-02-25T16:51:00.000-08:00

Another cool feature of Talk just shipped. Check out the link over on the right -- if I'm online, you can chat with me, even if you don't have a Google Talk account.

However, I won't be online for a while since I'm leaving for Hawaii early tomorrow morning :)

Cool bot!

2008-02-13T07:04:00.000-08:00

A reader of this blog, Bruno Nery, sent me a link to a very cool bot he wrote called rcc. It lets you register yourself as an "expert" on various topics and routes questions about topics to the experts on them. It's an excellent example of a simple, useful tool built on top of XMPP -- I'd love to see more things like this done by third parties. Google Talk is a small team and we don't have time to do even a tiny piece of the cool stuff that XMPP enables -- and the developer community at large has many more ideas about cool stuff than we do!

Google Ski Trip

2008-02-03T08:47:00.000-08:00

On the bus ride up, the dangers of many engineers in close confines:

Tour operator/guide: "...and they are planning to install some sort of transportation device, the longest of its kind, between Whistler and Blackcomb peaks. I'm not a skier, so I don't know the name of it, tram? No, maybe it's a French word?"

anonymous voice from the back of the bus: "Trebuchet?"

Pictures!

2007-12-25T15:05:00.003-08:00

Amelia opened bushels of presents last night... here are some pics:

Christmas 2007

It's been a while

2007-12-17T18:40:00.001-08:00

And I still don't have much to say... in the meantime, enjoy this video of Amelia & Lindsey:

Some google interviewing tips

2007-04-20T07:59:00.000-07:00

I'll write my own when I get a spare minute, but for now here are some from Adam and another Googler.

A housewarming present to myself

2007-04-10T07:23:00.000-07:00

Lots going on lately... we've moved again, but hopefully for the last time for a while. To celebrate, I commissioned a piece from an artist whose work I've always admired, William Schaff:

It came out better than I could've hoped.

I need to decide where to put it now... I'd love to put it in Amelia's room, but I also want to show it off a bit. It might work in our living room. Hmm... not a bad problem to have.

This looks like fun

2007-03-22T20:32:00.000-07:00

Google is hosting a scaleability conference here in Seattle in June. I'll be there along with many of my co-workers, some of whom will be presenting. Interested in presenting? See the link above. Details on attending (but not presenting) will be posted soon.

Cool hack

2007-03-20T09:26:00.001-07:00

If you use orkut & Google Talk & Firefox, check out this hack.

Smurf!

2007-03-14T16:45:00.000-07:00

The guys in the cube next to me just launched something pretty cool:

My gtalk account is moishel -- add me to your roster if you want.

Uh-oh

2007-02-11T20:40:00.000-08:00

I'll be a happy man if I get two shiny new belt buckles this August.

But it's gonna be a hell of a week.

Less programming, more skill?

2007-01-31T22:08:00.000-08:00

I just picked up a copy of Programmers at Work (disclosure: that's a paid Amazon link) and I've been looking forward to reading it. I've only read the Charles Simonyi chapter; I got distracted by other books and other things, but it's sitting there on my nightstand waiting.

So it was pretty cool to see Jeff Atwood quote the book on his blog entry about becoming a better programmer by not programming. I agree with the quote:

Does accumulating experience through the years necessarily make programming easier?

Bill Gates: No. I think after the first three or four years, it's pretty cast in concrete whether you're a good programmer or not. After a few more years, you may know more about managing large projects and personalities, but after three or four years, it's clear what you're going to be. There's no one at Microsoft who was just kind of mediocre for a couple of years, and then just out of the blue started optimizing everything in sight. I can talk to somebody about a program that he's written and know right away whether he's really a good programmer.

And I definitely agree with this from Jeff:

You won't-- you cannot-- become a better programmer through sheer force of programming alone. You can only complement and enhance your existing programming skills by branching out. Learn about your users. Learn about the industry. Learn about your business.

I think he limits it too much, though.

The best thing I ever did for myself was walking away from programming, as best as I could, for 4 years. In 1998, after 3.5 years at Microsoft and 5 years of high-stress programming before that, I was burned out, unsure of what I wanted to do with my life, and fed up with the work I was doing. I cashed out my stock options, put all my belongings in my friend's basement, and set out to hike, bike, and finally get that college degree I'd always wanted.

The day I quit, I started driving to LA. I hiked in Joshua Tree, then went to Canyonlands and hiked for days in the Maze, where I swear I was surrounded by the ghosts of the Anasazi. I flew back to Massachusetts, saw my parents, then took the train to northern Georgia and started hiking home on the Appalachian Trail. I didn't quite make it, but detoured to Washington DC for the 4th of July, hiked some more in Vermont, then went to Olympia for school.

At school, I took classes in forest ecology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, geography, linguistics, and so on. I learned a bunch, despite the hippies.

Between classes and during breaks, I rode my bike in the mud of Olympia, augmented with road trips to the sandstone of Moab and the dust of Nevada. I met my wife, and during summer vacation, we rode our bikes from northern Montana to Wyoming; we saw bears, and almost got struck by lightning, and saw amazing views and played pool at every dive bar that would let a couple of smelly cyclists in.

Through all of this, I missed programming. I dreamt about it, in good ways.

I didn't miss the long hours or the stress, but I missed being surrounded by lots of really smart people, and sitting down in front of a computer to just crank out code. I did a little bit of contract work, and after a few years I joined a startup with some friends, then ended up back at Microsoft.

Now, 9 years after trying to leave programming behind, I'm working on stuff that gets me as stoked as I was when I was 11 years old and learning Logo, or 13 years old and learning to do psychedelic animation with palette switching, or 16 years old and learning assembly language. There is always something new to learn -- always a new way of looking at a problem you've known about for a while, always a new problem to discover.

But Jeff is saying something a little different than what I'm driving at, I think:

Passion for coding is a wonderful thing. But it's all too easy to mindlessly, reflexively entrench yourself deeper and deeper into a skill that you've already proven yourself more than capable at many times over. To truly become a better programmer, you have to to cultivate passion for everything else that goes on around the programming.

Of course I agree: if you have profound knowledge of the cloud of problems around programming, of the higher level problems you're trying to solve, you'll do a better job programming. This is obvious, and explains why the best programs are always the ones programmers write for themselves, eg. emacs, Google, Visicalc, etc. And it conversely explains why so many programs are so uninspired, too: if you'll never use the feature you're writing, you're not going to imbue it with brilliance, because the brilliance will never occur to you.

And beyond that, if you truly love the entire experience of programming -- not just the act of sitting in front of keyboard, but the planning, and the bug triage, and the promotion of your ideas -- of course you'll do a better job. And yes, this cloud takes some time to master, and for many programmers it's a huge barrier.

But that stuff is necessary but insufficient. If you're gonna implement the killer features you want, you need the chops to bang 'em out. And if those killer features are also gonna be used by a million, or a hundred million, other people, you'd better have the chops to bang out that code rock-freakin'-solid. Those chops don't come in 3 years, as Bill Gates claims, and they don't come from the 97th percentile of programmers, as Jeff alludes:

Good developers are good at programming. Really good at programming. You might even say fanatically good. If they're anything like me, they've spent nearly every waking moment in front of a computer for most of their lives. And naturally, they get better at it over time. Competent software developers have already mastered the skill of programming, which puts them in a very select club. But if you're already in the 97th percentile for programming aptitude, what difference does a few more percentile points really make in the big scheme of things?

The really killer code that's used to build the really killer features come from the programmers with a Z-score of 5 or 6, not 3. Being a natural will get you most of the way there, but unless you're a true prodigy, you need to continually refine your skills over many years. For most people, I think that cultivating expertise and interests outside the scope of programming helps this, as it does with any creative endeavor: as an analogy, if you want to write, read lots and write lots, but also live lots. For me, staying psyched about programming definitely requires lots of extrinsic inspiration; I'm a better programmer when I have time to ride my bike, and run, and play with my daughter, and laugh with my wife.

Being an excellent programmer requires being excellent at the cloud of things directly related to programming -- dealing with people, anticipating problems, having vision about products and features -- of course it does, and of course you should cultivate that. Beyond that, I truly think it requires external stimulation; really, really not programming will let you recharge and be better at programming. I doubt this is limited to programming.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Dreaming in Code, take 2

2007-01-29T23:37:00.000-08:00

True story: when I was 18 years old, a series of unhappy accidents left me the only programmer on a massive software project. This project was an upgrade to the cash cow for the company I worked for; if it didn't ship, the company stood to lose lots of money and indeed might've gone out of business. I worked 80-100 hour weeks for months to try to make the thing work right, and every time I fixed a bug it felt like I introduced 2 others.

One night, in the midst of this, I had a vivid nightmare. In this nightmare, I felt sick and feverish; my limbs didn't work correctly and my brain was fuzzy. As I stumbled about, I realized that I was the project I was working on: I wasn't dreaming about working on it, I was dreaming about becoming it. I was a huge collection of code, I was ill and nothing worked right and I had no idea how to fix myself.

When I saw the title of Scott Rosenberg's book, I thought: yes, that's right, that is not nearly so idyllic as it might sound.

And, as it turns out, the subject of the book is not a transcendent glimmering example of software genius. Chandler is, rather, one of those projects that, I suspect, inspires the sort of dreams one might be glad to wake from.

Another reminiscence, if you will indulge me: when I was 22 years old, I got a job at Microsoft. No bullshit or exaggeration: my dream job. I worked on Outlook, with about 20 other developers and maybe half as many program managers. Most of us were recent college grads or at least (in my case) the correct age to have just graduated from college. Our product manager, Brian, had a huge vision for Outlook, and I think we all shared it, and we worked our butts off to make it happen, to the extent that it could. Brian's vision was that Outlook should be an über-PIM, the place to which all your data flow, and the place from which you can see everything. Sound familiar?

Anyone who knows Outlook well must've shared the déjà-vu I felt when I read about Chandler. For instance, its "revolutionary" idea of applying arbitrary views to data was implemented by Outlook in 1994. All the views in Outlook are data-type agnostic; you can apply a calendar view to your files, if you'd like, or a timeline view to your email.

Of course, this sort of abstraction leads to endless feature creep. For instance: did you know that, until Outlook 11, you could browse your files in Outlook, as if it were the Windows shell? It was possible, through some tweaking, to browse the web with Outlook and might still be, for all I know. Did this fit into Outlook's Grand Vision? Absolutely. Did it add unnecessary complexity and make it much, much harder to ship? Hell yes. Chandler is clearly facing similar scoping problems.

Beyond the functional overlap between Chandler and Outlook, there's something else that's interesting. When I first booted Chandler, it took about 45 seconds to start. If you ever used Outlook 97, you may remember a similar experience.

I was on the team responsible for improving performance for Outlook 98. Right after Outlook 97 shipped, my lead printed out every single function call made when Outlook started up. It was a stack of paper about a foot high. He spent about a week going through this printout with a highlighter, looking for "stupid shit", as he called it. Turned out, there was plenty of it. It further turned out that most of this "stupid shit" wasn't a result of any one programmer making a dumb decision; most of it was a result of an architecture and a mindset which tried to prevent developers from shooting themselves in the foot by gratuitously abstracting away "dangerous" things like memory management. Again: needless abstraction will bite you in the ass if you're not careful. My lead and I spent months going through the Outlook code exorcising "stupid shit" -- removing code which hid what it was actually doing, getting the code cleaner and closer to the machine, making everything more explicit, tighter, and less generic. I suspect Chandler is going to need someone to go through its code with a fine-tooth comb in the same way before it's viable.

As a programmer, I find abstraction a beautiful idea. In practice, abstraction is useful only when its benefits are concrete. Here is today's Advice To Young Programmers: Create a class you can instantiate first; then, only if you need to create a similar class should you create an abstract base. Create an application which solves one problem really, really well; then, if you see that the problem you solved is similar to some others, you'll have a nice framework to expand on.

Now I've been tagged

2007-01-28T21:02:00.000-08:00

Justin tagged me, so here goes. I'm supposed to tell you 5 things you don't know about me. I don't know my audience, exactly, so some of you may already know all this stuff:

My mom says that when she decided to name me Moishe, she saw my name floating in the sky with rainbows and stars floating around. She didn't mention unicorns, but I sort of wish she had. My dad has a less drug-induced version of where my name came from, but I believe my mom.
When I was 17, I rode my bicycle from my parents' house in Massachusetts to Los Angeles. When I got home, I was skinny and bearded, and my little sister Mahala (who was 6) had no idea who I was. Apparently I scared the hell out of her by picking her up to hug her.
I met my wife at a poker game at a house in Olympia. The house was named Thelma's, after its previous (?) owner. This house had two incredible features. First, it had a "fire sculpture": the house overlooked Puget Sound and sticking up out of the mud and the water, about 100 feet off shore, were a bunch of pipes about 5 meters tall. Inside the house was a switch. Turning the switch would cause gas to flow through the pipes and an ignitor to fire on their tips. This created a truly awesome effect. Second: in the front yard of this house was a bathtub. Next to the bathtub was a pile of firewood. If you wanted a hot bath, you filled the tub with water (via a pail), piled the wood under the tub and lit it. The effect was like a cartoon-cannibal stew.
With my friends Ansel and Scott, I "stole" (maybe Ansel had permission? It's still unclear) Isaac Brock's shitter Honda motorcycle from a parking lot on Capitol Hill. We stuffed this thing into Scott's VW cargo bus, drove it to Oly, and put it in my garage, where it stayed for at least two years. When I moved out of my duplex, I abandoned the unloved motorcycle in the woods.
During the aforementioned bicycle trip, my traveling companions and I arrived in a town in Texas after a very long day, as the sun was setting. According to our map, this town should've had a grocery store, a campsite and even some people. It had none. So, we started looking around this weird abandoned town for a place to stay, and saw what looked like an abandoned building with an unlocked door. So... we opened the door, saw what looked like the interior of an abandoned bar. Why not sleep in an abandoned bar, right? I mean, if you're a bunch of scrawny east coast liberals and one weird Australian, what harm could possibly befall you in an abandoned bar in an abandoned town in Texas? So we started moving our crap in, and on our second trip outside we were confronted by a GIANT Native American dude, who asked if he could help us. We stammered out what we were doing, and he replied, "wait here". What the hell else were we gonna do, right? So wait we did, and giant Indian dude came back with a littler guy and a mean-looking pit bull and a GIANT CASE OF BEER. And a camp stove, and STEAK. And we fucking raged that abandoned bar, drinking beer and eating steak with the locals. I am no way clever enough to make that shit up, but if you don't believe me I have photographic proof. And, the best part: the dog's name was Asshole. It's all true.

Now, I tag Lindsey, Hosie, Steve, Steve, and Deonn. Special bonus: Dad

OK, I take it back

2007-01-28T20:14:00.000-08:00

Bluedot is rad!

Turns out you can set it up to auto-import your Google Reader shared sites (or whatever random feed you want). Check it out.

So your bluedot feed turns into a superset of your shared RSS items and whatever random sites you see.

My own private fat-ass

2007-01-22T08:03:00.000-08:00

My week of veganism made me weak and unmotivated to the point that I woke up early Saturday morning (like 3am) literally sick with hunger, with a splitting headache. When my alarm went off at 5am, I turned it off, rolled over, and went back to sleep, missing the Capitol Forest Fat-Ass that I was looking forward to.

So, Saturday, I ate some meat, and some bread, and some yogurt, and it was so fucking delicious. Perhaps I'll write more about this, but for now, just let it be said that a week away from all those glorious things makes them taste better than I ever could have imagined.

Anyway, Sunday I decided to go to Tiger Mountain and do my own long run. Here's the geekery. It fully kicked my ass -- that was the hardest athletic thing I've done in a long time, despite how slow my time was. Much of it was under snow, so my legs are sore everywhere: all the stabilizing muscles are wrecked, in addition to the major muscles that I'd expect to be sore. There was a lot of steep climbing and steep downhill. The weather was good, though: no rain, low 40's. And it was so nice to be outdoors for so long with my only worries immediate ones: how much water I had, whether I should've turned left back at the top of that hill I just ran down (of course, I should have), when this snow would end, etc.