Tribal golB: Sep'10

I don't, as a rule, give people advice on what they "should" do. I can share my own experience learning Lisp and associating environments.

When I discover Lisp, I have 10 years of industry experience and a Master's degree. I am an Emacs user, including using Gnus for email. I run Linux on my home and office desktops. I feel very comfortable on the Unix command line. I'm working a boring corporate job. I lament having experience. I recall how easy it used to be, when I was younger, to jump into new languages, when I had no experience with any of them. I recall feeling shame about asking newbie questions when I have so much experience.

I work though the exercises in Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp. I print out a copy of his On Lisp. I switch from Red Hat to Debian which supports many Lisp packages out-of-the box in its binary distribution. When Practical Common Lisp comes out, I buy a copy and find it very readable and on the lighter, less academic side of Lisp. I like Peter's treatment of the LOOP macro. I ask questions in comp.lang.lisp.

I rewrite one of my Java programs in Lisp. I notice the Lisp version uses 10 times fewer lines of code. I meet Paul Graham and many of the folks at Franz. I notice that I start answering questions in comp.lang.lisp. I write a larger project in Lisp, a technical analysis package. I notice how quickly the level of abstraction rises in my code. I start with a string representation of a historical price quote, and two pages later I define indicators like moving averages in terms of lists of these quotes. I imagine the mounds of Java code in dozens of file that do an equivalent job. I notice that I refer more to the Lisp Hyperspec and less to introductory Lisp books.

I notice that learning new languages is again easy for me. I no longer feel that I need to be a know-all. I notice that few programmers understand the languages they use in any kind of depth. I notice feeling that's it's OK to have no deep understanding of a language as long as I understand how deep my understanding of it is. I notice that I categorize new languages I learn in terms of the features they are missing comparing to Lisp.

Thank you for the link.

Thank you for sharing your feeling that you are learning from me. It is tremendously rewarding for me to get this kind of feedback.

The languages you know suggest that most of your experience is in a Windows environment. While it technically possible to write VB in a text editor, in practice Microsoft languages couple very closely with IDEs and graphical shells. Programming in Visual Studio takes a lot of pointing and clicking and dragging and dropping. Even when you type code, the IDE tries to auto-complete for you, and you end up going for the mouse all the time.

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The Lisp environment you are learning presents a different way of looking at programming. It's a world of plain text source files and command lines. This worldview predates IDEs in the same way that walking predates riding a Segway. I don't judge one as "better" than the other, but going from one to the other may take some adjusting.

You may find Neal Stephenson's 1999 essay In the Beginning was the Command Line interesting.

Thank you for your email.

You can buy the module (with an extra receiver) from the same website for $109.99. You can buy just the module from some distributors, e.g. Chief Aircraft for $49.99. Many physical hobby stores carry both the helicopter and the module.

I am not clear on the use case for your alarm design. If you want your iPhone application to respond to respond to sound input, it must be running in the foreground when the alarm sounds.

The official Apple documentation for AudioQueues is at http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/musicaudio/Conceptual/AudioQueueProgrammingGuide/Introduction/Introduction.html. AQ is most useful when you want to take a digital audio stream and play it through the speaker or headset, or record audio from the microphone and write it to a disk file. It includes support for decoding codecs like MP3. A typical use case is playing audio streams from the Internet. AQ give you access to raw data, but at a latency of about 100 milliseconds.

Audio Units, and specifically RemoteIO Unit, give you access to low-level, low latency raw data. You work with raw samples, in real time. There are hard limits on how long you can take to process the data. You can get the latency down to about 5 milliseconds. The official Apple documentation is sparse. You can look at this blog entry for some pointers. You can also try to make sense of Apple's sample application for RemoteIO, auriotouch. The difficulty with this code is that you have to tease out the actual audio stuff. The application mixes together s lot of different technologies, including Objective C, "Subjective" C, C++, Objective C++, OpenGL, Fast Fourier Transforms, inline assembly, multitouch event processing, etc., in one big bowl.

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Thank you for the link.

You may wish to take your feelings about $TOUGH_LOVE to a Tribe meeting.

Thank you for thinking about me--and for the video.

Thank you for the link.

Thank you for the pointer.

I don't have a copy today's Journal. I let my subscription expire after the Murdoch takeover.

Thank you for the article. I find the price tag Mr. Trachtenberg quotes, $12,000 to $30,000, a particularly interesting piece of information. This is for software-only apps with no hardware components.

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Thank you for the link.

$39 is an interesting datapoint for a piece of plastic with knobs that don't spin. I wonder how much more the market can bear for a functioning Etch-a-Sketch peripheral.

Thank you for your patience. The secrecy is over. I am building an iPhone radar detector.

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Thank you for sharing your process.

I wish your new site more resilience than the old one.

The positive intention of $ANGER is boundary management. You may wish to bring your feelings about setting boundaries to a Tribe meeting.

Thank you for your note. When I buy your product on your website, I notice that I have no option to opt out of creating an account on your website. While I am looking forward to receiving the physical product I order from you, I have no interest in your promotions, address books or permanent carts.

You may wish to bring your feelings about $SPAM to a Tribe meeting as an entry point.

Please delete my account.

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Thank you for sharing your process.

I encourage you to share with your contact everything you know about us from the show, including the state of our prototypes and MFi licensing.

I wonder if you can be more specific about the dev you want to talk.

Thank you for the link. This is becoming an FAQ item.

The crowdsourcing real-time map is the focus of this venture. Your other suggestion puzzles me--I wonder what use you can derive from calculating these odds. While only one state in the Union prohibits radar detectors for private cars, gambling is illegal in most of them.

To your followup question, the iPhone by itself cannot detect radar. I am building a bit of hardware that connects to the phone that can.

Congratulations on your business expansion.

I am very happy with how my projects are going--thank you for asking. Manufacturing in China has its challenges, as I'm sure you can appreciate from your experience. These challenges are an enormous opportunity to practice accepting people as they are, rather than how I expect them to be.

I recall the assertion in your last communication that you cannot afford my consulting rate. I wonder if the growth of your business changes that assertion.

I like clarity in commitments.

I wonder what can I do for you.

MFi authentication is a favorite topic of mine.

As you know, Apple are rather strict about confidentiality in the MFi program. I would like to have your contract number before we have that conversation.

I recall seeing similar nets on many government buildings in Moscow in the 1980s. Somehow, nets on the KGB headquarters st Lubyanka stand out in my memory.

The story goes that in the old days, personnel turnover at all levels of government hierarchy is high. Officials who lose the high office prefer jumping out the window to going down into the cellars--they know all to well what happens to them there.

Moderns photos of that building show no safety nets. Perhaps this signifies an improvement in working conditions.