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Apparently, the West does not have a good system of Internet tubes. And the ones I was able to tap into I mainly used for homework.

We will return you to regularly scheduled programming soon. . . .

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If you can believe it, I once made a serious go at becoming a historian. I wanted to go to history grad school, but I hadn’t taken any coursework as an undergrad. Feeling extremely self-conscious and very far behind, I set out to get caught up. I took classes, first at U.Mass and then at Boston College. I went to AHA meetings and lectures at local universities. I read tons of book reviews. It was simultaneously enrapturing and terrifying.

But it was not to be. It’s hard to make up that much lost time, and I didn’t really have the mindset for researching in original sources, a skill that my “catch up” survey classes didn’t push. Now that I know better and have no serious desire to be a professional history, I would really love to do some original research (which probably explains why I’m so fascinated with tombstones these days).

And more than anything, I’m prone to scratch at an itch until I’m satisfied that I know enough about it to be able to define its key features, its edges, its historiography, and the why (not just the when and what). Since I finished my class early this month I’ve been reading voraciously about Afghanistan.

Afghanistan: the crossroads of the world, the graveyard of empires. Its recorded history extends thousands of years — Alexander of Macedonia lent his name to Kandahar, for goodness sake, and there’s another four to five thousand years in the archaeological record before he showed up. I’ve been reading a bit about that history recently, and I’d like to share it with you; but there’s way too much for one dispatch.

Its modern history intersects many of the 20th century’s historical themes: empire, globalization, the Cold War, and transnational terrorism. I think I was like most people who could only briefly describe Afghan history by giving a few keywords: Soviet invasion, mujahideen, Taliban, al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, there’s a lot more to it than the plot of a Rambo movie. Since Sunday marked the round-number anniversary of the beginning of what might euphemistically be called the “Afghan’s troubles,” let’s take a closer look at the last thirty years of Afghanistan’s history.

Important note: Be sure to see the “Important Note on Sources” at the end of this dispatch.

An Overview

The last thirty years in Afghan history trace an arc that began with instability and war and continued downward to disaster intermingled with stability through totalitarian theocracy before the reemergence of a fragile civil society in the midst of war. It’s fair to say that Afghans have endured one insurgency or another since 1978. Here are some of the key dates for future reference:

• April 27, 1978 — Communist coup
• December 24, 1979 — The Soviet Army invades
• February 15, 1989 — The Soviets withdraw
• April 1992 — The communist government falls to the Mujahideen
• September 1996 — The Taliban take Kabul
• December, 2001 — The Taliban flee Kandahar

The Saur Revolution

Picture it, Kabul 1978. King Zahir Shah had been living in exile for five years since a mostly bloodless coup led by President Mohammed Daoud Khan. Afghanistan was a poor developing country with powerful neighbors. Its western neighbor, Iran, was close to theocratic revolution in 1979. Pakistan, to the east and south, had seen General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq seize power in a coup the year before. And the Soviet Union loomed large on its northern border. Though nominally unaligned, the Soviets poured billions of rubles of influence south over the preceding decades in the form of economic and military aid.

(more…)

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If you want to change careers or know someone who’s looking for a job, consider working for The MathWorks. We’ve grown almost continually over the ten years that I’ve been working there, and it looks like this trend continues.

Wednesday, our HR people were handing out pink sheets — ironic? — containing a list of dozens of open positions. I won’t post the whole list, but here are the highlights:

• Software developers, architects, and engineers in all areas of development
• Quality engineers
• Marketing and sales
• Customer service and technical support staff (who are actually entry level engineering staff with a nice pathway to more senior careers)
• Application engineers, trainers, and consultants
• Etc.

So, if this sounds like the kind of thing you’re intrested in doing and you want to work for a financially successful, privately owned, values-driven company, then take a look at what we have to offer.

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There’s a whole lot of good stuff out there on the Internet. Here’s just a bit that I discovered recently:

• The Nerd Handbook — “A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.”
• Out Loud — “That’s your goal, and you can have a wildly successful presentation without achieving it, but a one-slide presentation represents the ultimate commitment to your audience. It says, ‘This isn’t about slides. This about me telling you a great story…’” (as seen at 43Folders)
• ForTheScience.org : MacOSX Leopard extended ls — The meaning of the “+” and “@” values in the long ls listing. Also working with ACLs and resource forks.
• Stevey’s Blog Rants: Emergency elisp — “Most Lisp introductions try to give you the ‘Tao of Lisp’, complete with incense-burning, chanting, yoga and all that stuff. What I really wanted in the beginning was a simple cookbook for doing my ‘normal’ stuff in Lisp. So that’s what this is. It’s an introduction to how to write C, Java or JavaScript code in Emacs Lisp, more or less.”
• California Photography Galleries and California Gallery Guide

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As seen at The Clutter Museum:

Bold the statements that are true.

1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college (don’t know . . . maybe)
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college (The same year I did, for which we were all very proud.)
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home. (You really only needed one book.)
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.
9. Were read children’s books by a parent
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people who dress and talk like me are portrayed in the media
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs (I don’t think so. It was all very sudden.)
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18 (after a while)
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them (I loved that ‘63 Dodge Dart.)
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house (about half my childhood)
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
25. You had your own room as a child
26. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course
27. Had your own TV in your room in high school
28. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college
29. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16 (I won a trip to Chicago, which was exciting.)
30. Went on a cruise with your family
31. Went on more than one cruise with your family
32. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
33. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

12/34 — Now it’s your turn. Feel free to use the comments if you don’t have your own web log.

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As a corollary to Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction — “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — here is my new law of technology:

Any insufficiently documented technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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Funny things happen to me at the end of a software release (we have one every six months) especially now that they occur at the same time as the end of the semester. My finals are almost over — less than two hours to go — but the release goes on. My mind seems to go off in it’s own direction.

It usually goes something like today’s incident. I was walking through the neighborhood supermarché on my way to get eggs for Lisa, who was at home baking cookies. I was thinking about les œufs on my way down the aisle, when suddenly I realized that I’m heading vers le marchand to give him my money without the right English greeting on my mind.

Bonsoir? No. Too formal.

Salut? Maybe. But still not quite right.

“Hi.” Yes, that was it . . . just in time.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve lapsed into French in my head since I started perusing that small Lonely Planet book about Paris the week after we returned from London. But it was the first time I’ve almost burst forth en français.

In a mostly unrelated note. I went looking in Google Earth for the antipodal point of our house (42° 8′53.36″N, 71°31′33.14″W). My hope was that whenever Lisa and I happened to be in Australia, we could say that we’re literally on the other side of the world. (An antipodal point is a spot on the globe that’s connected to some other spot by a straight line that passes through the center of the earth; so that if you had a magic bus — or the ability to realize the plot of a bad movie with an Academy Award-winning lead actress — it’s where you would arrive if you went straight down and just kept going.) Turns out, it’s in the South Seas, about 640 miles off the coast of Australia ( 42° 8′53.36″S, 108°28′26.86″E). Too bad, it would have been a great addition to a holiday newsletter.

(For those keeping track, these might be hints. . . . or maybe not.)

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Lisa says that using two monitors moves me further in the direction of nerdy. What do you think?

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It’s Friday . . . at least until I go to sleep, when it magically turns into Saturday. Here are some fun feeds to explore over the weekend.

• xkcd (feed): You’ll probably like it more if you’re geeky, but as Leslie said, “Herpes is always funny.”
• Strange Maps (feed): Old, incorrect, original, and unusual maps.
• If it’s on teh interweb it must be true (feed): Sadly no more, but even the old ones are great.
• Calvin and Hobbes (feed): A little bit of perfection everyday.
• avant-garde fashion photography (feed): Lovingly ripped from the best fashion mags worldwide.
• Go Fug Yourself (feed): The best website with the worst feed ever. (Thank you NYT for this bit of heaven.)
• Manolo’s Shoe Blog (feed): The Manolo he loves the shoes of the Jimmy Choo and of the many other designers too.

Update: And while you’re strutting around the ‘net, why not visit Shoe Blog?

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Salut, mes amis. It’s that time of the semester again where I don’t write as much here as I would like because I’m busy writing old school project documents as part of my coursework. Last fall I wrote a software test plan for a fictitious web-based software check-in process. Then last semester, I created requirements and design documents for a fictitious web interface for a library. Earlier this evening I submitted a Microsoft Project document with the plan for a fictitious web reservation system for a hotel.

Toward the end of the lengthy exercise I couldn’t get Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint out of my head. I took a Tufte visual design class about a decade ago and found it enlightening about a lot of things: the value of information density, small multiples, and not lying — just to mention a few things. Subtlety isn’t one of Tufte’s strong suits — unlike, say, David Allen — so I didn’t totally buy into his thesis of the inherent evil of PowerPoint:

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?

But there I was thinking the same thing about Microsoft Project. The hierarchical view of the software project lifecycle that Project uses has its most natural analogue in the antiquated waterfall model. Discrete phases for inception, requirements analysis, module design, coding, integration testing, and acceptance testing map directly to the traditional project management work breakdown structure and the definition of a project as a linear flow of tasks from idea to complete product without backtracking to account for reality.

Of course, you can use Microsoft Project to do agile development, just like you can use PowerPoint or Keynote to make great presentations. But you’re far more likely to end up with a ridiculous waterfall project plan that quickly falls apart or a slide show with too much text that you read with your back to the audience.

Maybe Tufte was right.

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Dear Lazyweb and/or entrepreneurs,

Here’s what I would like for Christmas or whenever you can get around to it:

• A smart card that stores all of my memberships and reward/affinity programs. Imagine one card that has my drugstore, supermarket, bookstore, car rental, (ahem) shoe store, pet store, outdoor store, etc., information on it. Instead of carrying around a dozen cards to scan for discounts, how about one card that I could swipe at loads of places. In the past, I’ve paid around $5 or £3 for Washington DC and London metro cards to hold my “cash;” so that seems like a fair price for convenience.
• A web application/oracle I can query for fictitious names. I’m tired of seeing just “Sally Software Analyst” and “Peter Programmer” while reading. Were are “Vikram VP,” “Manuel Manager,” “Laticia Language Expert,” and “Wole Windows Programmer?” Tell you what, you give me a large set of first/given names, and I will give the world an application you can ask for names for your case studies. What’s more, if you give me a set of first/given names broadly tagged by ethnicity, I will give you the option to get random names in roughly the same proportion as they appear in the US population. Or you can make it yourself. Whatever.

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At The MathWorks, new hires have to post a brief introduction about themselves. The messages are rather formulaic and goß a little something like this:

Hi, I’m Jeff Mather, a not-so-new software engineer in the Image and Scientific Data Formats team, which is a part of the Image and Geospatial Computing group. Before starting at The MathWorks, I attempted to defend the business model of a late-90’s dot-com start up in Cambridge, Mass., from people who said you had to sell things to make a profit.

In my spare time I like to photograph, catalog names at cemeteries, and watch obscure dramas and documentaries. A little known fact about me is that I’m a bit of a dilettante and hate bad type.

There you have it, friends, my secret shame. I’m a type aesthete who can’t abide bad page layout and artless kerning. That’s why you’ll only see em-dashes and smart quotes here. (Of course, you wouldn’t know the depth of my feeling from the current layout of this web site; but I’m working on that, and self-flagellation is a very old family trait.) But my shame is also pleasant, because I revel in good design, too.

To feed that font- and type-loving part of me, I follow these typographic weblogs:

• I Love Typography (feed): The appearance of this newcomer is so nice that I die a little whenever I read it in my news reader rather than a browser. [1]
• fontblog (feed): They put a pro-Microsoft spin on type, but then again Redmond’s type technology is actually more interesting than Apple’s, though not necessarily better looking. [2]
• Typblography (feed): Adobe’s take on type.
• Typographica (feed): One of many font-porn sites out there.
• Mark Simonson Studio/Notebook (feed): A font designer’s virtual scrapbook.
• Microsoft Typography — News Archive (feed): Newsy but worthwhile.

[1] - For example:

(Click for larger…)

[2] - I love the way that text and graphics look on my Mac, but Microsoft is going to win the future if Apple isn’t careful. For several years now motivated Windows users have been able to get dead-simple multilingual support. The Windows type engine does a really good job of creating the complex ligatures in various complex scripts. Furthermore, for several South and East Asian languages, you simply type what you want in a Roman alphabet you get nicely transliterated script. On the Mac, if you don’t have a TrueType font, you won’t get all of those nice features, and forget about input method editors if you aren’t using CJK. Here’s a simple comparison that shows the incomplete support for OpenType fonts on Mac OS 10.4.10. (Note the appearance of the combining character “ ् ” and the awkward positioning of vowels with all faces except Devanagari MT.)

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Last year I took a software testing course. A handful of software testing and quality blogs still hang out in my feed reader. In addition to the ones I wrote about last year, you might find these interesting.

• Software Testing Zone (feed): Howtos and gotchas
• Tester Tested (feed): “Discover Pradeep’s enormous passion for testing in this blog.”

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Adobe is really big — trust me, I visited them once; they have a whole tower for PostScript and its children — so you’d think they have some good blog writers. And you’re right.

But today let’s remember some of their better public blogs that have one foot in the grave or are no more:

• Gunar’s Site (feed): So you want to know about XMP, IPTC, or other metadata?
• Jeff Tranberry’s Photoshop Crawlspace (feed): With a name like that all I can say is “Please come back. Please.”
• Living Photoshop (feed): More like “Barely Living”
• Sean Parent’s blog (feed): Nice, longish posts about “programming, the Adobe Source Libraries, and Adobe’s Software Technology Lab.”
• Technical Perspectives on Digital Photography (feed): That pretty much says it all.

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