Day: May 3, 2009

Dreaming in Code covers three years of software development, without bearing witness to a final release. That’s really the whole story: software is hard, unpredictable, and never finished.

The book, by Scott Rosenberg, aspires to match Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, the classic record of a technology team overcoming the hurdles of innovation to deliver a product to market. While James Fallows makes that analogy explicit in his cover blurb, Dreaming in Code fell short for me.

Rosenberg chose Chander (an email/calendar/lifestream program…at least originally) because it was an open-source project with a different structure: more centralized, and funded generously by Mitch Kapor. But the team members changed throughout the three years plus that Rosenberg followed the project, and the software wasn’t delivered during this period, either. Because the cast of characters changes significantly, I lost interest in the people — and stories of this kind are really about the individuals melding (or not) into a team. Without software in people’s hands, there’s no sense of accomplishment, and no closure, either. Chandler continues, but simply with diminished ambitions and a disinterested audience.

The fits and starts in the development provide Rosenberg plenty of pages to delve into the research and writings about software development. These sidebars weren’t necessarily new to me, but more enjoyable than reading about Chandler’s failure to cohere.

Those in the technology realm will nod their heads at the tales of failure here, but I’m not certain about its appeal to a broader audience. Scott’s blog Wordyard is worth following, though. And I see his next book, about blogging, is due this summer. I admire his willingness to dive in again on a topic that is very much not finished.

By blogging my enjoyable encounters with the books (1, 2) of Alan Furst, I gave my cousins an idea for a gift: The Good German, by Joseph Kanon. Score!

A menacing, heartening mystery, set in Berlin as World War II has rattled to a close, The Good German collapses a very personal reunion with the rumblings of geopolitics.

More of a police procedural than a spy story — albeit with a journalist leading the investigation — this novel weaves in the larger realities. Again and again, the mundane details of larger issues are bluntly laid out for review: assigning blame for the Holocaust, the whitewashing of the sins of weapons developers, and the ominously clear rising conflict between the West and the Russians.

And it does all that in prose more direct and readable than my own. My thanks for the gift! I never saw the movie made from this book, but now I’m curious.

At the same time I found a volume of three lectures by Wallace Stegner, I picked up American Places. Originally published in 1981, this collection from Wallace Stegner and his son Page Stegner was re-released in 2006. I enjoyed these essays several weeks ago.

Father and son share an ethos that quietly, insistently urges a change in the way Americans enjoy and exploit America. But I wonder if being quiet does the trick. As Wallace writes in one chapter, “Last Exit to America,”

The unexamined life is not worth living, but it is precisely the life toward which Americans as a people desparately yearn. (page 53)

Without a jolt, stasis rules. Coming up on thirty years after these essays were written, all is recognizable, for better and for worse.

The first chapter sets the historical stage for how Americans use America, scanning many stages of exploration and exploitation over more than 500 years. The final chapter gazes slightly forward in time, with hope (albeit) faint for change. Each of the 11 chapters along the way narrows to a single place.

The chapter about the Great Salt Lake, “Dead Heart of the West,” taught me a lot about a anomalous fixture I’ve only skirted once, late at night on Interstate 80. It also reminded me that I want to read Stegner’s history of the Mormons (Mormon Country and, later, The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail).

The Stegners live in these words: both writers use personal history in their work. Their human relationships serve as a lens to focus attention on landscapes and environments. I wonder if their friends and colleagues accepted being grist for the mill. Not that the authors diminish these people in any way, but their lives become symbols, small and large.

With the title The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity, Stefan Klein echoes my own thoughts about the years/months/weeks/days/hours/minutes/seconds skipping or struggling by.

Klein is a science journalist who’s found success in taking on big topics with catchy titles. I haven’t read The Science of Happiness or All by Chance, but The Secret Pulse of Time read like a Malcolm Gladwell book, with a few differences.

Klein covers his topic more broadly and often deeper than Gladwell’s investigations. That’s not always positive — Klein’s book lacks Gladwell’s sense of narrative and purpose. Where Gladwell’s books at times feel like the extended, but focused, magazine articles they often are, Klein forces a bundle of research on his reader. Fortunately, I embraced this topic, so the tidbits and esoterica rewarded my perseverance. I looked forward to this book (a Christmas gift), but I didn’t fly through it. It’s a reference book, not a story. It may reward skimming in the future.

Below are some tidbits I marked along the way.

Increasing the volume of a uniformly ticking sound makes the listeners think the beat is accelerating, too. Klein calls this the Bolero affect. (p. 39)

Goethe complained about the undue focus on speed, and the increasing pace of communication…in 1825. (pp. 151-152)

“When Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction classic 2001 – A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, the movie’s boldly rapid cuts pushed the viewing habits of moviegoers to their limits. Today, we tend to lose patience with those same shots of spaceships gliding slowly through the universe to classical music, which move far too slowly for our current pace.” (pp. 152-153)

“Multitasking is a trap.” (p. 183)

“A lack of control distresses people far more than having a great deal demanded of them, as countless studies have shown. … ” (p. 204)

“Having small children in the house means living with endearing egocentrics who are not willing to delay their needs for a single moment, thus fragmenting their parents’ routine to an extreme. This also explains why many mothers and fathers feel rushed, although they theoretically have plenty of time to get things done.” (p. 205)

“Feeling rushed is decidedly unpleasant. You are obliged to do something, such as to take care of the children, but you don’t feel like doing it. This lack of motivation constitutes the third member of a trio of debilitating time wasters, along with the inability to concentrate and the feeling of being overwhelmed by stress.” (p. 219)

“Our everyday language is revealing: In describing time, we use words from the world of finance. We have and save and invest and waste it.” (p. 264)

State of Play makes a journalist (Russell Crowe) the hero in a corporate/political thriller that tries very hard. Sometimes, the movie succeeds. But with its reconciliation of the hard-core newspaperman and the young blogger and the final credits rolling over whirring presses as the newspaper prints the damning truth…State of Play felt like the modern re-make of All the Presidents’ Men that it is, with an elegy for the newspaper woven in.

Metacritic offers a just better than mediocre 64. Two weeks after seeing the movie, I’d agree… it’s slipped a few points for me since my original reaction.