"Social networking" killed productivity

Twitter has become work. Not acceptable for work, i.e. something that is not frowned upon to do at work, but actual work, something you are required to do at work. At least this is the case if you are involved somewhere where the development team is the marketing team, like a startup or an open source project. For the record my involvement in Neo4j qualify to both categories, and Jython is most certainly an open source project, and quite a high profile such as well.

In order to stay on top of things in this situation you easily find yourself with push based twitter notification or at least reading a lot of material on a regular basis. I for example get about 150 to 200 tweets per day from the people I follow. Combine this with the expectation to stay on top of email (yet again yo go for push), and you've got a constant stream of interrupts, and this really kills productivity.

Just the other day I read the Life Offline posts by Aaron Swartz, and found that very much recognize myself in how he describes the problems of the constant online presence. It would be wonderful if I, like he was able to do, could take a long stretch of time away from being connected, but I don't think that is possible, at least not now or in a near future. The problem stands though, I am not being productive. And some things don't get done in time. And this is a problem.

I've tried shifting my email and twitter use to only do processing of these things once per day, but it still takes two hours or more from my day to simply process the incoming stream. By processing I mean:

• Read all the email and define actions.
• Read all tweets, open tabs for links that seem interesting, skim those pages and define actions.
• Read feeds and define actions.

That takes two hours. Then I still have to perform the actions that I have defined. Which could take up to the rest of the day.

I noticed already about twelve years ago how destructive online communities and social networks could be, and how much time they consume. I have thus tried to stay away from them, which is why I don't use my facebook account. But when social networking has become part of work it is much harder to avoid. In the case of Twitter it is also difficult to ignore because of how hugely influential it is. Twitter is the de facto way to find out about new things and interesting articles.

I am starting to believe that perhaps Donald Knuth made a wise decision in not having an email address, but as he points out having an email address is for people who need to be on top of things, and that he does not have an email address because he does not have to be on top of things anymore. I will agree with that, Donald Knuth has contributed a lot to the field of computer science, but he is definitely not on top of things anymore. So how do you cope with both being on top of things while still being productive? Is it possible? I would love to get any insight into the secrets that I am obviously unaware of.

Den moderna människans (mitt) förfall

Jag ligger i skrivandets stund i vår (min och Saras) säng och försöker somna (Sara sover). Ett av de störande momenten som hittils hindrat mig är ett surrande ljud utifrån. Tankarna far precis som de vill, så jag kom att fundera kring möjligheten att det skulle vara någon form av allmänfarlig olycka som låg bakom ljudet, även om det inte lät som ett larm, inte ens ett avlägset sådant. Ifall det nu skulle uppstå en situation i vilken allmänheten skulle varnas, via vilka kanaler skulle det då nå mig?

1. Vi har ingen hemtelefon. Hemtelefoner är en onödig utgift för den moderna människan, merparten av all telefonkommunikation går via mobiltelefonin. Därför skulle vi inte nås av telefonlarmsystemet. Jag har för mig att det ska finnas ett sådant, som ska betyda "slå på radion eller TVn för information om säkerhetsåtgärder". Vilket leder oss till punkt 2.
2. Vi har ingen TV. TV är slöseri med tid som kan användas till mycket bättre saker, och det visas aldrig något bra när man tittar ändå. Vill man koppla av och se något bra ser man en film, och datorn har en DVD-spelare. Ergo: ingen TV. Därför skulle vi inte nås av varningsinformationen som går ut via TV heller.

De enda kanalen som återstår är larmsirenerna. Och jag kan inte minnas sisst jag hörde dem testas. Jag skulle kunna tänka mig att samhället räknat med att de ska kunna nå varje medborgare genom TV-nätet eller telefonnätet. Radiotjänst är alltid lika förvånade när man talar om för dem att man inte har någon TV. Och vad jag har förstått är de inte så hårda som de påstrår med att se till att man betalar sin avgift även om man har en TV, just på grund av att systemet förutsätter att alla kan nås via den informationskanalen, och ifall Radiotjänst inte har makten att ta TVn från den som inte betalar sin TV-licens, så har de ju inte heller någon direkt makt att driva in avgiften.

Bara några tankar som verkade tillräckligt bra i brist på bättre sömn.

Jython - Summer of Code, finally getting started

Disclaimer: Even though this is an announcement of the fact that I am getting started on my SoC project, I have to admit that there might be some rants about courses at my university and ScaMPI.

As most of my friends already know, this summer I am doing a Google Summer of Code project. The project I applied for, and have been assigned to work on, is the Jython project. My part in Jython will be back end compiler work, i.e. bytecode generation. I have a great mentor, Jim Baker, and that makes me quite sure that I will be able to accomplish something during this project.
My original plan was to be able to start working on this project a week and a half ago, but that didn't turn out as I wanted it to. A week and a half ago I had my final exam, in cryptology (I actually managed to get quite good scores on that exam), and I had thought that I would be free from my studies after that. I had never expected that the final lab assignment in my programming of parallel computers course would take as much time as it did. I thought I would have completed that assignment before my exams. I was wrong. Before focusing on my exams I knew that the code segfaulted in a call to MPI_Sendrecv, that was quite easy to find out using some trace printouts. But figuring out why was a whole other story. It turns out that the MPI library on our super computer (ScaMPI) didn't adhere to the MPI standards. In order to get the rapid development cycles I am used to, instead of having to wait for CPU time to run the application, i installed OpenMPI on my MacBook (hey, it has multiple cores, it can do parallel computing), and manged to get everything working fine there, but it still segfaulted with ScaMPI. In the end it turns out ScaMPI doesn't support the MPI_STATUS_IGNORE parameter, a limitation that I haven't been able to find in any of the documentation I have been looking at. That took me about a week to track down. This experience has made me even more thankful to Open Source, since trying to use a parallel debugger (that was a pain to start due to license enforcement algorithms) on assembly code that you really don't know what it was compiled from is NOT a pleasant experience.
Anyhow, back to the main topic, my Jython SoC project. For those of you who might want to follow the progress of my work I will try to publish posts here about the project quite regularly (I am aiming at once a week). If you are interested in my project notes and source code for the stuff I am playing around with in the scope of this project, these will be hosted on my personal server and available at https://projects.thobe.org/jython/. The final code and documentation will be hosted at the Jython repository over at SourceForge and the official Jython wiki respectively.
Well then. I think that was all I wanted to announce in this post. Wish me happy hacking. Even though I suppose that tomorrow wont be as productive as I would want it to be, it is the Swedish midsummers holiday tomorrow, an occasion Swedes (ab)use to get really drunk. I am going to be the designated driver for my girlfriend and her family during the day, and then my girlfriend and I are going to have our own party at the evening. Well, I am sure that all of my hacking after that will be of the happy kind.

Where are the women my age?

Did I grow old?

Disclaimer: Not that I am looking for women, I live togheter with a woman I am happy to live with. This is just a fact that I observed and wanted to rant about.

I have finally started working out again, I've gone back to swimming, once a week, with my good friend Kalms, starting next week we might increse our dose of this sweet drug to twice a week.

Since I don't check up every reader of this web log I cannot know how much you know about me. I used to be an elite swimmer, ranked among the top 100 on 200m butterfly in Sweden for a few years. I had practice 9 times per week back then. Then four years ago I moved away to Linköping to study. Since my life had been quite fucked up for a while then I stoped swimming and gave up other parts of my life at the same time to create a new life.

However, back then one of the things that used to be amusing to occupy my mind and eyes with while paddling back and forth in the pool was looking at bodies. Good looking bodies prefably. Female such. And good looking swim suits. The shape of the human body facinates me (Perhaps I'll ammuse you with rants about that some other time).

Back then I noticed bodies of what I thought was all various ages. There were little girls (not very interesting to look at), girls in their upper teens (the pleasent kind, my age back then), and older women (not very intersting either).

The other day, when we were swimming, I noticed that the age distribution had changed, Now there were only little girls and old women. Nothing to look at that is. Then, since my mind wasn't occupied by anything else byt my own thought it dawned upon me that the age distribution hadn't changed. It was only me who had gotten older. I had never noticed that there never were any women aged 20-30, since I was never interesed in that age group before. But looking back at things, this is an age group that has never been represented, neither female, nor male (except for me that is...). Why is that? Why aren't there any women (or men) aged 20-30 in the swimming pool?

Where are all the women my age?