Summary of September, 2002
In September, 2002 frequent subjects were emergence, “trusted computing,” agile software development.
At the beginning of this month, I was reading Emergence by Steven Johnson, which inspired me to think about what would be required for a team of software developers to build a system autonomously, without any form of central planning—which might not be something desirable, but which reveals stuff like the need for a shared vision, etc. See the following posts:
- Pandemonium (of September 2)
- Programmer ants (of September 2)
- Emergent software projects: genome analogy (of September 3)
- Sidewalks making better cities? (of September 4)
- Sidewalks making better cities? (revisited) (of September 4)
- Emergent cities (of September 5)
- Does the Web learn? (of September 6)
- Does the Web learn? (revisited) (of September 7)
- Emergent open-source (of September 9)
- Finished reading Emergence (of September 16)
- Emergence book list (of September 16)
- Self-awareness (of September 25)
- bin Laden networks (of September 26)
- Anarchy vs. emergence (of September 30)
Then I tried to find commonalities between software development and mathematical problem solving, but I’m not sure I got any wiser. See these two posts, though:
- Abstraction in mathematics (of September 2)
- Abstraction in mathematics (of September 3)
I read Erlend Loe’s Tatt av kvinnen, and began reading Alan Watts’ Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking.
One day, I had lunch with a friend who worked as a tester in a very large software project, and blogged some thoughts about hierarchical versus networked projects.
Then I read an essay by Richard Gabriel, titled Lower Standards (PDF) which reminded me of things in Gail Sher’s book about writing, One Continuous Mistake, and resulted in a post about how not focusing on quality sometimes can result in higher quality.
As for “trusted computing”, I mainly posted links and short quotations from other weblog posts and news articles, except for a post with my notes from listening to Lawrence Lessig’s USENIX keynote.