SPOILERS for Man of Steel ahead

Display technology is a recurring theme in my limited perspective reviews. For Oz, I wrote about live display on smoke, and for the original Alien, I came up with a theory for why you’d have such high DPI green screens in the future.

Man of Steel offers a similar conundrum, as the display technology for Krypton is a flying pinscreen. It’s monochrome, it’s extremely low DPI, and of course it’s designed to look good on the screen, especially in 3D.

I have looked for some stills of this, but can’t find any. If you’ve seen the movie, the technology I’m talking about is what showed Kal-El in-utero, flew next to Jor-El in his escape, showed Lara’s head when she warned Jor-El to look behind him, and presented Artificially Intelligent (AI) Jor-El’s history of Krypton to Superman.

Like I said, the driving force behind this technology being in the movie is undoubtedly because it looks good on screen. But, as always, my review of the in-movie technology is based on the fictional world that we are presented with, not what it means to us as viewers of the movie.

Here’s what we know about this technology:

• It needs to work in totally wireless flying displays, perhaps even in military contexts
• It appears to be two-way as Lara can see what is happening on the other side
• There seems to be a range of quality and size

It makes sense if this started as a military-use display. When Jor-El is riding the flying mount, and the display is flying next to him, it feels like this is common use-case. This display, made of metal “not on our periodic table”, would make this a nice piece of battle-hardened equipment.

This use-case also explains the low-DPI and monochrome you get in this context — this device needs to conserve power and be real-time in low-bandwidth situations. When power is readily available and you are connected (like in Jor-El’s “History of Krypton” presentation), the display becomes very high-quality.

And, true to Clay Christensen’s innovation theory, we expect that an innovative product to be worse on conventional measures, but better on new ones. This display shows 3D to the in-movie characters with no glasses or tricks because the display is actually in three dimensions.

The movie has another display, a perfect 3D projection (used to show AI Jor-El), but this seems to only be available inside of ships, so it’s not appropriate for outdoor military use-cases. I’m assuming that Jor-El didn’t use it for his presentation because Krypton also has advanced presentation theory and realized the the graphic/old-school look added a certain something.

I spent last weekend at UMass with over a hundred fellow hackers to work on local challenges as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. The event (Hack for Western Mass) itself was masterfully run by an amazing group that I hope to work with again.

The team I was on successfully completed our goal to get the Hilltown Seed Saving Network  a webapp to manage their decentralized seed bank.

Here’s what worked for us

We started before the weekend. Using the event’s wiki, Rosemary (a member of the network who knows HTML, but needed help on the back-end), Beryl (a CIT professor at Elms College) and I connected. We had a thorough discussion in the week before the event, and it became clear that Beryl and I could collaborate in python using Django to do this. Beryl knew python and did Django tutorials to prepare, and I have a few small Django backed sites.

We were a small team with complementary skills. At the event, we picked up Sheila, a new team member who set up our Facebook and Twitter pages, as well as training Rosemary on Hootsuite so that should could manage interactions.  During the event, a seed swap was executed using Facebook — talk about a minimum viable product! Beryl and I worked on the site, and Rosemary worked on our HTML template. We were a small, but efficient and effective team.

Rosemary came with wireframes. Here are the login and the add seed wireframes. She brought about a half-dozen more. Here’s the production version of login and add seed.

We set up a system to keep going. By Saturday night an 80% functional app was in the hackforwesternmass/seednetwork repo on GitHub. Since the event there have been dozens of small commits. It’s been really fun working with this team, and we have systems set up to work together.

We got to production as fast as we could. One of the organizers, Andrew, gave me a crash course in Heroku, and I had it done Sunday evening (Hilltown Seed Saving Network seed bank production site). Next time, I would do this as soon as we had anything ready to go.

We stayed focused. By Sunday, with only four hours or so before the presentations, there were a lot of possible distractions (incorporate maps? go on community access TV? prepare our presentation!) We tried to keep the end-goal in mind — get the Hilltown Seed Saving Network a functional app. We might revisit some of those ideas later, but having a clear goal made it possible to ignore everything else.

As an aspiring FP connoisseur, I spend my free time thinking about higher order functions, data-ing all the things, and hating on blub. One of my favorite new twitter follows is @jessitron (seriously, just go watch everything you can find, especially Functional Principles for OO Development).

In any case, she recently tweeted:

Procedure: we can replace each call with the body of the routine. Function: we can replace a call with the result. Do you see the power?

— Jessica Joy Kerr (@jessitron) May 29, 2013

Which got me thinking — what if the procedure was pure? Then, you could replace it with nothing! Talk about power.

On my way to work today, I banged out a prototype, and so, I proudly introduce fishbike — pure procedural programming. Admittedly, uses are limited.

You can use the fbc command as either an interpreter or compiler, so, first create a text file called primes.fb (you can use touch). This is a fishbike program to find all primes not divisible by themselves. Since this is a procedure, it can’t return anything. So, if it finds any, it will do some side-effect (update your database, tweet the answer, email your mom, etc). Run it with:

fbc primes.fb

Or compile it with

fbc primes.fb > primes
chmod +x primes
./primes

Enjoy!

On my work blog I have a series of limited perspective movie reviews. These reviews, inspired by a Letterman bit, look at only one narrow aspect of a movie.

SPOILER ALERT: These reviews assume you have seen the movie.

Here’s Inception, Breaking Dawn, and Star Trek.

I watched Alien with a friend recently and was struck by [the ship computer] Mother’s display. This (SPOILER) review has the best (SPOILER) image I could find — unfortunately, green text on black is particularly susceptible to JPEG compression artifacts. In the movie, the actual display is extremely high-res (perhaps “retina”), with no pixels visible on my friend’s large screen showing the Blu-ray edition. On the other hand, the display is a green screen and fairly small. It’s an odd vision of the future.

My guess for the choice is that this was the best they could do in 1979, but I’ll try to make sense of it in the context of the movie, which is made quite a bit harder by Prometheus. In Prometheus, there are full-fledged holograms, so I’m guessing they have color displays. It was only 29 years earlier, so it’s hard to explain a display regression that wouldn’t also affect space travel technology. The only explanation is conscious choice on the part of the ship builder.

Here are our clues:

1. The computer doesn’t seem to be able to display anything other than text.
2. It can’t receive any input other than keyed in text
3. It has a natural language interface
4. The computer is offline with respect to Earth

My guess, actual Earth computers of this era are 100% speech driven with no displays. This disruptive innovation has decimated the display market.

Like now, the voice recognition requires a connection to server farm to pull off. As a hack, when you have to go offline, they give you some of the AI client-side, but can’t understand speech anymore so they slap on a display.

There’s, of course, no such thing as a display with less than retina quality as that bar was passed a while ago. However, since displays aren’t used by mainstream tech any more, they had to use a batch of small displays from some niche supplier — perhaps a line of hipster, retro digital alarm clocks.

I’ve had an interest on how people learn to program and have been thinking about the patterns I’ve seen that work. I’m particularly interested in the patterns I applied when I first started out.

I learned how to program in my junior high school’s “computer shop” class. One day we had to take a working slot machine application and alter it so that you always win. This assignment has a lot of things going for it:

1. The goal is simple to understand and remember
2. It’s fun
3. To do it, you need to read a program written by an expert
4. It’s a very small amount of code to complete the assignment, but the end result is a large system
5. There are many simple follow-on assignments that can be generated by the students

Eventually, if a student spends some time following their interests to propose and make changes, they will expose themselves to more and more of the program, generate questions, and direct their own learning. In the end, they will get a lot closer to being able to create a program like this themselves.

I am using this approach now to learn clojure. With github, we have access to programs written by experts, and crucially, a simple way to fork and change them. This has been a great way for me to learn, and it just occurred to me today that I learned this technique nearly 30 years ago.

Here’s what I’m using to learn clojure.

I’m reading Clojure Programming by Chas Emerick, Brian Carper and Christophe Grand. I’m almost halfway through (just finished the chapter on macros).

I once blogged that tech books were broken, specifically that they were too long. I got the Kindle edition of this book, so I didn’t even check the size until just a few minutes ago (Amazon says it’s 632 pages). My problem with long tech books is that most of the space is used on uninteresting reference information like tables of possible enum values, long program listings, and minute details that I’m mostly not ready for. I don’t think these kinds of books promote learning, and pointed out that the 200-page books on my shelf were also the best for learning (and most were classics).

This book, although long, doesn’t have these problems. It’s a teaching narrative, with quick repl sessions and the longer examples are still very manageable. Perhaps clojure lends itself to be presented this way — the code for generating a maze fits on my iPhone, and a repl session is an ideal way to learn a language.

After presenting the basic building blocks, the book also takes time to show you idiomatic clojure. The perfect example is the chapter on macros. When I first tried to learn clojure, I struggled to learn macros and basically hacked my way towards a simple OO implementation. At the time, I really didn’t understand macros, but I was in a self-imposed time-crunch, so I hacked something together — my final thoughts were

suffice to say, this is kind a crazy way to make something, but it sure beats not being able to make it.

Now, after this chapter, I feel like a have a solid understanding of the various macro features, and even better, a sub-section called “Common Macro Idioms and Patterns” will improve anyone’s macros, no matter what your level. There are similar sections throughout the book.

I’m using Light Table as my IDE, not so much because it’s a great IDE (it’s not yet), but because its Instarepl is a nearly ideal way for me to explore clojure. I suspect I will outgrow it when I want to make something real, but while I am just learning, it’s perfect.

Any new clojure programmer should be making an account on 4Clojure and solving problems. I’m working my way through them now — follow other users to see their solutions to a problem after you solve it (check out the top users page for good examples, or follow me for more tortured ones)

Finally, I highly recommend Chas’s Clojure Atlas, which is $5 if you buy Clojure Programming. You really have to go see it for yourself, but essentially, it’s a clojure documentation visualization and search web app — I was skeptical at first, but I could not live without it. Mostly, I use the search, which is lightning fast, but when you don’t know what you need, the visualization is key. Every documentation balloon also has a way to just see the source, which is perfect if you are trying to see well-written clojure. And, in a very nice touch, you never have to give the search box focus, typing always starts a search.