Catspaw's Guide to the Inevitably Insane

Catspaw at Google: a little more content

I was rereading some insanecats archives earlier today and I realized how much I appreciate being able to go back and see how my opinions grew and shifted over the period of several years. Then I read the last two years of entries (ie: the Google Era) and it's amazing how quickly I just became a source of links to cool stuff completely outside of my life.

I've decided I'm going to try to do a better job at writing blog entries about the stuff I'm actually doing -- while walking that careful balance of not telling you all about the super secret ~~Google Death Rob--~~ oops! I've said too much!

The project that I'm currently on, Ads UI, is responsible for the user interface and user experience (the look and feel) of ads on google.com. We come up with ideas, try them out, and if they're successful, we launch them. It's an extremely satisfying job for a few reasons:

It's public facing. That means that I can say "okay now click this..... now that ...... yeah, see that thing there? My team just launched that."
We get to come up with cool new ideas and take them from brainstorming all the way to launch. These iterations can happen quickly (a few weeks) or can be massively complicated and require a ton of coordination. Both tend to happen simultaneously. (Personally, I have a secret love for the ones that are huge and complicated. I enjoy getting all of the pieces of the project to work together, to be ready at the exact right times, so that they all come together like a piece of music. It shouldn't surprise anyone that I enjoy mentally playing chess with everyone around me as a piece.)
We can quantitatively measure how we're doing. We're making X% more money, users are Y% happier, advertisers are spending Z% more money, and the side effects are A, B and C. We're doing actual science and very real research.
I get to interact with tons of teams here at Google. A lot of our experiments involve using other teams' technology, or editing their code to implement our ideas. In fact, almost all of what we do is editing other peoples' code, so it really drives home how important things like documentation, testing, readability and maintainability really are.

I also enjoy it because I don't really particularly like our ads, so it's fun to be a part of a project where you can start with something "meh" and then come up with ideas to make them really cool, and know that if the general user population likes it too, that it's going to be launched and you're going to have made it better for everyone.

And for those wondering, in the two years that I have been here, I still have never worked on even a single weekend, and I go home fairly early every day. I also harass my team mates if they're still at work on 5pm on a Friday: "Go home! I don't care that you got in at noon today, it's home time. Go home!" They usually do.

ArtistThemes for Google

Google has released Artist Themes for your iGoogle homepage, and this video made me totally excited about them:

You can get themes designed by creative people like Marc Ecko, Jeff Koons, Coldplay, NIGO, Michael Graves, Robert Mankoff and so many more.

There was a big public party on Thursday in New York City -- where I happened to be. For now, I've installed this one; but like my desktop background, I suspect I'll enjoy changing these themes in parallel with my ever-changing mood.

And I, for one, welcome our robot overlords

A robot made by the scientists at the University of Pennsylvania awesomely reassembles itself when kicked apart. How long before they control the universe? Based on robot rate-of-learning, which I approximate from watching sci-fi movies, I'm guessing about four days. Try to act surprised.

Should I stay in school?, 10 year old boy asks serial killers

This is one of those "damn I wish I'd thought of that first" moments. In the late 90s, Historian Bill Geerhart pretended to be a 10-year-old boy named Billy and wrote letters to convicted serial killers asking them questions like whether or not he should stay in school. The replies are just classic. Now, ten years later, he's writing back to them letting them know how successful he's been and all thanks to their advice.

You really have to read them all.

And then of course Manson's perfectly sensible reply...

And if reading notes from serial killers creeps you out, he also sends notes to the founder of Hustler, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc. Go spend the next half hour of your life reading them all.

Google plus Portal equals awesome

Seen in the Google hallways:

What kind of programmer are you?

If you're not a programmer (for example, if you're a dentist or a florist or the guy who checks that every water bottle cap produced comes with the right number of grooves to properly lock onto water bottles), then you're none of the below. But if you write software for a living, you probably identify with one of the following categories:

Computer Scientist: You can prove that the min flow is the max cut. You know all of the trade-offs between quicksort and bubblesort, and can explain modus ponens, modus tollens, De Morgan's Theorem and the law of the excluded middle.
Weaknesses: Bad news, hot shot...you're going to find a disappointing lack of the delta-epsilon theorem in real software design. Software libraries already provide most of what you know (who writes quicksort by hand anymore?!) and you fail horribly when it comes to real world problems. No one ever taught you the big-O complexity of binary search when your RAM corrupts halfway through the job, did they?

Code Monkey: You crank out code at amazing speed. You have the entire libraries of the language of your choice memorized. You got perfect, or near perfect, in all of your programming classes. You may have one or more certifications from institutions in order to prove your programming prowess.
Weaknesses: You need software design to be handed to you in neat little compartments defined in so much detail that the designer practically had to write out pseudo-code for you. You handle every edge case you're asked to handle, but only those ones. Oh, and if someone hands you an abstract problem like, "design a cool javascript widget that demonstrates the flexibility of this product", your brain explodes.

Hacker: The last UNIX command you ran was a set of twelve commands piped together, including sed, awk, find, grep, perl, and a bit of sendmail. You know exactly how to fix any sysadmin problem that anyone has. You once wrote this awesome piece of C code that monitored the vitals of a cluster using under 100 characters. You hate that keywords like "const" are so long and waste 5 whole characters of valuable screen real estate.
Weaknesses: No one understands any code you write, including yourself five minutes later. The truck number of any team that you're on is always 1 -- you -- and as soon as someone else has to work with your code they have to spend weeks just understanding it for the lack of tests, documentation, readability, etc. You secretly think that if they were smarter, they wouldn't need documentation, and you wish that you worked with smarter people. People need you, because you've made yourself necessary, but they also wish that you were dead.

Software Engineer: You write designs up front, solicit peer advice on the designs, then write tests and code and docs (all three in parallel), and end up contributing half of your code back to main libraries so that others can benefit from it. Your code is modular, extendible, and remarkably easy to understand considering what a difficult system you just wrote.
Weaknesses: Endangered species.

A tale of pudding

Restrictions sprout creativity. And so I gave five people this morning the following task: Tell me a story that starts with "Whether" and ends with "pudding" and has 27 words.

Here's what they came up with:

"Whether you live or die is not my concern" she said, thrusting a spoonful of the pungent custard in my face. My last words: "allergic! to! pudding!"
Whether [Catsy] knew it or not, her attempts to rule the earth were quickly being foiled, having had not taken into account the malicious, evil, Google pudding.
Whether it had happened before Roger wasn't sure. But he was definitely, definitely sure that when he had left for work, his house wasn't made of pudding.
Whether or not [Catspaw] was born to be a Warlock in We Know and she is KNOWN as Kazpah, depends on how she how she makes pudding.
Whether we go to the Canary Islands or not is still undecided. Last night [author's fiance] said that he would rather go to Hawaii where they eat pudding.

Can you do any better?

Remember to keep terrorist_plans.txt off your laptop

I've talked about this before, but a California appeals court today upheld that laptops can be searched by border security officials on international flights without requiring any specific evidence of criminal activity.

That means that if you're flying from Canada to the US, a border guard can demand your laptop password, log in to your laptop, and investigate any of your files.

US Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien said: "The government needs to have the ability to restrict harmful material from entering the country, whether that be weapons used by terrorists, dangerous narcotics or child pornography."

So make sure that you remove terrorist_plans.txt from your laptop before crossing the border. I feel safer already.

(Evil tip to the RIAA: Make it required for the border guards to report any illegal mp3 downloads that they find to you. Ooooo that is evil!)

On apathy and arm elevation

Who came up with the phrase "raise your hands in the air like you just don't care"?

Everyone knows the saying, but I doubt that many people would recognize the action if they saw it. "That young woman has her hands raised", they'd say, "I guess she must be apathetic about something."

At least it would help with things like giving a talk to a room full of people. "Uh oh, everyone has their hands up! I must not be reaching them with the importance of my topic."

From now on, I'm going to raise my hands in the air when I just don't care. Be on the look out.

Logos carved on human hair

Remember when laser-etching pictures onto your powerbook was super cool?

Well it just had its ass kicked by this:

A researcher at McMaster University used a focus ion beam microscope to carve his school's logo on a human hair. What would you etch onto your hair?