www.nickhodge.com

Who Is Nick Hodge?

An inter­est­ing ques­tion, who am I? This is the ques­tion that we all must answer whilst we are on this small planet. It is right up there with “What is the mean­ing of life?” Maybe they are connected.

My LinkedIn Pro­file, and more formal resume: www.linkedin.com Pro­file: Nick Hodge

From a dur­a­tion on this planet per­spect­ive, I am 39-plus-ish. Loc­a­tion, usu­ally Sydney. The fam­ily travels, and I travel for work — so there are pic­tures and stor­ies from all around the world on http://www.nickhodge.com/.

From a per­sonal accom­plish­ment per­spect­ive, I am mar­ried to Avril and have one son, Liam.

I am presently employed as a Pro­fes­sional Geek at Microsoft in Sydney, Aus­tralia. I work mainly online, pub­lished here and also http://thegeekstories.com/

This web site, mun­genet, has been online since 1996. It pred­ates the cur­rent hype/craze of “weblogs/blogs/blogosphere”. His­tor­ical views of mun­genet on www.nickhodge.com and mun­genet on webstuff.apple.com. Apart from the design com­ing a long way; tech­no­lo­gies have too.

My per­sonal likes are books (his­tory, spe­cific­ally mil­it­ary his­tory), pro­gram­ming lan­guages, music; spe­cially music of the 1980’s; and any­thing that is sorta geeky.

Our fam­ily has two Kor­ats (Lucy and Mee Noi (Our Kor­ats)). They are pure bred Thai cats, known as Si Sawat in Thai­l­and. One is named Lucy and the other Mee Noi.

We also two MINI Cooper S’s; one named Megan and the other SCRLTT (Scar­lett) Yes, the cars have names. It assists when we talk about them.

As stated, travel has been a part of my work, and thank­fully some­thing the whole fam­ily enjoy (70 Days, 7 Coun­tries and Jour­neys in 2005) so I get to New Zea­l­and and major cit­ies in Aus­tralia reg­u­lar­ily. Being a part of the wider Asia-Pacific, other loc­a­tions such as Singa­pore, Hong Kong and Tokyo also pop up from time to time.

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This is Avril Hodge, my beau­ti­ful wife. If you are a fan of Chris­tian Slater, you must, must, must visit her web site.

This is Liam, our son. Accord­ing to our friends, he is a split­ting image of me. This photo was taken on our trip to Lon­don in 2004

Today, at least in the US, it is Programmer’s Day.

Maybe it should be called “Inter­na­tional Pro­gram­ming Lan­guage Peace Day”. The level of advocacy for vari­ous pro­gram­ming lan­guages reaches rhet­or­ical heights last seen dur­ing the one of the not-so-successful 18^th cen­tury revolutions.

When not speak­ing to humans, other pro­gram­mers to read­ing the latest advocacy on their lan­guage of choice: pro­gram­mers stitch together the wild thoughts of oth­ers to munge data into inform­a­tion.

Pro­gram­mers are the people who use com­puter lan­guages, in their vari­ous forms, to get com­puters to do cool things. From bliken­lights to cool online maps: there are a pyr­amid of pro­gram­mers respons­ible for your com­puter exper­i­ence. A pro­gram­mer is behind the “ding” in the lift you used this morn­ing; and the soft­ware that val­id­ated your ticket on the bus ride to work.

The beauty of com­puter lan­guages is that they never seem to stag­nate: like mod­ern, spoken lan­guages: they evolve as the world changes. Except those that are aban­don­ware.

Microsoft has recently released my cur­rent favour­ite pro­gram­ming lan­guage, Python, as a CLR/.net lan­guage: Iron­Py­thon. This imple­ments Python as a dynamic lan­guage on the CLR engine.

C# is the lan­guage of imple­ment­a­tion for CLR, as is Sun’s Java is for the JVM. A# (Ada), B#, D# F# (OCaml), G# (Gen­er­at­ive lan­guage), J# (Jsharp), P# (Pro­log), L#. More sharps than Beeth­oven.

The lan­guage wars has returned to an old field: dynamic lan­guages. The grand-daddy of dynamic lan­guages, LISP, has received some recent pos­it­ive PR. One per­son, Paul Gra­ham, is the poster mil­lion­aire for LISP. Laz­arus of LISP.

This week, Sun Microsys­tems par­ried Microsoft’s Iron­Py­thon by hir­ing the team behind JRuby. The aim here is to imple­ment the Ruby dynamic lan­guage on the Java Vir­tual Machine (JVM). Some months ago, this team was able to get a Ruby on Rails work­ing on the JVM.

Whilst the big lan­guage guys battle it out, is Erlang the next Ruby, or is it just a vik­ing proto-language with the best non-pun name? The Erlang com­munity is start­ing to come out of their tele­phone exchanges.

No lan­guage has deemed to have arrived in the 21^st Cen­tury until there is a web frame­work writ­ten around it. C# is ASP.NET, Python has Dyango, Ruby has Rails, Erlang has Jaws, Scheme has Magic… and so it goes on.

This broken thing called Javas­cript that has been reborn with AJAX, and is receiv­ing daily blood trans­fu­sions of new features.

All of these lan­guages just remind me of my per­sonal all­time favour­ite lan­guage love of my life: Hypercard’s Hyper­Talk. As Hyper­card is no longer sold, and “Clas­sic MacOS” is a battle to get going on my Mac­Book Pro — sadly it is a lan­guage as use­ful as Cornish.

So, for a short period of time it is back to one of HyperTalk’s chil­dren: Applescript. Bas­ketweav­ing for the mind.

Spent yes­ter­day at the Education.au con­fer­ence “So What’s New”, I asked myself — so exactly what is new? I must admit to slight symp­toms of intel­lec­tual stock­holm syn­drome. Agree­ing with all points of view and res­ult­ing in a mush of thoughts, and no opinion.

Is Web2.0 new? Rel­at­ively. Is the Web new? Is TCP/IP new? Are com­puters new? Is technology-augmented learn­ing new? On the short bus ride home, all I could answer is “no”. The demands on the next gen­er­a­tion is new. The gen­er­a­tion that is going to replace the Baby-boomers and Generation-X are enter­ing into an envir­on­ment and com­munity where pure “know­ledge” or rote learn­ing can eas­ily be out­classed by any­one with a mobile phone to “google” an answer. Child­hood Obesity is a furphy. It’s about Child­hood Apathy.

It isn’t about teach­ers, cur­riculum, ped­agogy, cent­ral­ised test­ing, digital divides, politi­cians or depart­ments. Formal learn­ing about indi­vidual teach­ers and how they engage with their stu­dents. Enga­ging teach­ers leave a long emo­tional memory that has long term impact. Learn­ing Mentor Apathy Breeds Child­hood Apathy.

As the token lay­man at the con­fer­ence, I kept quiet and listened and learnt. The chal­lenges for par­ents and teach­ers is very sim­ilar for man­agers of small teams: enga­ging the minds of people is no easy task.

Phil­lip Adams was the key­note, fam­ous speaker. His feel­ings in rela­tion to the dot­age of mass-media and the rising of unme­di­ated media is inter­est­ing; and the impact the web and imme­di­ate com­mu­nic­a­tion have on the oncom­ing gen­er­a­tion seems in tune with the cur­rent mood of the internet.

James Farmer: post-punk decon­struc­tion­ist (icon­o­clastic edu­ca­tion, incor­por­ated sub­ver­sion) using web2; or more import­antly, using more advanced web tech­no­lo­gies in and out of the classroom. In a multi-dimensional, non-mediated media this seems the cur­rent norm.

Annika Small: the future learner, future learn­ing of the envir­on­ment. Future­Lab in UK. Not quite sure where this present­a­tion was on about; show­ing off Xerox Parc or MIT Labs-like videos of learn­ing scen­arios in the UK. Any of these could have been cre­ated with pure paper tech­no­logy and an enthu­si­astic teacher.

Whilst in these highly abstrac­ted circles, one should be extremely care­ful not to pro­ject your per­sonal life into a debate as import­ant as edu­ca­tion. As a par­ent of a teen age stu­dent, and not here to sell “stuff” to any­one. Just to listen, absorb — and sur­pris­ingly learn. Immersed into a world of instant-ness. Liam has cre­ated a digital learn­ing envir­on­ment based on strung-together tools. Cre­at­ing con­tent, and col­lab­or­at­ing with his class­mates to get work done.

The wis­dom of enthu­si­astic teach­ers is long remembered, les­sons from rote teach­ers is soon for­got­ten. Digital tech­no­logy will rarely aug­ment a bor­ing, non-engaging teacher. This concept is touched on by Judy O’Connell, a blog­ger at today’s con­fer­ence and rep­res­en­ted by Al Upton and Immanuel College’s Kevin Richardson.

A brave and far-sighted Edu­ca­tion Min­is­ter is going to have a dif­fi­cult time mov­ing the col­lect­ive wis­dom of rote learn­ing, exams, com­pet­it­ive effort and incre­mental res­ults into per­son­al­ised learn­ing and flex­ible meas­ure­ment. I wish them well. All chil­dren have a lat­ent thirst for learn­ing; and unlock­ing this should not be con­strained by short sighted populism

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The idea was to spend the day with the illus­tri­ous Uncle Mike. In a strange coin­cid­ence on the day, we both wore blue shirts. I was merely a calm­ing and super­flu­ous “num­ber 2″ gopher. Even more stra­tegic behind the scenes, earn­ing his stripes, was Munge Brother and Life Kludger No. 3, David Wal­lace. Wel­come to the Blue Shirt Bri­gade, and the Munge Broth­ers.

A good day out, and an excel­lent way to end the first week of doing something.

Chair­man Bill and CEO Steve have lost a valu­able mem­ber of staff in Uncle Mike. I have a dis­tinct feel­ing that product teams in Seattle will miss him more, if his­tory tells us any­thing. Nearly 9 years at Microsoft is an achieve­ment in these high velo­city career times.

Times like these trig­ger throughts and feel­ings requir­ing articulation:

• Accord­ing to Beth Wor­rall, Mike’s turn of phrase and gift of allit­er­a­tion hasn’t left him. “pro­cess is the colostomy bag of innov­a­tion” illus­trates both his off-centre (slightly black) but stark and illus­trat­ive phrase mak­ing skills. The Munge Broth­ers is dis­tinctly an Uncle Mike term, bor­rowed by mun­genet. These phrases have the abil­ity to per­fectly describe a situ­ation and cir­cum­stance that defies altern­ate char­ac­ter­isa­tion. Nam­ing your clapped-out, 1970’s era and rus­ted surf-boarding car­rier Holden sta­tion wagon DOSBOX replete with the per­son­al­ised num­ber plates sums up his sly sense of humour.
• Ad-hocery, or the lack of over-formalism and a fear of too-much pro­cess and meth­od­o­logy is an ana­thema to Mike. Throw­ing “stuff” together to solve a dif­fi­cult prob­lem is one of his strengths. “End user com­put­ing” and put­ting power into the hands of end users was his man­tra before he joined the small band at Ran­dom Access. Strict meth­od­o­lo­gists, or god-forbid, those how invent meth­od­o­lo­gies and Mike prob­ably wouldn’t get along that well. Watch out if you are in IT and don’t have a deep pas­sion for IT.
• Over ten years ago as a con­sult­ant, Mike’s phrase “a laptop and a mobile phone” clearly fore­told of today. One can work and be in touch vir­tu­ally any­where, and with a laptop be pro­duct­ive. There was a fam­ous piece of video made by the Munge Broth­ers that cap­tures this Fellini-like mood.
• A clear vis­ion of what is import­ant and what works. Some of the ori­ginal “turn­ing data into inform­a­tion” work the Munge Broth­ers presen­ted in 1991/2 and ad-hoc data retrieval meta­morphed into data-warehousing. This is an industry tech­no­logy that I use daily in my cur­rent, non-highly-technical man­age­ment job. I have no idea how I could do my job without this level of information.
• A love of art: be it music, video or still; that is off-kilter. It is dif­fi­cult to describe the imagery I’ve seen; and I think that Mike’s blog has a splat­ter­ing of these images. Sadly, it seems that its genetic as his son is now play­ing gui­tar at school.
• Friend­ship and loy­alty that spans many careers. Uncle Mike was my ref­eree for the job that lif­ted me from Adelaidian obscur­ity to Apple incubus. His loy­alty to his fam­ily in the midst of a tur­bu­lent work envir­on­ment is legendary — and he strike a har­mony that is unmatch­able. I’ve per­son­ally only seen this in one other per­son in my work­life; his name is also Michael.

Where next for the Fang? We might find him in the record­ing stu­dio as the micro-music media mogul of Adelaide or a gad­get heavy jack­aroo in out­back Aus­tralia. The fur­ther away he gets from this increas­ingly frac­tured IT industry the bet­ter. For those of us stuck on the inside, we are deadly envious.