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Source: ONLamp.com I have been meaning for a while to write a post about how mentors have helped me to achieve my goals and dreams, but I have been so busy recently, that I put it off. This week I came across the video of the last lecture by Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, and I was inspired enough that I figured I should write this post and tie it into my response to the video.
First, I would highly recommend that everyone and anyone watch this video. It is truly an inspirational and powerful video. One of the things he mentions in the video is, “How to Get People to Help You”. He mentions five points:
1. You can’t get there alone, and I believe in Karma
2. Tell the truth
3. Be earnest
4. Apologize when you screw up
5. Focus on others, not yourself
He also mentions, “Brick walls let us show our dedication”.
I won’t focus on everything he says in final speech, but I will get straight into how this relates to finding mentors in life. My first great mentor was Dr. Bogen, who I met at Caltech. He took in an interest in me when I was starting to form into a man, and, without a doubt, changed my life forever.
I remember doubting for quite a while if I was really intelligent or not, and then thinking that here was a guy that was in school until he was 37, a neurosurgeon, and a professor at Caltech, who found me interesting enough to talk with me every Friday from 8PM until 2 or 3 in the morning for a few years. Maybe I was smart? We talked about Philosophy, Math, Psychology, Consciousness, Religion, the Stock Market, Computers, Artificial Intelligence, and Bonsai Gardening, etc.
These talks and his wisdom allowed me to dream beyond what I thought was possible. He also introduced me to other powerful mentor/guru types. He also spurred a life long interest in the brain and psychology. Even though he passed away a couple of years ago, I still remember his words and advice almost like when Luke Skywalker hears the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi. “Noah use your brain, don’t turn to the dark side…..”. I am also very glad that I got the chance to tell him that I loved him before he died and that I got to say goodbye when he was in the hospital. It gives me great comfort that he knew that before he died. I still remember that day very clearly, I grabbed his bald head, like I now grab my son’s head now, and let him know how much he meant to me.
I have met other different types of mentors, as well, in my journey through life so far. Another interesting person who I met at Caltech was Titus Brown. He has been a much different type of a mentor, but I have been asking him questions about computers and programming since 2000. He was the voice that kept gently whispering in my email…”so why don’t you try Python?” I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for Titus, I would never have touched Python or considered it. God knows what language I would be using at this point.
In March this year, at Pycon, I had dinner with Titus, who I hadn’t physically seen in a while and I met Shannon Behrens. We ate some barbeque and started talking about Vim, LDAP, Python, etc. Before I knew it, Shannon turned into a mentor. His knowledge of Python is so vast, and his attitude is so humble, that he has made a huge impact on my knowledge of Python. As I have mentioned in many previous posts, Shannon is my hero. He is one of those rare people who will quite literally tell you anything he knows, and will not judge you for asking a stupid question, for this, he is my hero.
I have also met some incredible mentors in the various jobs I have had. What is interesting, is that each mentor has a different method to access their secrets, and different ways of teaching those secrets. In some cases I have even had “unwilling”, or “hostile” mentors. A “hostile” mentor is someone who is scared to share what they know with you because they are insecure. A “hostile” mentor is a bit like someone who has turned to the dark side of the force. They feel that they can only succeed by working really, really hard and not sharing information with people or giving them false information.
It is still possible to learn from these dark lords, by just seeing through the insecurity and focusing on what you can observe to be truth. Yes, a dark lord can still be a mentor.
I met a really impressive, good, mentor at Disney named Greg Neagle who taught me many cool OS X tricks. I met another extremely powerful, yet incredibly humble mentor named J.F. Panniset, who is now in charge of engineering at a A52, while I was working at Imageworks. JF was scary smart, in particular, because he can write code, is an expert Video Engineer, knows Film production and Post Production inside and out, is an expert sysadmin, AND is about as approachable and humble as they get. All I can say about A52 is that they lucked out big time getting JF. He is a one in a million catch for a company. I was very upset to have had to leave Imageworks, but my wife and I moved out to Atlanta to start a family.
When I got to Atlanta, I was lucky enough to take a couple of classes at the Big Nerd Ranch and I become friends with Aaron Hillegass, the owner. He has been a great help and a very kind mentor as well. I am in a book club with him and we are currently reading Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms.
So, what does all this mean and why am I bringing it up? There are mentors and gurus behind every bush. It is very easy to tell a powerful mentor. The more powerful the mentor, the more freely they give information, help and guidance. I am now under the belief that there is a direct correlation with a person’s mental power and their ability to mentor. The greater a mentor’s power and wisdom, the greater they can give. After all how much effort does it take for a flood light to light up a dark backyard, compared to flashlight? These great wizards can spare the beams.
If you want to get better at something, you need to find mentors and find out how to get them to take an interest in you. In some cases it make take quite a while for a good mentor to think your serious. I would refer back to the quote by Randy, “Brick walls let us show our dedication”. If you really want to learn from a good mentor, then if you put in the work they will eventually help you, unless they are a dark lord, but those guys are easy to catch. They say things like, “Old age and treachery will beat youth and skill, every time.”
The soon to be released “Spotlight on FOSS”, video podcast Pilot episode, features Mark Shuttleworth (We should have a date announced for release very soon). He gives a tremendously, moving talk that is on par with Randy Pausch. One of the goals that Jeremy and I are trying to achieve by doing this podcast series, is to take these mentors of the Free and Open Source Software world and to expose their thoughts, ideas and passions to a larger audience. I hope people take the time to watch our first show, and I am very excited that it turned out to be this powerful.
In closing, I am also on the lookout for a new mentor to learn new things. I am particularly interested in learning more about artificial intelligence in the next few years. If you are a guru, and are interested in taking an interest in me, I would love to hear from you. I am currently looking for another mentor like Dr. Bogen, although that may never happen again, as he was truly one of a kind, or one in a billion. Also, if you have Guru/Mentor stories, I would love to hear about them. Finally, all of the mentors mentioned here are mine, all mine, so get your hands off them!
Source: ONLamp.com I first used Subversion about
five years ago while writing my second book. It was an early milestone, but it
was easier to compile, install, and configure than CVS was, and it was much
more powerful than RCS. Since then, I’ve used Subversion to host every book
I’ve written or edited. (See The Making of
BSD Hacks.)
Though distributed version control systems are gaining in popularity (and
though I use
SVK atop Subversion), Subversion is still tremendously useful. Try being a
F/OSS developer without knowing how to work with a project in Subversion, for
example.
The preponderance of support with free hosting providers for F/OSS projects,
as well as the quality of documentation and implementation, mean that I spend a
lot of time working with Subversion. I’ve rarely had any trouble (even as far
back as milestones 19 and 20). My work would have been much more difficult
without this project, so thanks to everyone who’s contributed in any way.
Source: ONLamp.com Another article of the series “Yet Another Perl 6 Operator”
In the the last article, we’ve seen some of the usual relational operators in Perl 6 and their enhanced syntax through chaining (which allows expressions like a ).
Another kind of comparison operators are those that, instead of true/false returns, identify the relative order between its operands: before, equal, or after.
For numbers, there is the spaceship operator (just like in Perl 5):
0 1 # returns that 0 is before 1
0 0 # returns that 0 equals 0
1 0 # returns that 1 is after 0
But there is a change: instead of -1, 0, 1, the return is Order::Increase, Order::Same, Order::Decrease, the values of an enumeration, which in numeric context reduces into -1, 0, 1.
For strings, the sort comparator was renamed. After the triad le, eq, and gt, it is now called the leg operator.
'a' leg 'b' # Order::Increase
'a' leg 'a' # Order::Same
'b' leg 'a' # Order::Decrease
That was done on purpose, to leave the Perl 5 string sort comparator cmp free to be a generic sort comparison, in the same way that before and after were conceived.
$dt_today cmp $dt_tomorrow # Order::Increase
$dt_today cmp $dt_today # Order::Same
$dt_today cmp $dt_yesterday # Order::Decrease
The cmp operator is the operator of choice when comparing any items: numbers, strings, and objects. With respect to numbers and strings, its default is to act just like '' and leg, respectively. In turn, objects may have their comparison behavior
customized by the author of the code.
Chaining does not make sense to these operators. But for ordering operations like sorting, finding the minimum and maximum, they are just perfect. Some examples of sorting expressions follow. (Notice that these could be made shorter using the new signatures of the sort method and other Perl 6 novelties.)
@values.sort; # use default 'cmp'
@values.sort: { $^b cmp $^a }; # reverse order
@values.sort: { $^a leg $^b
|| $^a $^b };
# a sort based on values keyed by 'name' and 'id'
# respectively
This Monday is looking so much like a Tuesday, but I dunno why I’ve got that feeling ;-) Blame Ben for prodding me to publish only reviewed texts — well, he was damn right. This article was kindly commented and improved after the contributions by the folks at #perl6 freenode channel.
Next article will be due Wednesday (October 3, 2007).
LINKS
Synopsis S03, the official source
The introduction of this series
Official Perl 6 Documentation
Perl 6 in your browser
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