1. Problem 1: Beautiful Soup isn’t supported anymore
   Beautiful Soup is the de facto HTML parser. Beloved by Python programmers, it’s capable of dealing with broken and messy HTML. Sadly, the libraries that it used are being replaced, and the main developer doesn’t have time to work on it anymore.
   Solution: This was the easiest problem to deal with. I asked the New York Python Meetup, and they all recommended lxml.
2. Problem 2: lxml doesn’t have a Python 2.7 build
   The easy solution – “easy_install lxml” – is supposed to get an egg file precompiled with lxml’s dependencies (at least, says the INSTALL file in the download).
   There were two problems:
   1. It doesn’t
   2. None of the .exes on the site are for Python 2.7.
   Solution: As it turns out, there’s a way around this dilemma; someone’s posted a script to build it online. It’s only for 32-bit though, it seems, but I gave it a short spin anyway.
3. Problem 3: Cython error
   Solution: This fix was easy.
4. Problem 4: “vcvarsall.bat” missing
   As it turns out, building many Python packages requires vcvarsall.bat, which is probably a compiling tool of some kind in Microsoft’s toolchain. The fix that comes up in search engine results involve hacking in a different compiler (gcc from MinGW), which I suspected might cause other incompatibilities.
   Solution: After talking with a friend from Microsoft, I determined that downloading and installing the Windows SDK would be a good place to start. Though that didn’t work, I did end up installing Visual Studio C++ Express, which did include vcvarsall.bat.
5. Problem 5: “vcvarsall.bat” missing
   For some unknown reason, even after adding vcvarsall to the path,  the error still came up.
   Solution: It was at this point that I realized that the build script was for 32-bit. If I was going to go through the trouble of trying it, maybe it would be worth trying a 32-bit precompiled exe, which I ended up discovering on the same site I visited earlier.
6. Problem 6: Installation didn’t work
   Even though the install went find and “import lxml” worked without a hitch, the lxml package was strangely empty – there was nothing in it!
   Solution: I went through site-packages and cleaned it out – there were two separate lxmls in there from my previous experiments. Removing one of them cleared it all up.

(I recently had an experience where I couldn’t beta test some software because it was built for 32-bit, but my computer was 64-bit. As it turned out, that didn’t apply here.)

Possible lesson: If something is unlikely to work, but is easy and quick, try it anyway.

Lately there’s been a lot of privacy backlash over Facebook making a lot of information public by default. But one question that’s getting lost in the controversy deserves more attention. Why are they doing it?

I was lucky enough to be at a semantic web conference just after Facebook unleashed its new Graph API. What Facebook has done, for those who aren’t familiar, is changed Facebook interests and “likes” into links. So now, instead of having a list of movies and hobbies you like, your profile now links to pages for Cooking and The Godfather.

Cooking has more friends than you do

These pages are wrappers of the same information that was on Wikipedia, IMDB and elsewhere, but with likes and wall posts added. If you click on some of the Wikipedia links, you’ll get taken not to Wikipedia, but to another Facebook page that wraps it. Facebook may be using Wikipedia’s content, but the experience and the information is controlled by Facebook and stays on facebook.com.

Facebook isn’t interested in (just) becoming an encyclopedia of things, though. Facebook is interested in becoming an encyclopedia of you. All of your interests and likes are now linked, via FB, to wrapper pages that Facebook manages. Facebook is the centralized database that stores all that information.

This is how Facebook sees you. From F8 developer conference.

—–

Is having an open graph everywhere inevitable?

The four founders of Diaspora, in an appropriately indie band pose.

At the same time that Facebook was transforming their site into a database of everyone, a group of four NYU college students got a writeup from the New York Times. Their project, called Diaspora, was (is) to make your personal encyclopedia entry private, so you can control your information and how it gets accessed.

But while people donated nearly 200 thousand dollars to their project, and much ink was spilled over how much Facebook was now sharing about us, one might argue that the change to a public graph a la Facebook is inevitable. After all:

• Many, some at Facebook, some elsewhere, have argued that privacy is less important to members of Generation Y.
• Plus, having a shared social graph is clearly better than one where you can’t see any of the nodes, right? Once we see how useful it is to share the music we like and the news we’re interested in through the graph, we won’t want to turn back.

There are two forces that will decide this future: developers and you, the user.

Developers matter

You may have noticed recently that a huge number of sites – CNN, Pandora, the New York Times and others – have started spouting Facebook like buttons. Some other sites have included ways to login using Facebook itself, making you verify your identity by using your Facebook information.

Websites do this because it makes things easier. People are (arguably) more likely to login to CNN using Facebook than entering their email address, setting yet another password that could be forgotten, and checking their email for some confirmation link they have to click on. The added convenience makes it worth it to connect CNN to your real name and identity. For some people at least.

Web developers are the key to this, because we end up building the technology that decides if our sites are linked through Facebook or not. And, frankly: There are few good alternatives to Facebook.

For login, there are simply no sites that have the coverage of Facebook. We as developers could let you login to CNN through Google or Twitter, but allowing Facebook logins and using Facebook likes is a necessity. Or at least, a de facto standard.

Let’s say you wanted to make an alternative: You’d need to make sure that there’s an easy way for developers to incorporate it into their sites, because for a long time, you will be dealing with developers who have to put Facebook stuff on their website, and you’ll be their spare time project. If they can’t just drop it in, they won’t!

How will people react to Facebook in the long run?

As a Facebook user, the question that really matters is not privacy or the social graph. Instead: What’s in it for me? What do I get if I share all this information?

There isn’t that much value in sharing my movie preferences to a bunch of people, only some of whom are actually my friends. Twitter has proven that a market exists for conspicuous sharing – wide, out there, open sharing – but a lot of Facebook’s privacy woes come from incidental sharing – the “oops, I didn’t know that was public” type of sharing. One person came up with his own solution – all of his Facebook information is now public.

To borrow from the earlier 2000s: Some of us signed onto FB thinking it was LiveJournal, and it’s turned into MySpace. Those of us who thought that will move on.

Facebook’s main utility, for me and the one person I asked, is to see if my friends have updated their pages, and to upload and look at pictures. None of this has anything to do with the social graph, and until someone comes up with a killer app involving me sharing my links to fourteen different things, it’s not going to matter to me. I’ll just turn it off, and my Facebook page will be just another one of the many abandoned webpages I’ve made about myself.

I recently had the chance to compare an organization to an email.

The organization has had a number of meetings and made some useful decisions. They’ve put up a small site, but want to reorganize it and update the copy (it’s currently a shell with no visitors). This has been going on over approximately two months.

The email was from an email list about a startup competition:

On Friday night individuals pitch ideas for new ventures

Teams form around the best ideas and then work over the weekend to develop and launch a prototype on Sunday

——

Useful observations:

• In a startup, your limiting reagent is how fast you can build. If you have a fast engineering team, you can iterate quickly.
• Just because a product is minimal doesn’t mean it’s viable. The key criteria: Does the user have something to do?

It’s easy – it won’t take you any longer than it would to write the first draft of your resume. Want to do it?

OK.

Get out your word processor, and write your resume.

Twenty years from now.

When you’re done…

—–

.

.

.

.

What’s your job title? Software architect? Lead developer? CEO? Homeless? President? Billy Mays?

(Did you weird yourself out doing it? It’s OK, me too.)

1. How’d you pick it?

_______________________________________________

_______________________________________________

_______________________________________________

• Have you always dreamed of selling Oxy-Clean?
• Do you like the fact that 200 people report to you?
• Money?
• Do you want college students to look at your life and say, “i want to be the next __________”?
• Do you want to be in the history books as “the Henry Ford of technology?”
• Do you want to be happy?

2. How did you get there?

_______________________________________________

_______________________________________________

_______________________________________________

• Did you land a great interview after working your way up the ladder, doing great work and getting the attention of your managers?
• Did you run for City Council and pioneer a new initiative?
• Or make friends with everyone in the political machine?

Did you quit and get frustrated after 10 years of success your field to start over and become a teacher? Why’d you wait so long?

3. Look at your job now. How are you gonna get there?

_______________________________________________

_______________________________________________

_______________________________________________

Programming languages are great because they make it easy to write code – in a way that makes it easier for us to understand.

In the end though, all of these abstractions were not written with your problem in mind, but a generic, off-the-shelf problem that you don’t actually have.

Thus, write with any language you want. But write in a way that’s appropriate to your problem, and write in a way that’s appropriate to you.

Previously

An update: While a doberman/chihuahua mix is certainly possible, apparently not all same-species crosses are viable.

Teams can basically function in one of two ways. Loosely speaking, let’s call them the light side and the dark side.

On the light side, everyone is communicating and everyone is focused on the success of the team. People are willing to make sacrifices, and everyone knows who’s making the sacrifices. There is openness and solidarity; the team shares one objective.

If this sounds a little bit doe-eyed and delusional, then I don’t need to introduce you to the dark side.

While I call it the dark side, the thinking that pulls someone over to this side is completely rational. “Why should I give up my time and my effort to get something done for someone who’s just going to claim it for themselves when I’m done, like he did last month when we finished the Spearmint project?” The big question a darksider asks is simple and practical: What’s in it for me.

The other thing about the dark side is that it’s contagious. Once one person starts doing it, everyone gets pulled in.

—

Now, I’m not going to claim that you should do anything for anyone if it’s only going to benefit them. But let’s consider what’s in it for you.

Did you ever think about what separates leaders from everyone else? Is it power? Money? The privilege of belonging to a special class, knowing special people? Education? Yes, all of those things matter. But what fills in the empty space when society no longer places them on a pedestal?

Leadership starts by being the one who acts when everyone else doesn’t.

Leadership starts by being the one who acts when everyone else doesn’t. Did you ever wonder, while you were sitting in the lecture hall, if you would ever stop being driven around by a system of authority beyond your ability to influence? Or why it didn’t seem to end when you left the high school classroom and found yourself in another set of forms and bureaucratic procedures driven by some unseen force?

There are two ways of coping in the workplace. The first way is the way of procedure, rule-taking, what’s in it for me. The rule followers are the dominant breed in high school and bureaucratic monoliths. You can’t change the rules, so you get what you can out of them. But the rest of the world doesn’t have to work that way.

The smaller the organization, and the simpler the bureaucracy, the more likely it is that part of the system and the rules is defined by you. When everyone else abdicates responsibility, that’s not an alarm warning you to rush to the doors while dodging all responsibility. That’s a vacuum, a power vacuum, and you’re going to fill it. If you choose to.

There are hundreds of newspapers across the globe, but if you took the national stories and put them together, a lot of them are about the same things. If you combine today’s papers with last week’s, you find that there’s even less new information – you could compress the whole story into, say, an eventual Wikipedia article, where a few sentences are enough to cover the salient points.

If you spent your whole day thinking, maybe you could come up with a blog post of information. But undoubtably tomorrow’s post would contain themes from previous posts.

The blogosphere, television, news…they all have the same problem. There’s not too much to say, but the talking never ceases. Modern media is a producer of raw content, not a way to digest it and put it into context.

What’s the best way to create a source of fully digested content?