If this means they’re ditching those push button chicken soup dispensers and getting back to making coffee then I’m all for it.

‘Starbucks, he said, has lost its focus on coffee, noting that the company switched from making espresso by hand to robotic machines that pump out drinks with the push of a button.

“For them, the move to fully automated machines was inevitable, but they lost something,” Mr. Cates said. “If you are a barista, you have to roast your own coffee. It’s a necessity. You cannot compete by selling music or WiFi.”’

As Mark always says, it’s about the experience! In the meantime I’ll stick with Planet Bean.

Man am I’m glad I’m dumb. Seriously, I really need to ask more stupid questions here if these are the returns I’m going to reap.

Check out the comments there. The links eventually lead me to explanations involving ascii art. Seriously, when’s the last time you read a tech article with ascii art? I’m equal parts envious and concerned about the guy who wrote that. In either case his art was very helpful.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to read my dumb question and point me in the right direction.

I’m planning to attend DemoCampToronto17 this coming Monday and StartupCamp in Waterloo Tuesday night. You should too.

I’m sure this is explained quite clearly somewhere like here or here. Hopefully someday I’ll be pythonic enough to understand. In the meantime, this is confusing to me and a bit scary. I’m hoping someone can explain to me why I’d want this behaviour.

Let’s take a really simple class with one method. All that method does is creates a variable local to that method and then print it out. One catch, first I call a second method, passing in that variable, and change it within the scope of that second method. As expected, that has no impact on the variable in the calling method and the result when you run it is “local…”

class klass(object):
    def settime(self, s):
        s=’remote’

    def dosomething(self):
        astring=’local’
        self.settime(astring)
        print “%s…” % astring

if __name__ == “__main__”:
    c = klass()
    c.dosomething()

Modify the above, adding a class within that same method call, again attempting to modify it in the second method call. Again, do nothing more than print both variables out. My instincts do NOT have me expecting the results I get, which are “local remote…”

class me(object):
    def __init__(self, n):
        self.name=n

class klass(object):
    def settime(self, t, s):
        t.name=’remote’
        s=’remote’

    def dosomething(self):
        astring=’local’
        aclass=me(‘local’)

        self.settime(aclass, astring)
        print “%s %s…” % (astring, aclass.name)

if __name__ == “__main__”:
    c = klass()
    c.dosomething()

No, these aren’t my typical naming conventions.

As Edwin Hutchins writes, cognitive anthropology “turned away from society by looking inward to the knowledge an individual had to have to function as a member of the culture. The question became ‘What does a person have to know?’ The locus of knowledge was assumed to be inside the individual….But knowledge expressed or expressible in language tends to be declarative knowledge. It is what people can say about what they know.”

So what am I rambling about? As far as I can tell, cognitive theory itself only recently, early 90’s, turned away from focusing solely on the individual and what a person knows. They’ve since developed the notion of socially distributed cognition. The concept I love is that the cognitive properties of a group is NOT simply the sum of the cognitive properties of the individuals.

Software is facing parallel false assumptions now. Is there any software being built that focuses on socially distributed cognition? I’m not talking about web 2.0, groups, friends, tags, etc because that ain’t it. Ya sure, it’s a leading question and I’m talking out loud about what we’re working towards with brainpark but isn’t that what this medium’s about? Software that supports cognition in the context of an individual is good, but it would pale in comparison to software that tackles socially distributed cognition….maybe…..I think…..but I’m just one person….

Mark recently came out of the closet in mentioning that he is focusing “100% on leading Brainpark, Inc. a new software venture targeting the small to midsize company with a suite of networked collective intelligence solutions. More to be revealed soon…”

While it’s not news to most, I’m coming out as well. I’m spending parts of my current life supporting Mark and Bobby with product design and development. In doing that, I think we’re taking a unique path in product design. Unique in software, not so unique in every other industry.

What’s unique about it? We have yet to use a computer in any form. We use a LOT of paper, pencils, and pens. We are working hard to involve community members continually from day 0. The result is a rapidly iterative design process that’s highly participative from a user perspective. The hope is that we learn a lot as early as we can from real users.

We’re on tonight for our fourth DemoCamp in Guelph. Come out and join us and enjoy some free food and drinks courtesy of Communitech.

I’d concur with Joel that the Business of Software conference, organized by Neil Davidson from Red Gate, was the best conference I attended last year. I’m not much for conferences so it was also the only real conference I attended so that’s not saying much. I’d go so far as to say it was the best software conference I’ve attended to date.

They are running it again this year and apparently Joel’s taking over. It’ll be in Boston in fall 2008 and I’m planning to hit it up. If you are interested in attending, and know me personally, then contact me as Neil’s graciously offering a reduced rate to people who attended last year. I’m curious to see what natural disaster they have planned for us this year.

Some examples poached directly from Mark Hurst of business success that has come directly from creating a good experience:

• Amazon
• Apple Store
• SAS
• This one’s cool and would be judged ‘insane’ by most business standards, Holidays and Whole Foods
• Zappos.com

An example of how Mark Hurst has pulled off something similar? They had a small outage with their gootodo application last year, small meaning a few hours I believe. Their response was to email their user base offering a 6 months credit to any user who was interrupted by this outage.

It’s a sad fact that I spent most of my “holidays” rewriting the blueTurbine client in python which is my first real experience with the language. Python is described as a “high-level language“:

“In a high-level language, complex elements can be broken up into simpler, though still fairly complex, elements for which the language provides abstractions, keeping programmers from having to ‘reinvent the wheel.’ For this reason, code which needs to run particularly quickly and efficiently may be written in a lower-level language, even if a higher-level language would make the coding easier.”

I have to agree with the above in that I find it significantly simpler to develop complex concepts into python code as compared to any other language I’ve used. The catch, however, is the “though still fairly complex” part. Being able to translate complex concepts into simpler code does NOT mean it’s simpler to work with complex concepts.

If you happen to be struggling with complex software concepts, or have yet to be exposed to them, then don’t expect python to teach them to you. If anything it’s the exact opposite in that it puts the burden squarely on the developer to completely understand those complex concepts in the first place. Python allows you to code them with less code which means they’re more subtle and less explicit.

That’s amazing for developers who already grasp those concepts. They can be more productive both in reading and writing code. If you’re trying to learn them, however, then I’m not sure how that helps. If anything you may want to spend more time wading through more verbose (less simple) code first? Wow that sounds backwards…

Having said that Bruce Eckel makes a great point about using python as a learning language so what do I know? He doesn’t, however, speak to the idea of learning complex concepts by working on codebases where they exist which is more what I’m speaking to.

“Python would make an even better first language to teach programming. It’s such a gentle learning curve. You can start with scripts, and of course some people dismiss Python as a scripting language, because you can script with it. You start teaching scripts. You can teach functions. Then later you can add classes. Then you can go onto things like metaclasses. Python has many more of these powerful constructs that you can learn when you’re ready. And I think that’s very impressive, because it doesn’t say you should only be an object-oriented programmer.”