I’d like to second Mr ClickyClicky on how much I like Andrew Bird’s new album Armchair Apocrypha. The mix of instrumentation and atmospherics play well together. Stand out tracks include “Fiery Crash” which almost sounds like a Wilco (or even Superchunk) song and “Imitosis” which is lyrically depressed (“it was anything but hear the voice / that says we’re all basically alone”) but the delivery is very catchy. Perhaps the strongest track is the 7-minute “Armchairs” where his voice climbs and the dynamics are reminiscent of Jeff Buckley.

This weekend Andrew Bird appeared on Studio360 in an episode about being alone. Bird talks about moving into a barn in rural Illinois by himself to work on his music. But he’s back among people again and will be playing at the Berklee Performance Center on May 16th. Tickets were getting into the thin air section when I bought mine.

The first time I drove past this house in Cambridge I nearly caused an accident. Barrelling down the busy street, my head snapped back to confirm what I thought I had just seen. And sure enough, nestled among typical Colonial homes overlooking the Fresh Pond Golf Course is this very warm looking contemporary home. The home was designed by Bob Augustine (who has much better photos that detail the back decks, large windows and roof garden complete with sod!) and featured in a Boston Globe article on softer-edged modern homes.

The parade of box homes featured in the likes of Dwell usually strike me as too harsh outside and austere inside. Like with software, sometimes the design can seem more about the designer than the human who has to interact with it. This house, though, with its red cedar and green copper put a smile on my face (but I didn’t see the price tag).

The Boston Globe ranks Watertown among the top five towns for first time home buyers (with Lowell, Billerica, East Boston and Brockton). I’d like to think that despite Watertown’s lack of bars it is on its way to being the next Somerville. I see plenty of hipsters lining up at the Deluxe Town Diner for brunch on weekends and hope they are the shock troops of increased interest. H2otown has plenty of good restaurants, a small theater, crazy local politics and convenient if less than great mall & box stores. From where we live it is faster and easier to get to Harvard/Central/Kendall Squares than it was from our previous place in North Cambridge (Mass Ave. through Porter Sq. can be excruciatingly slow). And we like our space in the industrial / bakery district of East Watertown.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software, by Salon Co-founder Scott Rosenberg, tracks the development of the personal information manager Chandler at Mitch Kapor’s non-profit Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF). While it may have set out to be a modern-day Soul of a New Machine, events take a twist for the worse for OSAF, and better for the reader.

It is no secret that Chandler has struggled to mature and “Dreaming in Code” catalogs the project’s many missteps. Chief among them is their great difficulty translating a broad vision into a concrete plan of attack. Also, while they are working on Chandler several successful, rich webapps like Gmail transform expectations about what can be delivered in a browser. All this is unfortunate for the Chandler team, but gives Rosenberg a great case study in a struggling software project. Rosenberg interweaves vignettes from the development of Chandler with a primer on why software is hard. For those who are programmers much of the descriptions of day-to-day activities (bugs, builds, language wars) are familiar. At times the slow pace of progress might have programmers yelling back at the book (“don’t use wxWidgets!” / “don’t do peer-to-peer!”). Most compelling, and a little depressing, is the long list of bright thinkers he quotes who believe modern software development is deeply flawed. And there are no shortage of expensive projects on the scrap heap to illustrate the point, like the killed $170M FBI program “Trilogy”.

Among the critics of the current practice of software development that I found most persuasive is Richard Gabriel. Rosenberg quotes Gabriel saying,

“But what do people do when they’re being trained, for example, to get a master of fine arts in poetry? They study great works of poetry. Do we do that in our software engineering disciplines? No. You don’t look at the source code for great pieces of software. Or look at the architecture of great pieces of software. You don’t look at their design.

The pedagogy practiced in many computer science departments teaches habits that don’t scale to larger projects that require more people, more code and have more complexity. Similar to the elementary school student who tries memorize his multiplication tables, the method breaks down when the teacher asks you to multiply 942 by 1024. But I digress.

Part of my interest in reading this was to find a non-technical book that I can suggest (read: push) on those I know who have no idea what the hell it is I do. Rosenberg is writing for a general audience and succeeds. He adroitly translates complex issues (language choices, UI concerns, software methodologies) without relying solely on metaphors that lose their meaning. The end is anti-climatic with the jury still out on Chandler, since it is only at 0.7alpha. Although that fact alone might be more damning than anything Rosenberg writes. Finally, my hat is off to the OSAF team for letting Rosenberg chronicle their experiences and produce a snapshot of the current state of software development, troubled as it may be.

I recently saw that WordPress launched a new plugins directory [via]. Plugins are an enjoyable way to spend too much time tweaking your blog, but previously they were rather scattered and many outdated. Having sifted through the directory a bit, here are my top 5 (different from those mentioned before):

• wp-cache - Caches pages from your blog, which greatly improves performance especially when on a not-so-fast shared host somewhere. And it does the right thing when you edit a post.
• Kill Preivew 2 - Removes the preview on the posts page and replaces it with a link to preview in a new window. I never used the inline preview at the bottom of the page, and this plugin speeds up the time to refresh the page after a save. Simple and helpful.
• WP-Amazon - Handy way to search and insert links from Amazon, including an Amazon Associates account if you use one. Helps to ensure the URL is right, albeit a longer form than if done by hand.
• 404 Notifier - Creates an RSS feed or emails you about 404s from your site. You have a friendly 404 page, right? Here are some tips for good ones, if not. I like to see what URLs aren’t being found, and this helped find a few. Then you can redirect to the real page using mod_rewrite, if you are brave, or cook something else up.
• WP OpenID Registration - Let’s your readers register to leave a comment using OpenID. OpenID is gaining traction among early adopters, and who doesn’t want to be one of those folks? They have new Macs and witty t-shirts!
• Google Custom Search Engine - A bonus 6th link! While not a plugin, Google offers the ability to create your own customized search engine for your site. Easy to restrict the searching to just your site, offer possible refinements, and optionally include AdSense ads. While the results won’t be realtime, Google usually does a better job than most sites own search engine (I’m looking at you, Pitchfork).