Before there were steam engines or cars or computers, art was technology. Artists were geeks in smocks. Paint was code with dye. I took Art History in High School and the bug bit. It was wonderfully imprecise and subjective - everything the rest of my life wasn't. My favorite painter was Hieronymus Bosch, a 15th-century Dutchman who dressed funny, married into the Habsburg dynasty, and is best known for his Garden of Earthly Delights.
Bosch was 40 when he started it, no spring chicken at a time when that was the male adult life expectancy. He spent the better part of 20 years suspended from scaffolding scrutinizing over every brush stroke. It was never meant to be his opus but he got started, got inspired, and dedicated his life to making it perfect.
The result is astonishing. It tells the creation story starting with Adam and Eve and ending with monsters eating human flesh (don't recall that part of Genesis). The center panel depicts the yin and yang of good intentions wrestling with temptation. Think Pinocchio being lured onto Pleasure Island. The right panel illustrates ****, dark and foreboding. Just beyond the nakedness and debauchery is a rich allegory about the human experience. Bosch died shortly after it was completed. His flesh wasn't eaten by monsters.
Art and artists evolve but what motivates us doesn't. I've met modern-day Bosches who don't resemble the master (well, they too have bad posture and don't shave) but share his passion. They're eccentric and push themselves and their tools. They write stories with code and publish masterpieces like Haze and Flipboard.
We're in the middle of another Renaissance and this one's bigger and bolder. They'll dig us up in hundreds of years and marvel at how so much innovation took place in so short a period by so few. They'll ask what inspired us and what crucible contained the ingredients that created masters like Noyce, Cooper, and Jobs. We'll smile from six feet under, high-five Bosch and his battery mates, and watch in awe as a new species of painter or developer or whatever they're called then makes our C code look like pigment on canvas.
The Index of PaaS Activity
IPA had another banner month, gaining 13.6% on the strength of PaaS-related tweets (+8.8%) and press releases (+6.8%). "PaaS" is fast-becoming the new "social media" or "cloud" - a term every tech copywriter incorporates into announcements and news items gratuitously to increase readership. Case in point: this announcement from Agawi about an endorsement from graphics chipmaker Nvidia. Many legitimate PaaS-related announcements also dominated headlines this month including Amazon's introduction of OpsWorks, RedHat's relaunch of OpenShift, and Salesforce.com's defense of Heroku's scalability.
