_Mark_
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Below are the 5 most recent journal entries recorded in the "_Mark_" journal:
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12:09 am
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Welcome to CodeMonth
As discussed earlier, I've inaugurated a NaNoWriMo-style ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) codemonth project.
On a related note, I found this Hallmarks of a Great Developer page - somewhat aggressive, but I can't say I disagree with any of it...
Tags: code
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07:13 pm
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NaCoWriMo?
November is National Novel Writing Month, sort of a "group therapy for creative people" where people commit to writing 175-page (50,000 word) novels, from scratch, in one month; they've run for several years, and last year 3500 of the 25000 participants actually finished novels (one of whom has, a few rewrites later, not only been published, but won an award for her work.)
A recent thread on one of the scheme-loonies lists brought up the point that coding is like thinking but doing it rigorously enough to take notes; an unrelated discussion of writing talked about deeply imagining a world, and then writing it all down. Other thoughts on the use of code to communicate with other coders (rather than merely computers) swirled around that - and if, in an expressive language (like scheme or python) a line or statement is approximately a sentence (there are pieces of code where statements are more like paragraphs; like Kafka, they are extraordinarily difficult for the reader, and not a widespread approach) we can simply consider the "novel" to be the equivalent of roughly 6000 lines of code.
Is this comparison fair? If so, only by accident. At first glance, I'm not sure what, in the abstract, writing 6000 lines of code in a month really means. Mark Pilgrim's feedparser, eikeon's rdflib, and one of my larger document shuffling subsystems at work are all around half that, and they all have a lot more time in them -- though I suspect they all have in common a big up-front burst followed by a bunch of smaller changes. I've written about 7000 lines of personal code in my python-learning efforts over the last year, another 9000 in QA support code - so writing 6000 in one month would be a bit of a sprint, but not insane, at first glance.
NaNoWriMo is at least partly about giving oneself explicit daily pressure, to help get one's stride, to get the words *out* instead of continuing to meditate on them. Arguably, it's an explicit "bias towards execution". Perhaps the equivalent for software works too, thus, NaCoWriMo...
This all assumes you have something interesting to code; so what do you do with it once November is done (aside from, well, using it)? Well, you'd then have two weeks to prepare a submission for CodeCon, which is certainly quite the audience...
Now to come up with a project. And a reason to think I'd be able to pull it off while going through an end-of-release crunch at work :-)
Current Mood: lightly addled
Tags: code
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12:27 am
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Grinding to a halt - a tale of laptop woe
There's something about Mondays.
Monday evening. Not much going on, dropped a friend off at the airport, had dinner, things are generally quiet. I've been "catching up" on a lot of my electronic lists and todos; went through a few hundred items from the first year of the current job, most of which were either fixed or no longer relevant, but got a good pile of questions to hunt down out of it. Caught up on a bunch of my reading (Robin Williams' "design for non-designers" is excellent, even if I'm embarassed to admit that one of the business card designs on the "don't do this, haven't you learned anything yet?" pages is almost exactly like the ones I designed for myself 7 or 8 years back), got 2/3 of the way through Dive Into Python (great book if you're already a programmer and want to read and/or fix someone else's code in a hurry. Beginners or the otherwise less brave may go splat, though: none of this "hello world" crap, the first example is a database client!) and decided to watch some videos of Chuck Moore's talks.
( More rambling... )
Current Mood: disrupted
Tags: code, mac, robots, social, work
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04:17 pm
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linux phone
According to LinuxDevices,
Motorola has announced its third mobile phone based on Linux and Java software. The A780 is expected to ship in Q4, 2004, and will woo enterprise and home users with features such as a PDA-like quarter-VGA color touchscreen, claimed 240Kbps GPRS data download speeds, Bluetooth networking and synchronization, PDF and Microsoft Office file viewing, a 1.3 megapixel digital camera, mp3 playback, 48MB of removable TransFlash storage, and more.
If I can get at it at a low enough level to run my own code [in particular, to put python on it], it is likely to win out over the Nokia 7610...
Tags: code, nokia
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02:07 am
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Jef Raskin's Humane Interface
I finally finished Jef Raskin's book "The Humane Interface" and have promised enough people comments that I figured I'd just write a review - and livejournal turns out to be the most convenient place for me to put it up and get feedback, so here it is.
Jef Raskin's name has come up numerous times over the years, as a user interface design god - but as with many gods, he seemed distant and incomprehensible. I finally saw him speak (and demo) at EuroPython 2004, when he was opposite a talk that ended early (fame is not in and of itself attractive, at a technical conference) and discovered that he fits a pattern that I've found worth of attention before - "Everything you know about [topic] is wrong, here's what you get if you examine it rigorously instead of believing the folklore". Examples include Measured capacity of an Ethernet: myths and reality (Boggs, Mogul, Kent) (notable for debunking early myths about ethernet having a maximum capacity of 1/3 the wire-bandwidth) and ON FOOD AND COOKING by Harold McGee (notable for the definitive explanation of copper bowls and egg whites, with confirming evidence from a spectrophotometer.) He also turns out to be very clear and concrete with his examples; the book follows the same pattern.
It is definitely a book to read for anyone designing a workflow - especially if you have the opportunity to escape "modern" application toolkits. If you are stuck using rich standard libraries, you may want to avoid this book, as it will bring you moments of enlightenment that come crashing down when you try to fit them into the metaphors current systems have stumbled upon. Also, if you've ever thought "if only my work tools had interfaces as slick as this video game", this book is for you.
( another thousand words of review follow... )
Current Mood: enlightened
Tags: code, meme
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eichin's journal