Pensieri di un lunatico minore
Ohhhhhhhhhhhh yeah! Or sorta.
The first “object publishing” framework I ever used—and this was many, many moons ago—was called “bobo”, and was the hurried effort of Jim Fulton, a wielder of much Python magic. It soon got subsumed into Zope as the foundation of object publishing and disappeared from the interwebs. Now, it’s back, but this time it’s got a fresh coat of WSGI and decorators to give it that new framework smell.
Will have to take a peek and see where it fits in this day and age.
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In going through my mom’s house to prepare it for sale, I stumbled upon a box of slides that I had been looking for for many, many years. It contains several hundred slides that my dad shot back between 1960 and 1962 when he was stationed in Korea. Now I’ve got to work on scanning them all in.
The funny thing, to cite Paul Simon, is that the Kodachrome slides are stunning. The Ektachrome (E-2 processed) slides suck unbelievably.
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Let’s face it … nobody buys a Windows machine for it’s stellar functionality or beautiful interface. They buy it for the ecosystem (software) around it, and the fact that Microsoft dominates the desktop domain. While Apple may have lost out on the desktop to Microsoft, they didn’t ignore the lessons to be learned.
With today’s announcement of the new iPhone 3GS and the reduction of the iPhone 3G to $99 (effective immediately). Let me explain why the Palm Pre has a sisyphean task:
- 1,000,000 SDKs downloaded
- 50,000 applications
- 40M iPhones/iPod Touches
That is the iPhone/iPod ecosystem. That leaves out the thousands and thousands of accessories that are “Made for iPhone”. It’s a gigantic impediment to adoption, and more importantly a huge risk to consider for any developer. You don’t unseat the “best” while being only incrementally better. You have to change the game.
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Some rather horny commentators are dismissive of a compass and its importance in the iPhone, but here’s why I think it’s actually more interesting than people think:
- Knowing which way the phone is facing when it’s on can tell you which way the user is facing.
- Knowing which way the user is facing allows you to do fun things with mapping and social media. Think turning around in place and watching Google StreetView spin to match.
- Navigation, especially when walking, would be strongly assisted by knowing which way the user is facing, and therefore probably walking.
Not a huge change, but it’s a refinement, and since you can get a very small compass, it won’t consume much space. More sensors is better than less.
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There’s nothing worse than realizing that the reason the audio on your new machine isn’t working is not because of stupid Linux drivers, but because you’re a moron and somehow disabled it in the BIOS. D’oh!
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The group I work in is composed of a lot of young whipper-snappers who came of age long after the Internet was created and have never known the joy of an acoustic-coupled modem, or figuring out the order of a set of punch cards that you dropped on the floor 5 seconds before putting them in the reader. As such, they are a bit wet behind the ears, and I’ve been asked to teach a little “architectural thinking” to them.
What I’ve got to manage to do, in 45-60 minutes is explain the basics of architectural decomposition (e.g,, business -> functional -> deployment architectures), as well as a brief introduction to UML with enough that they can make sense of existing models. As someone who thinks that many of the fiddly bits are needlessly confusing, I’ve got to figure out what to present and what not to present.
Fun ensues! I taught a draft today and it went over reasonably well, but I still feel the examples were too contrived.
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Now that my main desktop—for now—is a Linux box running on a commodity PC platform, I switched back to using the legendary IBM Model M keyboard that I originally purchased around 1990-1991. That means the keyboard is now almost 20 years old. Think about that. Twenty years on a keyboard. Now, I’ve not used it as my primary input device in the past few years, largely because it’s missing some keys to be a good Mac keyboard. In fact, I had to seek out a similar buckling spring keyboard from Matias just to get a similar feel.
So how is it? Well, it’s still a tank of a keyboard, built better than today’s Mercedes-Benz, and with a feel that is incomparable. The Matias was the best of the modern keyboards for me, but it always had a slight metallic “twang” to every keypress that would get on my nerves. The IBM has no such annoyance, and simply works.
Now, if I could figure out where the key cap for the left arrow went.
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So, if you’re trying to install VisualWorks from the network installer, you might run into an interesting problem… it doesn’t work, at least not on the amd64 version of Ubuntu.
There’s a pretty easy trick, though. Go get getlibs, and run it against the visual application. This will analyze the ELF file, and download all necessary 32-bit libraries. Poof, you’re done.
Do make sure you download the 64-bit VM when you do it, though, so you can use either.
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I have been doing most of my development on a MacBook Pro 15 for a while now, but unfortunately, some of the projects I work on simply require more memory than it can hold (2GB in the version I have). This, combined with the fact that I could use the ability to run a bunch of VMs for testing means I had a couple options available to me:
- Buy a new MacBook
- Buy a Mac Pro
- Buy a “PC”
I considered all three, but in the end, a new MacBook wouldn’t hold more than 6GB of RAM, and still would only have 2 cores. Instead, I found a good deal on a Core i7 machine from Dell. But I didn’t buy it. Instead, I built a machine of my own this time. Same price, a lot better components:
That should hold me for a while. I think. So now I will be using both, depending on the application, quite honestly. For portable use, the MacBook Pro can’t be beat.
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James Robertson talks about some misconceptions about Smalltalk, but this is the bit that struck me:
I could just not write the full code at all, let the thing break, and ponder the response in the debugger. While there, I can write the code based on what actually came back, and watch it work. Rinse, Repeat for each one of them
Yes, tests are useful. But, the debugger is not something to be feared. Rather, it’s a great tool to be used in order to have the computer do all the memory work for you. I can get a lot more done by working with decent tools like the Smalltalk debugger than I can by assuming the doc is good and writing tests that just help me a whole lot less than you might think.
Here’s the thing. For some value of “nothing”, Smalltalk’s debugger and a debugger for C or Java are nothing alike. Smalltalk’s debugger is like going to see the doctor. You can poke and prod and run tests and prescribe medicines to resolve issues all while monitoring the results. In fact, it’s better than a doctor, because generally no matter how weird the “fix” you try, you can rewind it and go backwards. It’s a doctor with a time-machine. The debugger in C and Java is post-mortem. I can maybe tell you why it died, but I can’t fix it.
This is where the deepest disconnect happens. It’s a language issue. The debugger in Smalltalk and the debugger in C and Java are not only different in capabilities by orders of magnitude, they simply are orthogonal intellectually.
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For the 3 people who actually read what I write, I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been taking an obvious hiatus from writing here. Between the loss of my mom, the election and work being quite bizarre right now, I’ve simply been unsure what to write about. It’s entirely possible that I won’t restart, but more likely that I will but refocus on some specific areas.
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Via James comes an article saying that Gore Verbinski is directing an adaption of the board game Clue. This would be lame enough—what with all the lame adaptions that seem to happen—were it not for the curious case that this has already been done. And it was done brilliantly. In 1985.
The original version had an amazing cast, and while it was a financial failure, has gone on to be a massive cult hit. Take a look at some of the members:
- Tim Curry as the butler
- Eileen Brennan as Mrs. Peacock
- Madeline Kahn as Mrs. White
- Martin Mull as Colonel Mustard
- Michael McKeen as Mr. Green
- Leslie Ann Warren as Miss Scarlet
- Christopher Lloyd as Professor Plum
Where in the world, in this day and age, are you going to find a cast like that to work with? The movie itself was simply a framework for some brilliant comedic performers to work with. A projection screen for all their neurotic behavior and silliness.
Then again, maybe I’m biased; I’ve seen it hundreds of times.
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Ever since the first Kindle came out, I’ve been excited by the prospect. While the Sony Reader was on the scene earlier, the Kindle represented a tectonic shift in capabilities. The Whispernet feature—based on Sprint’s EVDO data network—brought near real-time access to hundreds of thousands of books and the ability to operate sans computer. So, now that I’ve had a few hours to play with my Kindle, I’ve read a few things on it:
- New York Times
- New Yorker
- Kindle 2 User’s Manual
- Several sample chapters downloaded for free
So here’s a few observations, from T+6h:
- The screen is every bit as good as you would imagine. No, it’s not backlit, but then neither are any of my paper books. I’ve had no problem reading under normal light with minimum eyestrain.
- The default font size is too big. I’ve shrunk it one step and that seems to fit my preferences.
- The typography is not as horrendous as I had expected, but this isn’t a Folio Society production either.
- Page changes are pretty quick and not particularly distracting.
- The weight of the unit is quite acceptable and it feels largely like a book in your hand. My right thumb lands naturally on the “next page” button.
- Online access is decent, but it’s no replacement for my iPhone.
Overall, I’m quite happy with the purchase. The real test will be next week when I start commuting on mass transit again and have 30-35 minutes a day to read going in each direction. With the Kindle 2, Amazon really has refined the idea even further. It’s not as dramatic a shift as the original Kindle, but it is an improvement overall.
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Click through for some unboxing photos.
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Lunch:
Very yummy, and not too heavy.
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