“programming”
41 posts under this tag.
In computing, the second-system syndrome is a form of sophomore slump that describes the tendency to design the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system as an elephantine, feature-laden monstrosity. The term was first used by Fred Brooks WP in his classic The Mythical Man-MonthWP, AM.
Y’know, I remember reading about the syndrome in Brooks’s book with a smug confidence that it would never happen to me. It did. Imagery was by many accounts a pretty cool thing, but then I tried to outdo myself with its successor, Domburi, and, many, many ineffectual months later, I must admit that I’ve only weird sketches and weirder code to show for my time.
Which doesn’t mean that I’ve given up. It means that we need a new strategy. The all-or-nothing, hail-mary, next-big-thing, under-wraps-until-perfect approach was doomed since the beginning. (I really should have known better.) So the new strategy is to get it all out. As rough and soon as possible.
I’m calling it ”Improv’d Daily!” and it is akin to beta-hoodWP—in that it indicates that the website is still under developement—but it carries the all important mantra of radical incrementalism: every single day there will be at least one new, stand-alone, non-trivial improvement for the website. It won’t be earth shattering every day but it shall always be interesting.
I’m starting the meme with this very blog, which is supposed to be my online self and yet still lags far, far behind of what I want from it. (Domburi will be up in a couple of hours. Domburi up.) This very post will be updated daily with each day’s changes starting now and I have several new goodies to kickstart the kaizen:
8/May/07
# Related Posts section added (when viewing an individual post). Posts are related the more tags they have in common and the more rare those tags are.
# List of comments (accessible from the right sidebar, at the bottom of the Recent Comments header)
# New URLs: http://elzr.com/articles/YEAR/MONTH/DAY/TITLE becomes http://elzr.com/posts/TITLE, which is shorter and sweeter. You don’t need to remember a post’s date now and, what’s more, if there’s no post found with that TITLE, Google comes automagically to the rescue.
# Left sidebar redesign: new headshot, shorter description, just email (putting my phone # up there was always a bad idea, that phone-call confirmed it), new format for the archives.
# Collapsed “for:” tags in a post’s tag list. Much clearer. Tags are also now ordered alphabetically.
# Lots of tiny improvements all over. Like the orange bar atop a single post—neat, huh?—or icons for search (a magnifying glass in the searchbox) and for favorites (a star in favorite articles).
9/May/07
# Crappy day: a minor, bureaucratic improvement to the website became a nightmare. Blog crashing on and off. Domburi will have to wait until tomorrow.
10/May/07
# Blog back!
# Section Cache!: the recent list (favorites, posts, comments), the tags list, and the archive are now cached, making the website much, much faster.
# List of all posts (accessible from the left sidebar, below the Archives header)
11/May/07
# Save to Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg, and Stumble Upon when viewing an individual post.
# Tag Cloud!
# js-less Improv’d Daily! Ok, this may not sound like much but it’s important and cool. I use ALA’s CSS Sprites technique.
12-14/May/07
Obsessed Domburi fiddling. Sorry.
15/May/07
# Fixed broken Tag Cloud links (Thanks Aaron!)
16/May/07—20/Jun/07
Big, humongous gap—or vacations—or depression bout. Or all of them together. See chronicle on Domburi’s Improv’d Daily.
21/Jun/07
- Old URLs redirect to URLs to keep with the migration announced May 8. http://elzr.com/articles/YEAR/MONTH/DAY/TITLE now really becomes http://elzr.com/posts/TITLE.>
- Sidebar Redesign: new picture, new welcome copy bared down to its barest Basic EnglishWP essentials, new webapps added to webapp section, new, much better descriptions for most items in the sidebar.
- Daily Improves section in the sidebar for you to keep handy track of my progress—or lack thereof.
- Minor CSS fiddling—like a new, bigger size for small caps type (it could be hard to read at some resolutions and some platforms).
- New 404 page, that is, a new page to aid you when you type in an address that can’t be found. Try it now with http://elzr.com/this-address-is-wrong/. Thanks Aaron!
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New title for homepage. Since the delta thing is already obscure conceit enough, I decided to convert seconds into more humane time units. 8,321,231s delta is now 96 day delta.
Delta, btw, means something like the divergence (the difference) that has come to pass between two different times, one of which is usually the present—so when I say in this blog’s homepage title that there’s a 96 day delta I mean that I haven’t updated it in 96 days, i.e., me and my digital self have had 96 days to go our own separate ways. This wonderful sense of the word comes from Charles Stross’s Accelerando.
- Unified search into a simple URL, http://elzr.com/search/QUERY, which currently carries a personalized Google search of elzr.com but will eventually change to Domburi. This new unified interface allowed me to finally create a YubNub command for the blog: try elzr (see its man page) at every input box that speaks YubNub.
We will come to think of interface design as a kind of art form —perhaps the art form of the next century.
Steven Johnson, Interace Culture, p213
“Hello, how are you?” being written in Dasher. (Hit escape to halt animation.)
A text-entry interface for the tetraplegic, it’s like nothing you’ve seen. Not only does using it have the same rush and exhilaration of playing SonicWP, it is also unbelievably efficient. And again, sheer fun.
It will take you some 5 minutes to get the hang of it (not out of difficulty, out of profound weirdness) but believe you me, you won’t regret it. Read the quick, 3-page explanation and try the Java version in-browser or download it. It’s free software and there are localized versions in many languages.
If such deep novelty, such striking unrealityELZR lies in something as mundane as text-entry, what wonders lie yon in the craft of interface design?
Scratch
Visual programming has been a perennial pipe dream of mine and just some three months ago the MIT Media Lab unveiled the best embodiment so far of my vague and unspecified dreams. It’s called Scratch and it’s meant to introduce children to computing by giving them easy, programmatic means to media manipulation.
The brilliant breakthrough has been to Lego-fy programming, making control blocks actually, well, blocks, and turning programming into block stacking. Yes, it’s messy and you have to fumble around for blocks but it’s visual, incredibly intuitive, and—get this—syntax error free (since blocks have shapes and will only fit in ways that make syntactic sense).
It was scary, you know, when I first knew about Scratch, just some days after it was launched, my evangelizing streak came back with a vengeance and I felt this strange calling to go and teach it somewhere, wherever. Here was finally an easy way to show “normal” people what programming was. Here it is.
I really should know better than spending the better part of three days on a whim…
Never had read anything by Larry WallWP before. I’m dazzled, through and through. Don’t walk, run out to read his Perl, the first postmodern computer language speech. It’s an important rambling, with a scope far beyond that of programming.
While I was digesting this, and thinking about how it applied to computer science, [My daughter] went on, “Well, it’s like, you know, we have this saying at school, when somebody gets uptight about something, we say: ’Tsall good. If someone is depressed, we say: ‘Tsall good.’’’
“But you don’t actually think everything is good, do you?”
“No, of course not.”
“Are you saying that everything has good elements in it?”
”No, Dad, I think when we say that, we’re saying that, overall, things are good. Like, look at the big picture, don’t just focus in on the two or three bad things that are happening to you right now.”
I report this conversation to you not just because I think my kids are cute and smart, but also because I think it’s important that we know where our culture is going, and because it’s our kids that will shape our culture in the future. I don’t think I could have defined postmodernism better than Heidi. Look at the big picture. Don’t focus in on two or three things to the exclusion of other things. Keep everything in context. Don’t go out of your way to justify stuff that’s obviously cool. Don’t ridicule ideas merely because they’re not the latest and greatest. Pick your own fashions. Don’t let someone else tell you what you should like. ’Tsall good.
That’s all well and good, but I ask you, if it’s all good, why, in every other breath, does my daughter say “That sucks.”?
Turns out you can easily break DRM-ed LIT ebooks while as far as I know your PDF ones—if tightly DRM-ed, and these days they all are—are lost for good—leaving you as a sucker who can’t even copy paste and interesting quote; heck, a sucker who can’t even lend the ebook to a friend (hurrah for technology!).
Interesting how piracy can actually be a good thing for business: yesterday I bought a digital version of Peter Watson’s 800-paged IdeasAM (to go with my paper version) only because it was available as a LIT. I then immediately broke the DRM (Microsoft Reader is a joke) and had the—again, 800-paged book—as an HTML mine to edit and tweak. This is just the encouragement I needed to start reading the book—just imagine, I can now tweak the format just like I want it (and as you may have noticed I am a format freak—I like my italics in a slightly more remarkable tone, my parenthetical text slightly subdued, my quotes highlighted), I can turn footnotes into sidenotes, I can 1-click-Answers.com every word, I can copy-paste to Evernote and Devonthink (these days I just can’t conceive of reading a book without highlighting, now it’s getting intolerable not being able to immediately save select quotes in a digital form1), I can upload to my webserver and have it always some seconds away, I can read it in my berry, I can print it, I can find-as-I-type, I can link, annotate, or rewrite, I can…
Three good, non-obvious answers:
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That we participate in it.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
You can use words like ‘platform’ and ‘web application’ and ‘Ajax’ and ‘desktop functionality’ but really in essence the most amazing thing about the web today is the concept of sharing is becoming increasingly OK. We are slowly coming out of our cocoons, testing the waters and sharing out things that we know, and things that we love or hate.
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That we can make (some) sense of it at all.
People understand a graph composed of tree-like documents (HTML) related by links (URLs). In some ways I find this the most surprising of all. For years we assumed people had trouble with trees, never mind graphs. And suddenly hyperlinks come along, and as long as there is a Back button, they work.
I would argue that the “back” button is one of the two or three defining constraints of interaction design. I’d even go so far to say that it’s more significant than the hyperlink.
“Back” doesn’t just mean “go backwards”: it stands for the entire paradigm of user-controlled navigation, arbitrary hyperlinking, and back-as-undo that everyone has come to expect from the behavior of software.. The back button is a contract web design has with our users.
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That it is a universal namespace.
The most important thing about the Web is that it is a universal namespace, something that has not been available before, not at this level of precision.
Benny Gustavsson, On the Semantic Web languagePDF
Tab Mix Plus is simply a pretty good Firefox extension that adds a lot of extra, welcomed functionality to your tabs. Today, lost somewhere within its not so easy-to-use preference pane, I found a little tooltip that is a wonder of clarity, of communicationEEM.
Click a message checkbox, then, holding shift, click another one a couple of messages apart—all intermediate checkboxes are automatically checked.
One of the most universal uses of the ShiftWP key is to aid in selecting ranges (think how you use it to select text or several files) and yet it was only today that it occurred to me that it just might work for checkboxes. I blame years of crappy webmail for that. I checked Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail (the “standard version”, the cool beta version does implement something along these lines), and my university mail and it won’t work there—which is bollocks: it’s a tremendously useful feature that costs near nothing to implement.
I have always envied Alexander the Great, because he had Aristotle as a personal tutor. In those days, Aristotle knew pretty much everything there was to know. Even better, Aristotle understood the mind of Alexander. He understood which topics interested Alexander, what Alexander knew and did not know, and what kinds of explanations Alexander preferred. Aristotle had been a student of Plato, and he was himself a great teacher. We know from his writings that he was full of examples, explanations, arguments, and stories. Through Aristotle, Alexander had the knowledge of the world at his command.
With that, Danny HillisW, E introduces his idea for Aristotle, an AI tutor that will move in a smarter web he calls the knowledge web. I find his dream somewhat unconvincing, somewhat pedantically unrealistic and somewhat suspicious of oversimplification. (Even though he considers it but a steppingstone towards Neal Stephenson’s Young Lady’s Illustrated PrimerWP, ELZR, which I love.) It is from the eminent responses to his essay where there’s gold.
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