Archive for April, 2008

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

Published
by
nesrait
on April 9, 2008
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Incredible!

Compiling the fun out of it!

Published
by
nesrait
on April 9, 2008
in Uncategorized
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Yesterday I was hacking trying to hack away some code in Java when I realized there was something wrong…

Something was trying to stop me from being productive!

In one case I wrote some code which turned red on me the moment I stopped typing it… The reason was obvious: the exceptions! We can’t have those exceptions running around! :) So… ok IDE! Go ahead and add the try/catch for me. Errors: gone.
Then after a bit I rewrote the code and removed the Exception-throwing part. To my surprised: errors! Wtf?

Unreachable catch exception for WtfException. This exception is never thrown from the try statement body.

Cool… so that means I have some junk code lying around. Fine by me!

Not so fine by java… I had to fix the “error” before continuing, which took away the remaining hacking flow I had. What was I really doing before my IDE decided to interrupted me? Beats me… :(

A while ago I read that after a distraction a person needs 8 minutos to concentrate again. If that is so then it’s possible that Java and other compiled languages might be working against programmers. They might help you write more thorough code. But that will be at the expense of loosing the big picture. While you hack away you are constantly brought down to the “current-error” in front of you level.

In the last few weeks I’ve been working more intensely with php and I’ve come to love it’s hackability (or could it be… its documentation?). For instance, I knew nothing about php’s XPath support but php was fine with that. It would let me write shitty code anyway until I got to where I wanted. I could experiment for hours without having a single negative feedback other that my own reprimands for not getting it right! Yesterday’s attempt was a completely different story. For the first time in that project’s lifespan I “felt bad” while working in it. Yuck! :P

And now for something (not) completely different!

I don’t know if you’ve read “7 Thinking Hats” - you should by the way - but I couldn’t help but connecting yesterday’s experience to being in the same room with someone wearing a black hat, someone who kept interrupting any green or yellow ideas you might had.

What about your favourite language? Does it have “nag the developer whenever we does something wrong” in it’s feature list? :)

Last week’s news

Published
by
nesrait
on April 5, 2008
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Just dumping some news I consider relevant.

These are glued together by “Information Overload”:

  • Google Maps Now Editable by Anyone
    Too much data, too little context to allow for a sensible control over the editing process.
  • Five Methodologies to Deal with Email Overload
    The article describes ways to deal with information overload. Nice, but drives attention away from the real problem: the limitations of email.
  • The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere
    Indeed, indeed. The world is moving online and the available technology isn’t coping well with it. Lifestreaming services are a good step forward but still… we might want to look back into what people are putting online (as well as why and where) before “mending” the problem by aggregating information (doing so strips information from its original context and assumes the public and universal sharing of information between people - profiling heaven ahead)
  • AllPeers Closes - What Happened to the Glorious Future of P2P?
    Every day we see a new startup popping up, another feature or site update. All craving our attention, our presence in their space.
    The article mentions marketing problems and I reckon that its all about reaching people, about giving them the experience that makes them include your product into their daily life. If you cross that threshold “you’re in” and then you have access to the “social threshold” - the sense that something is so cool that “I have to share it with someone else”.
    Most startups start working on this later barrier before even considering the former. Until now, social recommendations were an important part of human’s information gathering toolkit. But with the comercial exploitation of the social graph how long is it until our minds start to kick back and worn off the high preference attributed to data collected from our peers? What might the alternatives be? Food for the mind…

These are “Semantic”:

Others:

Sleep mode: on.