“first there was a three-legged monkey...”
This Thursday visitor number 1000 came to my blog. Yay!
Today (until now) I have clicked with my mouse 2776 times.
Today I have typed 5500 keys (including this one).
2826 of these were special keys.
Space is the key I use the most. Runner-ups are E, A, T, backspace, enter.
O is the key I type fastest. Runner-ups are E, A, H, U, space.
(I’ve installed Gabe’s TypOmeter)
Yesterday I borrowed Agile Software Development by Alistair Cockburn at the library. Today I got an e-mail from them, saying that my reservation for Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck is in. Mary Poppendieck has released a couple of more chapters of Lean Development: Toolkit for Software Development Managers (I’ve mentioned this book before). Robert C. Martin has released a new book called Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices (official site) and there are a couple of sample chapters. Crosstalk has a whole issue about Agile Software development with articles by folks as Jim Highsmith, Alistair Cockburn, Mark C. Paulk. There is a short article Always Be Second by Jerry Weinberg (my favourite) [via ChaordicEdge]. There is also an article at New Architect: Scaling Agile Methods by Sanjay Murthi.
If the world just could stop spinning for two weeks or so, to let me reduce the books/articles on my “list” I would be very grateful!
Yesterday I started “researching” for my CV. And boy was that a trip down memory lane. When I moved here three years ago I started keeping all receipts, so I had a couple of hundered, perhaps thousands, receipts from stores and ATM’s. I thought it was a good time to clean up the mess so I started browsing through them and throw most of it away. It was nice to see that I have had some money at the bank—I’m not used to that :). I guess you could figure out quite much about me, where I’ve been and what I’ve bought the last three years, based on those receipts. I decided to clean up the mess in my “important stuff” drawer as well. There in the bottom I found my “special work” (I’m not sure of the translation) from the upper high school (I think). Quite fun to read. I have also read about the various project I’ve participated in at the university. Really interesting! Anyhow, now most of the unimportant stuff is thrown away, but it was a nice trip. After reading that much I got a terrible head ache and got really ill. Couldn’t sleep until sometime in the middle of the night :)
I hope I get my CV in order soon, so I can start looking for a job!
Btw, I stumbled upon pyblosxom. It’s a Python port of bloxsom. Nice!
At Typophile they have a nice project they call The Smaller Picture [via BoingBoing]. By allowing visitors to decide if a randomly picked pixel of a certain letter should be white or black, the letters are starting to look like they “should”. You can even see the evolution of the characters as animations. So go and start helping the typophiles out!
I wish I could come up with an idea like that…
This is something I’d like: AudioTron by Turtle Beach. It’s a stereo component that can play MP3’s and Windows Media files. You plug it in to your LAN and can listen to music residing on your computer or to Internet radio stations. It seems great to be able to put away a computer in the closet and still be able to listen to the music on it in your stereo. Perhaps it would be better with a hard drive embedded within AudioTron, but that would make it more expensive and you can’t use the space for anything else. It’s not that expensive, only $299.95. I’m not sure how much it costs here in Sweden, but the distributor for Scandinavia/Europe is HPT (only pre-order available at this moment).
But I don’t have enough money to buy it anyway since I haven’t got the down payment on the apartment yet. So I will have to continue dreaming…
Today they launched a new effort to inspire to mathematical discussions at my university. They will post two problems each month (they are available here, but they are in Swedish and only people attending or working at the university can participate).
I admit that calculating probability is not one of my strongest mathematical skills. So I started hacking together a Python script in less than 30 LOC which pretty much solved the problem (in an empirical way). But before I finished it I realized that it was wrong in some cases. And since the code was quite hackish and written in a procedural manner I didn’t want to debug it. So I rewrote the simulation in Ruby. This time I made some effort to do a good design and refactor as the code evolved (it ended up three times more LOC than the Python script). And it worked correctly without any tiresome debugging and I had faith in the code (I didn’t trust the output from the hackish Python script).
But empirical evidence from a computer simulation is hardly valid as evidence. Hence I started looking into the problem and how to solve it. After a while I did manage to solve the problem. I did only solve the easy level, but that’s ok. I don’t think I have the time to solve the hard level (or any ideas of how to solve it). I don’t think I have much use of my existing solution to that problem…
To conclude, today I was reminded of two things: mathematical problems are quite fun, and it is always best to write good code, even when it’s just for code that will be thrown away.
Roy Miller has started a column about XP called Demystifying Extreme Programming at developerWorks. So far, there are only two installments released (part 1 – part 2). They are both interesting and, in fact, uplifting read. They are both a good introduction to XP, but what is more interesting they talk about what XP might become in the near(?) future. Instead of almost exclusively addressing the need of the programmers, this column seems to address everyone involved (programmers, customers and management). XP is normally considered having 12 practices, but Miller talks about 19 practices divided into joint practices (for programmers, customers, managers), development practices (for programmers), management practices (for management) and customer practices (for customers). The “new” practices are:
What a great idea! Chaos computer club made something amazing to celebrate their 20th anniversery. They made a large building into a computer display where they showed animations, love letters and where folks could play pong. The installation is called Blinkenlights, check it out. Their next installation is called Arcade and will take place in Paris (25/9-6/10). It would be great to see it live! Perhaps I could make my own Blinkenlights—the code is release under GPL :-)
Yesterday I started looking into Flash. People seem to be able to do just about anything with this tool. However, I have several problems with it. If you draw a square, you can dissemble it by just moving one of its sides. And if you place two geometrical figures on top of each other they automatically merge. There are also other things which make me wonder if anybody can do any modelling (besides just basic lines) in Flash, or if they use other applications and import the graphics to Flash.
When I (re)learned how to do some basic animation I realized that I had to look into Actionscript (of course without any book or other documentation), since I wanted to have some sort of interactivity and thought it could be used to do some minor animation. The syntax seemed quite ok, and after a lot of tinkering I managed to make a figure (a Southpark inspired fellow) rotate when I moved the mouse over a button. Yay :-) . But somehow Actionscript seemed unfinished. I didn’t manage to hide/show layers. You can only add mouse handlers to buttons (not to graphics or movie clips). You can’t programatically manipulate (scale/rotate etc) buttons or graphics, just movie clips. There were also other things that bugged me. In conclusion, Flash/Actionscript doesn’t fit my need (perhaps I should try the new Flash MX version). I wonder how such a tool would look like if it addressed programmers.
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