Ideas Posts

• 08.27.07 Holding a Program in One’s Head (Ideas, Me, Computers)

  Paul Graham [who is obnoxiously elitist, but frequently insightful] has a new essay, “Holding a Program in One’s Head“, that is making me feel sad this morning.
  

  “A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he’s working on. Mathematicians don’t answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will.”

  I know that feeling so well, and I want to be back in that [non-Euclidean] space again.

  
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• 07.18.07 Hang on, I gotta take a call from the Archdemon Azazael (Ideas, Humor)

  37signals gripes about those annoying Bluetooth cellphone headsets with even-more-annoying blinky LEDs on them.

  I once had the idea of a charity that would collect discarded headsets from yuppies and distribute them to mentally ill homeless people. Just by wearing the headsets, they would eliminate the social stigma attached to talking to themselves on the street; this would help re-integrate them into society.

• 07.01.07 How to get an iPhone without a service contract and save $$$ (Ideas)

  Two of the downsides of the iPhone are the two-year indentured servitude to AT&T, and the cost of the service plans (well, they’re not that expensive, but it’s 50% more I was spending on my Sidekick.) But I inadvertently found a way around both those problems.

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• 04.18.07 Twitter, Rails, Hammers, and 11,000 Nails per Second (Ideas, Social Software, Computers)

  There’s an interesting kerfluffle going on regarding the scaling woes that Twitter.com is going through, especially since it’s built on Ruby On Rails. Here’s the original interview with one of the Twitter coders, the somewhat evasive reply by the lead Rails architect, and Mark Pilgrim’s cruel-but-funny dissection of the latter.

  Ruby is a lovely language and Rails is a lovely framework, but both of them trade performance for aesthetics and convenience. That is, they’re slow. No … MORE

• 04.16.07 Computer Science’s Image Problem (Ideas, Computers)

  NYT: Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold

  I find this article baffling and the comments on it aggravating.

  “The nerd factor is huge,” Dr. Cuny said. … This image discourages members of both sexes, but the problem seems to be more prevalent among women. ‘They think of it as programming,’ Dr. Cuny said. ‘They don’t think of it as revolutionizing the way we are going to do medicine or create … MORE

• 03.18.07 Masculine And Feminine In Operating Systems (Ideas, Computers)

  My friend Tanya is a gateway to the strange and exotic worlds of fan- and slash-fiction. Today she pointed out a whole LiveJournal community, mac_hearts_pc, devoted to mostly-smutty extrapolations of Apple’s anthropomorphized Mac-vs-PC ads. Wow.

  In her post about this, she says

  “I tend to think of Macs as so feminine as to be, well, female”

  which is really making me think…

  How do we map computer behaviors onto ‘male’ and ‘female’? In American culture the æsthetic sense, intuition … MORE

• 10.13.06 Dream apps and the perils of screen-scraping (Ideas, Social Software)

  There’s an interesting online competition going on called My Dream App. The idea is that a bunch of people pitch their ideas for a Mac application, and the set of ideas gets winnowed down in several rounds of public voting, until one is left. A group of experienced developers have promised to implement the winning idea as a shareware app, whatever it turns out to be.

  It’s a fun concept, but it highlights some of the problems of having end users design software. A number of the proposals give me a particular sinking feeling I associate with user-interface design meetings: lots of ideas that sound super-cool as one-sentence pitches, accompanied by irresistibly glitzy faked-up screen shots (all replete with translucency, rounded corners, and this year’s de rigeur reflections). But too often there’s no “there” there. It’s all so vague that I can sense that these people haven’t thought through the difficult bits or worked out a coherent idea of what the app will do.
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• 03.28.06 Multisensory CPU meter (Ideas, Computers)

  It just occurred to me that my newish MacBook gives me no less than four sensory modalities for detecting high CPU usage:

  1. The scrolling bar-graphs [one per CPU] of the Activity Monitor icon in the Dock
  2. The unobtrusive little purring fan that comes on every few seconds after the CPU’s been busy for a while
  3. The extra warmth of the computer against my palms and lap (I won’t say it gets “hot”; maybe “toasty”.)
     …and the … MORE
• 06.28.05 Lua and unique strings (Ideas, Languages)

  Lua is an interesting scripting language. I can’t say I have much familiarity with it; I’ve only read the book, and a couple of papers, and downloaded and built the interpreter (which takes less than a minute). But what I’ve seen of it gives me a warm feeling, like reading a concise little poem, a haiku. It’s a small language, but what’s there is well-considered, and it appears that you can build bigger things (like … MORE

• 06.15.05 Little Boxes Of Words (Ideas, Social Software)

  Much of what I’m consumed with (at work) boils down to a question of: what is the right shape for the small but plentiful bits of writing that we are all creating daily? Here shape means largely visual representation but also sequencing and topology.

  It’s a problem of hypertext, primarily. The World Wide Web established one shape for hypertext: individual pages with one-way links in the text, replacing one another in a back-forwards chain. It’s proven to be a pretty good shape, but it’s not the only one, and earlier thinkers like Engelbart and Nelson had lots of other ideas.
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