My two most recent contracts have been triggering the reflective urge in me. I’ve been a user of Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal, as has been noted in these electrons before. But I’ve never been entirely satisfied with them.
I can go down a long list of little things that annoy me about each one of them, but the root cause for almost all of it is they’re just too complicated.
Just read in Locus about the death of Algis Budrys. Ruined what was promising to be a perfectly good day.
Some will write about how good of an editor he was. And there will the obligatory homages to Rogue Moon and Who?, his classics in the genre. All of that will be covered by others who will do it much better than I, so I will leave them to it.
Instead I’ll talk about Michaelmas, a flawed book with a conventional alien invasion plot, but with a more personal meaning. It was the novel that brought me into the computer industry. Besides being a forerunner to (and better than 99% of) the cyberpunk subgenre in science fiction, it was the first novel to explore the potential of human/computer teams, without making either one the slave of the other. Oh, there was no doubt who was in charge (Michaelmas, the human). But he listened to and often accepted the advice of the computer (Domino) and in general treated Domino as he might a human member of his staff.
That was what excited me. It made real to me the possibilities of computers not as calculators, but as assistants in the real meaning of the term: as things to assist us in what we do best. It was the synergy between Domino and Michaelmas that excited me. I wanted to make that happen in real life.
I was happily on my way to becoming a chemist when I read that book. It was a life-altering experience. Call him cranky, curmudgeonly, call him whatever you want. Just remember it takes a whale of a writer to reach into someone’s life like that.
I never knew Budrys the man, but that doesn’t matter. My world is a little darker today for his absence. And for the umpteenth time, I’m going to re-read Michaelmas.
Been spending way too much time with Capistrano recently, and it stops now. It’s quite possibly useful to me in my current projects, but its user-hostility makes it not worth the time.
As I searched and read page after web page, trying to find a pointer to how to use Cap in my environment (svn is on my development machine, not on a server somewhere else) without success, I began getting a feel for the attitude surrounding Cap, and frankly, I didn’t like it much. One article about doing this had several comments to the effect of “this capability is built in to version 2; this article is deprecated.” Of course, not one of them pointed to where I could find out about how to make version 2 use it.
The moment of my departure from Capistrano came when I ran across several exchanges about the (lack of) documentation for version 2. One of the respondents suggested the person looking for information could always read the code. Continue reading
Jon Gruber writes, quoting Joe Wilcox (go ahead and read the story, but skip the comments as they devolve quickly into meaninglessness) on Apple sales figures.
The numbers look great, but the context of the initial report, and the lack of context in Gruber’s later spin, remind us of Mark Twain’s famous comment about statistics. Continue reading
I’ve tweeted this a bit, but decided it’s time I start a catalog.
Been working an assignment on location at an ASP.Net shop (they’ve teased about it being a full-time gig, but no action on that front; honestly don’t know what I’d do, because the folks there are great to work with even if they do use VS) and so I’ve been having to deal with Visual Studio.
Now, I’d used VS a lot in my previous life as a software developer. What I wasn’t prepared for was:
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Aug | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |