Category Archives: General

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General

Hair sketching

2006/08/23 – 12:23

I wonder if Shahzad Malik has ever played with Barbie Magic Hairstyler:

Shahzad Malik’s Web Page – Projects (see ‘Hair Sketching’ project)

(I already explained how I know about Barbie Magic Hairstyler.)

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General

“Price Tag for Lost Productivity”

2006/08/22 – 00:18

Ya know, I was going to construct a list of all the ways in which this sort of study is wrongheaded, but then I thought, you have to get it to get it, and if you don’t, my arguments won’t help… So, I guess there’s no point to this post, but still:

Price Tag for Lost Productivity: $544 Billion

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General

DVD mystique

2006/08/07 – 13:47

It’s interesting to me that when I buy a DVD of episodes of a TV show, they’re quite a bit better than they were on TV. There are a number of possible explanations for this, and no doubt they add up, but I think the biggest difference is that there are no commercial interruptions. Not only does this let the content flow properly, but I’m also more likely to allow myself to invest my attention when I know that nobody is going to try to hijack it to hawk garbage.

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General

“Make Your Own Fun/Rules”

2006/07/26 – 16:07

These are some pretty great suggestions about modifying gameplay by conventions to get some more life out of your video games:

game girl advance: Make Your Own Fun/Rules.

I try this sort of thing on occasion, but I haven’t yet reached the heights of creativity demonstrated here. Part of it is that I mostly play games by myself, so I don’t really have the social component that is key to those rule sets, nor do I have other people checking me on whether I’m sticking to the rules.

This reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about lately with regard to video games (well, it’s true of all games), which is that the structure of a game, its rules, scoring, criteria for winning, etc., imply a certain value system. To play the game ‘by the rules’ is to agree to enter or pretend to enter into that value system for a while. That can be fun and that can be annoying/frustrating/disgusting. I forsee video games getting more and more direct support for regular gamers (i.e. not modders or programmers) to modify the rules of the game to tailor it to their own value choices.

For example, in Need for Speed Underground 2, I like to play drift races, but I don’t quite like how the game scores them (wagging your ass all over the place willy-nilly gets you lots of points, for example). If I had some nice little control panel where I could modify the scoring algorithm, then I could have more fun with the game and still have the computer track my ‘performance’ for me. Of course, I can always just ignore the scores, but why not have a nice middle ground?

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General

Frozen annoyance

2006/07/25 – 20:19

I don’t love it when a frozen dinner requires you to remove the film from two different portions prior to cooking. One’s OK, but two is somewhat difficult to do without disturbing the other(s).

But lemme tell ya, that’s nothing compared to those stupid ones with the, I think, Betty Crocker brownies. Last time I checked, you were supposed to cook the dish for a while, _remove and set aside_ the gooey brownie, then cook it some more. I refuse to buy those, which unfortunately restricts my choices quite a bit these days, because they’re all the rage right now. Hopefully they’ll get over those or figure out a better way to balance the microwave energy or something…

In case you were wondering, my refusal to buy the latter category of dinners is probably the reason you’ve been hearing that the top 3 frozen dinner makers have fallen bankrupt. I guess I should have warned them about my vast consumer power. Ha ha, hahaha!

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General

The XML Illusion

2006/06/20 – 13:30

One of the things that people tout as a strength of XML is its “human-readability”. But we pay a big price, in terms of CPU, bandwidth, and storage, for the terabytes of XML that are parsed, shuffled, and stored without a human eye ever reading them.

By the way, you ever tried to read some of the stuff that comes out of, say, OpenOffice? To call it human-readable is a bit overstated. And don’t get me started on XML-based scripting languages! I mean it, don’t!

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General

P. Peeves

2006/06/06 – 11:27

‘Pet peeves’. Seems we ought not be nurturing our peeves as if they were something we want to thrive under our care, like a pet. Seems they’re more like parasites than pets (but then, parasites are an analogy that’s more likely to come to my mind in any situation after reading “Parasite Rex”). We don’t really want them, but we haven’t yet developed a personally effective way to deal with them. But we certainly shouldn’t be treating them like pets…

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General

Work space

2006/05/30 – 22:17

Hmmm, might have to finally go read some of this guy’s stuff, just because he’s a lot like me in this way: Malcom Gladwell/My Work Space

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General

“Parasite Rex”

2006/05/23 – 22:39

Parasite Rex (LOC, Amazon) by Carl Zimmer was a great read. I never really got a good introduction to parasites in my previous studies in biology, so I was greatly enlightened about their vast diversity and importance to life on earth. I was particularly struck by the new view of evolution that one gets when considering the intertwined life-cycles of parasites and their hosts.

Not surprisingly, it’s full of descriptions of processes that’ll make the worms under your skin crawl, so don’t bother if you’re squeamish about that. I have to admit that I (not very squeamish) felt a bit itchy when reading it, at times… All in good fun, though.

Here’s a parasite story on Zimmer’s blog that gives you a taste of some of the stories in the book.

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General

Flow and Refactoring

2006/05/23 – 22:09

Those being the names of two books I’m reading now. I like it when two things I’m reading, from different fields and for different purposes, turn out to have a nice connection.

It sorta struck me when Fowler mentioned “not once did I have to open the debugger, so the process actually flowed quite quickly”, that, yeah, there does seem to be a connection between flow and refactoring in a general sense.

With any complex project, there are multiple competing concerns. For example, in writing software, I want the functionality, but I also want a clean architecture, good performance, multi-platform capability, etc. With a document, I want clarity, completeness, cleverness, alliteration, etc. But due to limitations of brain-context-capacity, varying interest levels, and compounded complexity, it’s rarely possible to keep all these concerns going simultaneously. And swapping between them all the time can wreaks havoc with the potential for flow.

Given that, one can look at refactoring as a way to profitably resequence work. If I can’t fulfill all the concerns at the same time, I’ll just focus on slapping down something that works, forgetting for the moment all the other stuff. Then, one by one or two by two, I can go back and refactor in the other concerns, as time and interests permit. Beyond simply enabling me to get past the block of “I can’t do it all, so I shouldn’t start at all”, I can also match my work to my capacity and have some chance of getting a flow state going.

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