It’s out - the macbook replacement for the iBooks. And I’m leaning pretty heavily towards one of those guys. It’s really a question to me of do I want the additional video power/screen. I currently pretty much live at 1024×768, so either of these guys will be a significant update for me.
The smaller size (13″) is actually somewhat appealing- although I think I’ll need to make a run out to the Apple Store and hope the UVillage one has some in stock so I can check out the keyboard. The pics look decent so far… but the feel. The feel of the keyboard is all important.
Today is one of those days where I’m digging into a sticky, pervasive problem. It has its little tendrils everywhere, and it is the kind of problem where you just have to get up, stomp around the room a bit, and try to figure out how to attack it.
I’ve been peeling back the edges, and it is just one of those goopy things. The overall issue is really about process, procedure, and a touch of culture. Part of it is technical too - and there is a whole balancing act of flexibility vs. complexity to get into as well. The worst part is that the whole thing is rather nebulous.
I have been tackling it by writing down goals, defining edges, to the problem. That seems to be getting me somewhere. I’m thinking sort of “hedge it in” and then chop it up into smaller, more managable issues.
No, I’m not going Ad sponsored for this blog - I’m just fiddling with Google’s advertising mechanism to see what it’s all about. I don’t think I even have a significant enough readership to drive anything more than a few pennies through Ads on my personal blog, but you never know about something else.
I’ve thought several times of doing a little more online publishing of articles, tips & tricks, etc. A good “how to” is a damn handy thing, you know. And its not like there isn’t a need for content. I used to try and publish in magazines and the periodic on-line site (OReillyNet actually) - and that worked out well, but I wonder if I couldn’t do something edited just by myself and a few friends and get away with making enough pennies to support the hosting.
I spent some of today playing around with generating “dot” files for use in Graphviz. It was mutually amusing, frustrating, and ultimately enlightening.
Graphviz is a bit of an open-source standard for laying out and displaying directed and non-directed graphs, but there’s still a lot of things it doesn’t do. I’m that at least some of that ‘lack’ is simply me not knowing how to tweak it out to perform… after a morning of fiddling and reading the docs (yeah, I admit it - I actually read them…) I still don’t know how to make graphs that splay out like one of their examples. And yeah, I know there’s a dot file there for me to view, tweak, etc.
On the flip side of all this, I’m back to being reasonably comfortable with recursive function calls. It was how I was parsing my data structure out into those dot files.
I’ve been dancing around this guys work for a couple of years now - it gets cited, I take a look, and then I go “eh…” and move on. Not today. In my usual whim-like fashion, I picked up a copy of Envisioning Information at a Barnes and Noble and have been idly flipping around the pages.
It’s really a weird mix between graphic design and data. He does a good job sort of describing what works and what doesn’t for conveying information in succinct visual forms. Another one of his concepts is Sparklines, which have been interesting me for the name of them if nothing else. They seem like in the right instance, they’d be just damn near perfect for conveying relevant information. I haven’t found the right place though…
My favorite tool for information display right now is RRDtool - mostly because I seem drawn to looking at data over time, and it does a pretty darn good job of making pretty pictures about data over time. But lately I’ve been weirdly obsessing about other kinds of information that aren’t so easily displayed over time. Watching a source code/project tree and the edits to that tree has been in my mind. Can you make a useful visualization of it modelled from a living tree - maybe shading the “leaf nodes” into colors of green based on age and continued development, with sections that are unchaning over time dimming to brown, or even going grey with age. It sounds all cool - but would it be useful? And how would you really get useful information from that view over time? A snapshot view with coloration on the tree (maybe some interesting wrangling of Graphviz would enable that) might be a really interesting thing. The graphs that you find in CruiseControl these days, under metrics, hold a lot of interesting information to me as well. You can see clustering of development and effort for the project that it’s building - get a sense of what’s happening over time.
Here’s one project I’ve been keeping my eye on:
The information doesn’t really give me anything “actionable”, so there’s an argument for its general superflousness. I don’t agree - but I don’t immediately have a good argument towards the pro. Some folks are making pay-for tools that introspect your source code tree as a means of deriving metrics and health - so there is at least someone (I would think) paying for this information. And if someone will pay for the tools, you’d think they’d probably see some value there. Eh - I guess that’s rather the definition of paying for the tools though. Heh.
“Two Decades of the Language-Action Perspective” is the title of this month’s Communcations of the ACM. Quite a few of these issues have been a “glance here” and “hmm, ok” there. This one actually caught my attention. Now I actually don’t know diddly about “LAP” (Language-Action Perspective) as they’re describing it - it’s some communications/negotiation computing theory stuff that I hadn’t been explicitly exposed to previously - for all it’s being 2 decades old now. Even so, it is an interesting concept and reading about the 20 year reflection on the theory was more so.
A lot of it revolves down into a thesis of “conversation is a generator of action, including organization”. I may be reading way to simplistically toward it, but the articles appear to incite faults with their own over simplification, so maybe not. Some conversation is definitely a generator of action, other is a transmission of knowledge. Maybe there’s a third category that I’m not thinking of, but there is at least knowledge broadcast and reception. You could make are argument for requesting information is “action”, but I don’t think that deals fairly with purely declarative statements.
The article that really piqued my interest was “innovation as language action” by Peter Denning and Robert Dunham. I didn’t get the “as language action” part of the article really at all, but the article was a great description of innovation vs. invention, as well as expounding a concept (that I generally buy) that innovation is and can be a learned skill. It’s not just clever thinking - and in fact that’s the smaller part of the innovation process. It’s taking the though, concept - invention - and running with it towards broader acceptance. They call these generative steps “offering new outcomes”, “executing plans and tools”, “adopting new practice”, and “sustaining integration into surroundings”. The tail end of the article actually sort of read like a “come take our professional course” advertisement, which I found rather disappointing - but I liked the core concepts.
Ah yeah, finally a reasonably useful (to me) edition of the Communications of the ACM. I am just so not an academic.
There are days (and this is one) that I really wish I could view my laptop screen in the full sun. It’s nice outside, ya know? And I’d like to lounge around on the patio and do a little surfing of the internet at the same time.
Alas, the full sun washes out the display on my iBook so badly that it’s just impossible to use. You always see those advertising pictures of the dude working with his laptop on the beach… that’s just so much crap - you can’t see a damn thing. Maybe it’s just meant to look like he’s working though… hmmm… hadn’t thought of that.
I’m back in Seattle today, and I’m just wiped out. I had a good trip, but for some reason I’m just exhausted today. I’m poking and proding at my to-do list, and even making progress - but I’m not 100% today, that’s for sure.
XCoder’s meeting is tonight, which I’m looking forward to seeing. Maybe I’ll be more awake by then…
I stepped off the plane into Burbank last night, and my first thought was “LA smells bad”. The smog/cloud cover was really low last night and there is a continued haze today. It is making everything sort of warm, slightly humid (nothing like missouri - just slightly humid), and and greyed out. It’s very odd.
As usual, I mananged to get myself lost - but quickly reoriented and found my way around. Took a tour of the area between Universal Studios and Glendale today trying to find the office at which I am meeting today.
Lost a hard drive today - the one I keep the backups on. Whoops. Damn. Well, so there goes a few gig for now - I’ve spent part of the afternoon setting up and making another set of backups so I’m not without. Annoying, but it happens.
