Dreams

for a time slacks and shirt.
without which, fired,
brokeness and hunger,
less barbecue/beer/burgers/indian (such diverse tastes!).
paused dreams pay the bills.

For the Holidays: BreatheRight Nasal Plugs

1. Gwen Stefani
2. Antonio Banderas
3. Hillary Duff
4. Mariah Carey
5. Usher
6. Britney Spears

Each has a new fabulous fragrance for Christmas. As Kristen says, “it’s going to be a smelly Christmas.”

Discovery

The shuttle Discovery landed successfully today. While watching it on local news and CNN I couldn’t help feeling proud to be part of a species that’s capable of such things. One day I hope to contribute something towards that effort even though it’s too late for me to become an astronaut. That job wouldn’t fit well with where I am in life, but I’d love be involved somehow. Maybe it’ll be through embedded software development for robotic devices … who knows.

Qualifications aside, if I had no surviving family or loved ones I’d go into space in a heartbeat.

College Lawn Evangelists

They speak too loud to be heard. They failed as drama students. They think they’re in a Holy War.

The above images are from 2005 while attending UCF.

Those that Do

Reading blogs filled with opinions on the latest software/language/library tuckers me out. Now, if instead they were contributing to such a project and were hashing out their ideas and/or struggles in public, I’d be on the edge of my seat. Alas, there aren’t enough of those on the net. And really, it’s the nature of a blog to be mundane and mostly insignificant. Notable exceptions noted. So instead, I waste my reading time by keeping up with (active) software projects and hoping to witness progress. People write too well too often about software stuffs; I want to see results. Of course, I’m writing this in my blog, where none of my code lives. Oh well. For that there’s always greaterscope.net.

Continuing on, I’m a big fan of the efforts of Rob Landley. I may not be able to see the code he’s working on but I can read about it, which is good enough for now. It’s comforting just knowing he’s actually doing things. My favorite method (and seemingly his) of contributing to the betterment of computing is by consciously trying to improve software. This isn’t for everybody and many probably see it as less spectacular than coming up with brand-new things but I remain committed. I don’t want to be a revolutionary. The chance that a person will make a truly original contribution seems pretty slim anyway. But it’s not impossible, so even I occasionally entertain those dreams. Improving upon existing concepts just seems a more readily rewarding — and perhaps a more noble — goal.

Doing One’s Job

“I was just doing my job” is a cop-out, used by weak and worthless individuals. Side-stepping blame under the guise of duty/dedication is disgusting. The guards that dealt with Martin Lee Anderson were adhering to their training, but doing so to the point that one ignores the chance to second-guess the appropriateness of an action is a frightening thing. The world is not so black-and-white. Full dedication to duty should never have become an honorable trait.

Re-Inventing

Starting from scratch on a particular application is great for generating quality software, but only when you know you can create something better. And really, the only way to know you can do a better job is to have experience with alternatives and a keen understanding of where they succeed and/or fail.

Also, if you’re going to take the time to re-invent a piece of software, do it well, especially if you’re planning on Open Sourcing it. You can hack it together in the beginning but refinement is king. Write the code for an audience. Write it to be usable and easily understood. Making software intuitive is an art, but attempt it anyway. Also, take a visibly different approach than the competition or you’ll end up looking just like them.

Why Obfuscate

I’ve heard some people boast about writing obfuscated code and I wondered why they’d even spend their time doing such a thing. To me it seems nothing more than an egotistical endeavor of deliberately making something confusing to others. Since I intend for my code to be understood by others I wouldn’t want to invoke the opposite.

And in comparison, doesn’t it require more skill to construct a program that works well, has a beautiful structure, and comprehensible code? I think so. But in some cases you might not want others to be able to comprehend or modify your code, such as if you’re selling a killer JavaScript application.

Obfuscation can also help create smaller code: there won’t be much left after you do away with the scaffolding that normally makes code organized and extensible.

Xorg is a Bitch

X11/Xorg still disappoints me. Unless you’re an Xorg developer it’s almost impossible to compile it from scratch and set it up properly. Not to mention the fact that the code is too vast for me to care to poke around in. This means my uClibc + Busybox distro I’ve created for my older laptop has lacked a windowing system, and thus has been without GUI capability. It’d be nice to be able to view PDFs or open up Firefox every now and then.

That’s partly why, after 3 years, I was still excited about Y-windows, now the newly forked Dsy Windows. Built on top of SDL, it has the potential to have a smaller code-base than X and be much easier to install. However, tonight I discovered the Xynth windowing system, which seems to be further along than DsY, so my excitement has shifted. I’ve yet to get it up and running, but it compiles and more importantly, it doesn’t give me crap about missing rgb, font or xkbcomp files.

Web Programming Likes and Dislikes

Since they’ve never been enumerated before, here are things I do and don’t like about web applications programming.

Dislikes - Least to Greatest

• That no real debugging environment exists, so code has to be written to temporarily print out variables and data structures in an effort to track down bugs
• Many projects don’t contain enough abstraction, making standard tasks time-consuming
• Writing CSS
• When code is interspersed with HTML
• Writing JavaScript

Likes - Least to Greatest

• It often requires knowledge and experience with many different technologies: scripting languages, data structures, databases, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript
• Can provide experience in dealing with deadlines, changing requirements, feature creep, and clients that assume features not mentioned in the original spec
• It serves as an excellent starting point for coders wishing to develop their skills. Working on a variety of web-based applications is a great way to become better at problem solving, critical thinking, working with others.
• Though it’s often regarded as less-difficult than developing non-web-based applications, there are many complex problems begging to be solved by clever means. Most of those I see are related to good code design.

Some Reflection

For more than a year I’ve been wanting to improve my skills in non-web-applications programming. However, since there’s still much to be done in the field I don’t envision ever leaving it entirely. The experience I’ve gained since I started writing HTML in 9th grade has landed me several jobs and enabled me to earn money while going to college. It’s the field of computing with the least barriers to entry, shallowest learning curves, and the most job opportunities. Experienced coders that also have an eye for design should have no difficulty finding work, since most smaller shops prefer to hire a single person willing to fulfill both needs.

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