I just wrote this in CVS:
Leave out the omit column.
Weird. Makes perfect sense, but it seems redundant…
August 2005 Archives
Just finished reading it. If you program for a living, or as a serious hobby, and are reasonably good at it, read this book. I’ll accept no excuses if you take programming seriously. Part of its appeal is how easy a read it is, and it’s written in short sections, so you don’t need to allot a large chunk of time for it. You don’t even have to read it from cover to cover.
The authors give a lot of advice on how to improve your programming, and how to be an asset to your organization. They don’t advocate any one methodology or programming language, and they even avoid taking a side in the Emacs vs. vi argument, but rather focus on issues that will be applicable everywhere.
My next book was going to be Peopleware, but, looking through the table of contents and a couple of sections, it’s not holding much appeal to me, now that I’m a programming team of one. I’ll keep it on my list for later, though.
So, instead, I’ve picked out The Design of Everyday Things as my next technical book. It has been on my wish list for quite some time, and I finally found it at the local bookstore.
Memorable quotes/scenes:
Hairbrush ring tone
“I may have blown the nose caper”
“But with an italian accent, they’re both the same”
“Cat combs? I’m not looking for a comb!” (*)
“Figaro! Figaro Figaro Figaro Figaro Figaro!”
Humming the hairbrush song
“I have a brush, and I know how to use it!”
“Noah’s Umbrella”
“Why don’t you like that song, Bob?” I’ve been wondering that since the very first show…
I like it. Probably the best one since Little Joe, in my opinion. I’m glad to see them doing Bible stories again. The Belly Button song is still by far my favorite silly song, though this one is pretty good as well. (Aside: What are your favorite silly songs?)
Going through the commentary… Oops, I should have caught the Barbershop of Seville gag…
I’m glad to see that the Canadians aren’t the bad guys. :-)
(*) This reminds me of one of the first book quotes that made me laugh so hard that I cried, from a DragonLance novel. The Cataclysm (earth-shattering event where the seat of power of the world was destroyed and the gods left the earth) was known to at least some kender as the Cart Collision… The mental picture of two carts causing the end of the world as everyone knew it still makes me laugh.
Thus ends attempt #1 to comment on something as I’m watching/reading it.
I’ve created a storage/server room downstairs using wireframe shelves and a folding table to stake out some space. The little inconvenience of not having everything within 15 feet of my desk comes with a lot of benefits:
My entire business isn’t within 15 feet of my desk.
I’m down to one computer in the office, with the other four (not counting the laptop) downstairs. I can control them either locally (we had an extra monitor lying around in the basement, so it was just the cost of a keyboard) or remotely through SSH and VNC.
The fax machine/copier and photo/business card printer are now down there as well, freeing up a good bit of space.
I think I got rid of about 10 pounds of cables, including several cables that had been lost for a couple of years.
The piano (slab keyboard) can now fit in the room again. Yay!
I can now store far more extra paper and envelopes than before, so I shouldn’t be having to make emergency trips to Staples any more.
Having fewer computers in the office should help with the heating issue.
Unfortunately, my desk is now a mess once again, and I have more piles on the floor… Sigh…
You’d think that after months and months of working in PuTTY rather than KDE or Gnome, that I’d finally get out of the habit of including “-nw” on the command-line… Not yet, apparently.
From The Pragmatic Programmer, pp. 99-100:
In their book The Practice of Programming, Kernighan and Pike built the same program in five different languages. The Perl version was the shortest (17 lines, compared with C’s 150). With Perl you can manipulate text, interact with programs, talk over networks, drive Web pages, perform arbitrary precision arithmetic, and write programs that look like Snoopy swearing. (Last emphasis mine.)
Yup.
I enjoy seeing what other people are reading, so here are the books I have bookmarks in right now:
- The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
- Code Complete, by Steve McConnell
- Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett
- Finding Common Ground, by Tim Downs
- Questioning Evangelism, by Randy Newman
(Why read just one book when you can read five?)
This is a little unusual, in that I normally only read one book per genre at any given time, but I’ve never been the type of person who reads one book from front to back before going on to the next one.
The signature scanning program worked pretty well. I was able to queue up the processing, and it generally stayed ahead of me as I was customizing the template E-Mail based on what I knew about the people receiving it. (The occasional break and answering other E-Mails helped as well.)
It did take more than 30 seconds per scan on average, but the best cases (clear handwriting and no prior interaction with the recipient) were in the realm of 15 seconds of human time, so there was a definite time savings.
I only had to tweak the program a little after fixing one major flaw — if the form needed to be rotated back any number of degrees (angle < 0), it flipped it upside-down first. Wrong multiplier.
It’s also worth noting that you can store an entire E-Mail in an HTML link. I knew that you could include a subject, but I never knew until a few days ago that you could also include a body.
That’s a very handy feature for semi-programmatic E-Mails. In my case, I had it include a specific link in the body of the message, address it to the proper person, and then open it up in my mail program so that I could customize it to suit the person receiving it.
An alternative would have been to have the program send the E-Mail (first allowing me to customize the E-Mail in a text box), but this let me use Thunderbird’s interface, which was designed for E-Mail, instead of web forms, which were not, and I now have a copy of each message in my Sent folder as an added bonus.
There were two main challenges:
Handwriting. If you fill out a form for a product or service that is going to be E-Mailed to you, please be sure to (a) write your E-Mail address clearly, and (b) write your correct E-Mail address. Mistakes ranged from one person who neglected to include his E-Mail address, making it very hard to contact him with his scanned signatures, to people putting things like “comcast.com” instead of “comcast.net”, or writing an “m” with one too many loops.
Alignment. All told, this went very well, considering the requirements. I was drawing a 3-inch by 1.5-inch box with a tolerance of less than an eighth of an inch based on three points that I was tracking down programmatically. Still, there was room for improvement. In a future iteration, I’d love to be able to have it find the boundaries of the boxes and use those, in addition to the crosshairs in the corners (I need to put a picture up… Let me know if you’d like to see one).
Even so, I got all of the signatures done in well under two days, including everything else that’s been happening, at a fairly leisurely pace. That’s a success in my book.
I just won an iPod Photo in a sweepstakes I entered some time ago. Neat!
