Experiments on animals (by alaric)

I was doing something in the kitchen; Jean was toddling around playing with a hair grip. The kind that's two plastic jaws closed by a spring. She was gripping it on to bits of her clothing, and various objects around the kitchen, experimenting with what it would hold onto well.

She wandered out of the kitchen into the living room, then came back a bit later, looking thoughtful.

"Cat no like it" she said, waving the hair grip at me.

I'm amazed she wasn't crying and nursing a scratch!

Mental modes (by alaric)

Hmmm, it appears I have two mental modes when working.

1. Deeply focussed into something. I block out distractions to hold onto the focus. This is what I need when I'm programming. Once I get into this mood, I get a lot done, since I have all the pertinent information sitting in my head and all the correct windows open on my computer, but it can be an uphill struggle to get started.

2. Event driven. When I'm dealing with emails, phonecalls, broken servers, and that sort of thing, I'm in a very different mode, agily flipping between things. I come across problems that will clearly need some deep focus, and I have to put them off for later, since it takes me a while to get out of deep mode and into event-driven mode.

This morning I've been event-driven, catching up on email, dealing with a down server, and now I really ought to try moving back into deep focus mode to work on something else, and I'm finding it hard; my thoughts just keep jumping around!

I really want to decrease my dependence on lots of deep thought mode for earning money; part of this revolves around getting an underling to do more of the programming so I can be event-drivenly mentoring them while doing the considerably easier form of deep thought required to design software architectures for them to implement... which is a work in progress as we speak...

Debugger is not a naughty word (by alaric)

Computers are famed for harbouring bugs, and the high rate of failures in software compared to other industries is a constant cause of embarrassment. I'd like to explore why this is, with an example. And what we might be able to do about it.

Note: Although a lot of the details of the remainder crash are unfortunately very technical, I have done my best to explain things in a way that lay people should be able to make some sense of. However, some things would require a lot of background information, in which case I've just plowed on without explanation. So if you come across things that you don't understand, feel free to skip ahead a bit; you shouldn't lose too much.

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Bah, back to Rails! (by alaric)

Gah. I was happily thinking that I was slowly getting rid of my last Ruby on Rails projects, when I've ended up on another one. Despite extensive hype, Rails is a bit of a dog... Ruby has some niceties, but also has a lot of misfeatures, and the implementation is still maturing. But Rails is dreadful, dreadful code. It helps you if you're working within its limited model, but as soon as you come across a problem that doesn't fit into that model, you're quickly working at pretty much the same level as PHP and everything else: writing Ruby code that is called upon an HTTP request and has to output some HTML back, albeit with access to a reasonable template language... And it's full of bugs and gotchas that keep you up all night screaming "Why doesn't this wooooorrrkkkkk?!?!?!?".

You see, the project is a major extension of a Rails project we'd mainly finished. We had the choice of rewriting the whole thing in something else (which would involve some time spent catching up with where we already are rather than producing anything new), continuing with Rails, or making a hybrid system, writing the new parts in something else while reusing parts in Rails (which would be a bit ugly).

Since the client wants to see interesting new things appearing after the first week or two, sadly, it had to be Rails...

Samuel Pepys (by alaric)

I'd always been vaguely aware that Phil Gyford, an interesting fellow I had the pleasure of meeting through my time with UpMyStreet.com nearly a decade ago, ran a web site that told you what the famous diarist Samuel Pepys was doing three hundred and forty three years ago today.

However, it wasn't until I saw his blog posting about it today that I realised just how much work he's put into it.

WOW.

Well worth a visit, even if you're not into history...