I turned this in as an essay for professor David Russo’s Software Planning and Management class at UT Dallas (SE 4381, Spring 2006) prior to posting it here.
I ramble at the end, but I think the essay includes a few ideas worth sharing.
In his essay “No Silver Bullet,” Frederick Brooks presents the view that software development is an unusual field because we will never discover a single technique or technology which provide massive increases in development productivity.
I’m in a phase where everything I do must have a reason.
That may sound obvious—of course everything should have a reason, right? But there are many little questions in life where we generally feel that the exact solution chosen doesn’t make enough difference to even consider choosing one approach over any of the others. In many cases this may be the proper approach, but in other cases the minor activity is performed thousands of times in a lifespan, and the small losses incurred by a poor approach eventually add up to something meaningful.
I propose that we enter a new term into our vocabularies: “the personal aesthetic.”
Observations on human behavior have lead me to the conclusion that every human being has a built-in aesthetic evaluation system. This system is applied to nearly everything in life, creating non-random personal preferences from this seemingly random base. The components of the personal aesthetic are neither directly under the individual’s control, not completely out of their control, but somewhere in between.
I can’t stand people who can’t accept the realities of what they eat. If you can’t eat a dead cow and admit to yourself that it is cow flesh, then you probably shouldn’t be eating it.
When I ate beef, I had no problem with the truth about what it was I ate. I’m sure, however, that every one of us knows one of those people who tries to shush anyone who mentions the piece of meat having once been an animal.
If you happen to come across the following error while using dpkg (or apt-get):
dpkg: ../../src/packages.c:191: process_queue: Assertion `dependtry <= 4' failed . E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg exited unexpectedly The solution is as simple as:
# dpkg --configure -a --force-depends According to Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho:
There are two known triggers for that bug:
A package depends on itself. (This is a bug in the package.)
There is a dependency loop which involves a virtual package.
2005 wasn’t a particularly productive year for me. My list of personal projects for the year is rather pathetic and makes me wonder what I was doing with my time. But I did make a number of important personal discoveries, and I came to many exciting new conclusions philosophically.
There were also some great changes in my life, as well as some exciting arts discoveries. Definitely a fun year on the whole, if not quite so productive as I might have hoped.
I just remembered that my elementary school, Steele School, had a fight song of sorts. =P I think it went something like this:
We're the best grade school and we play by the rules. And for-ever we'll al-ways be proud of the things we do awards we earn we're part of the Steele winning-crowd! Our success to you, everyone who is true, and remembers to do their best. Our school will always stand the test, our school is the very best, go Stars!
In PyBlosxom, blog entries are stored in regular files rather than in a database. This means that I can write my entries in Emacs (hurrah). PyBlosxom can handle posts in any format it has a parser for.
The simplest parser removes the metadata from the beginning of the file and passes the remainder of the file directly to the output webpage. Ergo, in the most simple format, the entries should be written in html (with a basic text header).
Well, it just wouldn’t feel like Christmas without coding. =)
I recently started using pyblosxom for my blogging software needs. I’ll discuss the reasons for this choice in a later post.
One minor annoyance about pyblosxom is that since the entries are regular files, the developer chose to base entry post dates on file mtimes. While this is a really cool idea for the sake of simplicity of design, it gets rather old having post times change when correcting typos.
I sometimes find that when I am saving files off the web in Firefox, I have to go through multiple levels of folder creation. I click the “create new directory” button, type a name, hit return. Repeat.
I just learned (after my determination that it would be a very handy thing) that you can simply enter a directory hierarchy (e.g. images/wallpapers/hairless_cats/1024x768/) and firefox will create all of the parent directories and leave you in the deepest directory (“1024x768”).
