I was reading DVD Jon’s blog the other day and stumbled across some really great video of Cory Doctorow speaking in Norway.
Monthly Archive for May, 2005Page 2 of 3
Intuition is the brain’s way of compressing huge sequences of logical cause and effect down to a single “feeling”. It’s a lossy algorithm. Eventually, you throw away all the reasoning and just keep the nice compact conclusion.
In some sense, our intuition defines us.
I’ve spent most of my life developing intuition, which I implicitly trust, since I created it. Others don’t trust my intuition, any more than I trust theirs — and I don’t blame them. So, more and more often, I am forced to deconstruct my own intuition; to decompress my brain. I say to myself, “I know that sounds wrong. It just doesn’t feel right. Now, why the hell do I feel that way?”
As with all lossy compression algorithms, intuition is damn hard to reverse.
Update:
Apparently someone has written a book about this called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. I’ve just added this to my Amazon Wishlist.
One thing I miss from my Windows days were the Logitech mouse drivers. Their acceleration curve was a thing of beauty.
The idea behind mouse acceleration is pretty simple. Normally, cursor movement is based only on the distance which the mouse moves. With acceleration, cursor movement is based on both mouse speed and distance. The basic idea is to maintain accuracy for slow movements, yet make it possible to get around without requiring a giant mousing surface. The tricky part is that the acceleration curve has to be so natural that you don’t notice it.
Mouse acceleration on Linux has always been crap. The first problem is that there is no single entity modulating the mouse coordinates. You’ve got to configure X, gpm, SVGAlib, etc. separately. The next problem is that Linux acceleration curves are totally unnatural. They feel horrible. I’d be surprised if anyone used them.
Bah. I need to stop whining and write some code.
If you want to be a great programmer, practice reading and understanding other people’s code. It’s much easier to write code than to understand it.
When I interview new college graduates, I expect they’ll be able to write simple things from scratch. You get a lot of this type of experience in school. The first day on the job can be a rude awakening by comparison. “OK here’s how you access source control. There are about 100K lines of code here, the first of which were written 10 years ago. Most of the original team has long since left. Good luck.”
If you violate the “principle of least surprise” you should be prepared to face the wrath of your users. Here’s today’s example:
The Windows start command does about a million things. One of them is to launch a new process. If you are benchmarking, it can be useful to launch the benchmarked process this way so that you can influence it’s scheduling priority, processor affinity, etc.
The command supports the following two switches, among others:
- /B - Start application without creating a new window.
- /WAIT - Start application and wait for it to terminate.
The usage summary includes this output:
START
["title"][/D path][/I][/MIN][/MAX][/SEPARATE|/SHARED]
[/LOW|/NORMAL|/HIGH|/REALTIME|/ABOVENORMAL|/BELOWNORMAL]
[/AFFINITY
[parameters]
Notice the order of the /WAIT and /B switches. Guess what? If you issue the switches in this order, the /B switch silently cancels the effect of the /WAIT switch. You need to use the switches in the other order if you want them to work properly. As far as I can tell, these are the only two order-dependent options to start.
Believe it or not, this is the intended and completely undocumented behavior.
Funny, but knowing that this was done on purpose in no way gives me the last hour of my life back.
I’m occasionally forced to deal with people who have no idea how to listen. To them, a conversation is a public speaking opportunity. If you manage to get a word in edgewise, they just ignore you and move to their next talking-point.
I wonder about people like this. Perhaps this behavior is a reaction to low self-esteem?
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away I dedicated (squandered?) a couple of years of my life to a game called Quake. I learned a few things about myself, and a lot about networking, but mostly I had a metric shitload of fun.
The first “con” I ever attended was the Manhattan Memorial Day Marathon in May of 1997. I was 19 years old. I remember watching Honus rocket-jump all over DM6. I couldn’t believe people could actually get so good at a game. I was hooked. I attended a bunch of cons over the next two years, until the “net quake” scene sort of died out. I got pretty good. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been better at anything in my entire life.
In the spirit of nostalga, I dug out some old screen shots and demos.
I miss the old days.
If they ever decide to expand BabelFish, they should add Girl-Speak.
Guy: “What’s wrong”
Girl: “Nothing.”
Translation: “Something. I’m not telling. You should know, but you obviously don’t. Now two things are wrong, jerk”
I’ve got the left and right channels reversed on my computer speakers. Moving the actual speakers is too much of a pain. If anyone knows how to instruct ALSA to swap the channels, I’d love to hear about it.
The broadcast flag is dead. The US Court of Appeals finds that the FCC has no authority “…to regulate apparatus that can receive television broadcasts when those apparatus are not engaged in the process of receiving a broadcast transmission.”
If you are interested, check out the full text of the official decision
Or, for non-legalese-speakers, the News.com.com story, in actual English.
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