Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Accounting and Beauty

Words spo­ken by a CS major (and that would nev­er be heard from a busi­ness student):

William:

dou­ble entry accounting

I just got it

and it’s beautiful

Why Twitter beats a blog

I use Twit­ter a lot, post­ing dai­ly more sta­tus updates than I can count (and I’d rather now know, I’m quite sure it’s too many). I find myself squeez­ing things into a 140 char­ac­ter text field that would work real­ly well as a blog entry, but it takes too much work, too many steps, to post it to my blog.

I’m cur­rent­ly typ­ing this via IMi­fied, to see if per­haps this, or blog­ging from Text­Mate, will help get me the acti­va­tion ener­gy required to post to the blog.

We’ll see.

Bug Hunting

The three stages of bug hunt­ing (via ~stevenf)

1. It can nev­er happen!
2. Strange, it happens…
3. How can it even have worked before?

more eas­i­ly under­stood as: denial, accep­tance, and amazement.

Many bugs I’ve encoun­tered and fixed in my young Com­put­er Sci­ence days went through these steps. While denial is use­ful for ego infla­tiong, I quick­ly grew past it, because I real­ized it did­n’t con­tribute any­thing to a final solu­tion: it only delayed inevitable accep­tance. It’s quite hard to deny the exis­tence of a bug when the pro­gram crash­es or when a tree tra­ver­sal returns incor­rect values.

Piracy and Development

From ArsTech­ni­ca: Infi­nite Loop: Inter­view: Wil Ship­ley of Deli­cious Mon­ster:

…Pira­cy: who cares if some­one steals your appli­ca­tion if they were nev­er going to buy it in the first place?

Cabel spoke briefly about pira­cy at C4[1]. Pan­ic has long black­list­ed pirat­ed ser­i­al num­bers in updates to Audion, Trans­mit, and the like. But for the first time, they inte­grat­ed live black­list check­ing in Coda, where, instead of an appli­ca­tion update to refresh the seri­als black­list, Coda pulls a live copy of the list from Pan­ic’s servers. Cabel said that any­thing above and beyond basic check­sum­ming and black­list­ing is too much work to pre­vent too lit­tle pira­cy, and for users deter­mined not to pay for soft­ware, a devel­op­er try­ing to thwart them is com­pet­ing in a los­ing game, com­pet­ing against some­one with infi­nite time and ener­gy to devote to break­ing the hur­dles placed in front of them.

And hence, Wil’s obvi­ous con­clu­sion: if they steal it, you can’t count it as a lost sale: they prob­a­bly nev­er had any inten­tion of buy­ing it.

The Final Semesters

With 39 cred­its stand­ing between myself and a diplo­ma in May, I’ve got more than a few cours­es to take each semes­ter. Tak­ing 21 hours this fall is going to be some­thing I’ve nev­er done before, both with respect to man­ag­ing that many hours of lec­tures each week, and han­dling the large amount of home­work (regard­less of the actu­al dif­fi­cul­ty lev­el) that comes with tak­ing sev­en classes.

I tell myself, over and over, that I’ve done worse. “Remem­ber Oper­at­ing Sys­tems,” I say. “You took 18 cred­its, worked part-time, and rushed a ser­vice fra­ter­ni­ty.” Oper­at­ing Sys­tems was, in a nut­shell, chal­leng­ing mate­r­i­al (learn­ing ker­nel inter­nals and basic oper­at­ing sys­tems con­cepts) that strove to defeat you by sheer vol­ume; it was a class that bet that you could­n’t pos­si­bly learn and under­stand the exist­ing code­base, ana­lyze the project, and put a work­ing solu­tion togeth­er in the time allot­ed. I’m quite grate­ful that I was with a group of peo­ple that I knew well: we trust­ed each oth­er to get the work done in time, and did­n’t waste any resources with “just in case they don’t do this right, here’s anoth­er approach” solu­tions that would have been unnecessary.

After tak­ing a course like OS, one termed the “cap­stone wash-out course” by the pro­fes­sor, I gained a new con­fi­dence in my abil­i­ty to han­dle a vol­ume of work beyond any­thing I’d ever antic­i­pat­ed facing.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly for the laid-back part of me, I’ve tak­en that con­fi­dence and run with it, opt­ing to take 21 hours, work part-time, and still make at least two rug­by prac­tices a week.

Here’s to giv­ing a whole new mean­ing to the word “busy”.

The First Days

Today’s been the third con­sec­u­tive day of “work” with the Get Con­nect­ed Team at Tech. Mon­day and Tues­day con­sist­ed of some­what mean­ing­less train­ing, and today was most­ly sit­ting around, surf­ing the web or chat­ting with RAs from a dorm.

After a sum­mer of work­ing hard at Pro­tiv­i­ti, it feels good to relax a bit. The four days pri­or to get­ting back to school were tough: I had to pack my entire room into my small car (Inte­gra coupes don’t make good mov­ing vans), pack for Chica­go, attend an excel­lent, if not a tad expen­sive, con­fer­ence, fly back to DC at mid­night, and dri­ve down to school just five hours later.

Tomor­row promis­es to be much more busy. Most of the fresh­men who moved in today will be set­ting up their com­put­ers, and with that will come a host of prob­lems, rang­ing from spy­ware and virus­es to poor­ly con­fig­ured appli­ca­tion installers.

C4[1] Wrap

Today marked the end of the C4[1] con­fer­ence in down­town Chica­go. The talks giv­en Fri­day night, Sat­ur­day, and Sun­day ranged from the hilar­i­ous, with Wil Ship­ley’s talk on hype and prod­uct releas­es, to the sur­pris­ing, with the announce­ment of Nu, a Lisp imple­men­ta­tion for Obj‑C, to the impres­sive, with an Iron Coder Live hack for the iPhone by the Aspes­lagh broth­ers that sup­port­ed two-way video chat over the AT&T network.

C4[1] had been in the works since Johnathan Rentzsch threw C4 (now known as C4[0]) in Octo­ber 2006. C4[0] was a great suc­cess, fill­ing a need for small con­fer­ences after the death of MacHack/ADHOC. When C4[1] was announced in April, and reg­is­tra­tion opened in May, I reg­is­tered immediately.

C4[1] was a chance for me to meet the devel­op­ers that I’ve fol­lowed via Twit­ter and RSS, the devel­op­ers whose prod­ucts I use day in and day out. But more than that, I got to talk to a large num­ber of devs who haven’t yet made the jump to full-time inde­pen­dence. I asked them about what they were work­ing on, what was hold­ing them back, and where they saw them­selves going in the near future. Many were at C4[1] for the same rea­son as me: they want­ed to find out how oth­er peo­ple had done it; they want­ed to net­work with oth­er devel­op­ers; they want­ed to learn what every­one else was work­ing on.

C4[1] was worth the mon­ey I spent on it, although in hind­sight (in the form of the hotel bill), I’d con­sid­er stay­ing at the Chica­go hos­tel in the Loop if I came again. I love to help under­write the con­fer­ence, but not as a col­lege stu­dent who did­n’t get a schol­ar­ship to come. In total, I spent about 1200 dol­lars to fly out, stay at Chica­go City Cen­tre hotel, and pay the $512 for the con­fer­ence itself.

More valu­able than any­thing I got from the talks was the moti­va­tion, inspi­ra­tion, and impres­sive­ness of know­ing that oth­er peo­ple have been here before me and been suc­cess­ful. I’m going to fit in Cocoa devel­op­ment when­ev­er I can dur­ing this upcom­ing school year. I man­aged to hack through most of Hil­le­gass’s book this past spring, but ran out of steam over the sum­mer. This fall, I’m hop­ing to read Stephen Kochan’s Pro­gram­ming in Objective‑C and get more com­fort­able with the language.

Applying Economics: Gas Prices

Words can­not express my dis­may at the recent Wash­ing­ton Post-ABC News poll results: I had hoped to write a blog post about gas prices and the lack of changes to the nation’s con­sump­tion habits. I had men­tal­ly penned para­graphs about price inelas­tic­i­ty, “men­tal account­ing”, and oth­er eco­nom­ic and behav­iour­al psy­chol­o­gy topics.

Bol­locks.

A Status Update…

So where have I been? The past semes­ter, with rug­by, mono, a new job, and a tragedy on cam­pus, has been a busy one. It’s no excuse for the dearth of words here, but it makes me feel bet­ter to write down all the major events that took up so much of my time, to cat­a­log them, to assign blame.

Let me share some of the house­keep­ing items:

• I’ve pulled the post on the Vir­ginia Tech shoot­ings: it was a very quick and dirty live-blog­ging bit done dur­ing the first press con­fer­ence: rather than try to edit it, update it, or attempt to add addi­tion­al com­men­tary, it’s eas­i­er to make it dis­ap­pear. I’d rather not read it any­ways. If you do, drop me a line or leave a comment.
• I’ll be updat­ing this to Word­Press 2.2 in the com­ing hours (read: days or weeks, if you know how I accom­plish these things). If things are bro­ken, don’t hes­i­tate to con­tact me and let me know.

…has every­one left yet? Yes? Good. So, hel­lo, non-exis­tent read­er. How are things? My life has been both busy and relaxed these past weeks. The semes­ter has end­ed, grades have been put out, and I’ve been shop­ping for a new road bike. The iBook’s log­ic board died, and the iPod faked death two or three times: elec­tron­ics hate me. I’ve got a dirty room, a full inbox, a @computer text file that says I ought not be doing this, but here I sit, typ­ing what I can.

I’ll have more in the com­ing days. Emp­ty promis­es, yes. But if a man promis­es the impos­si­ble, and no one is around to hear it, must he real­ly fol­low through? You, non-exis­tent read­er, don’t care when I update: I address these to you, because I know you’ll always be there for me.

My Ears, Plugged Into a Fire Hydrant

(How do you like them mixed metaphors?) South by South­west (SxSW) just released the 2007 bands tor­rent, a Bit­Tor­rent file with 739 MP3s from some of the artists per­form­ing at SxSW.

I run into large influx­es of music, such as this one, quite often. I also just tor­rent­ed the 2005 and 2006 SxSW tor­rents. I’m star­ing down a fire hose of music, with some 2000+ songs need­ing to be reviewed.

My music is orga­nized in three ways. First, songs that I nev­er want to lis­ten to are unchecked. Since my iPod is only 40 GB, and my library is 65, I only sync checked songs plus cer­tain playlists to the iPod. Sec­ond, I have songs labelled with “Ambi­ent” if they’re back­ground noise songs: lit­tle to no lyrics, bet­ter suit­ed for cod­ing or home­work than for dri­ving or exer­cis­ing. Third, I have playlists that pull out songs that either have a play count of 0, or haven’t been lis­tened to in X weeks or months. These are used to “re-review” songs that I’ve added but haven’t heard in a long time, and it’s anoth­er chance for me to say, “Oh, this song is great!” or “This is trash! This ought to be unchecked and forgotten!”

When I add in 2000 songs, like I will lat­er this week with the SxSW tor­rents, all my “recre­ation­al” lis­ten­ing that I do in the car, walk­ing around cam­pus, will come to a halt. Every minute of semi-aware lis­ten­ing (mind you, this does­n’t include my lis­ten­ing at work: I put on music as white noise and space out when work­ing on some­thing) is ded­i­cat­ed to review­ing these songs. I’ll put the SxSW songs into a playlist, prob­a­bly titled “SxSW Tor­rent”. Then, I’ll make a smart playlist, with the fol­low­ing rules: Is in playlist “SxSW Tor­rent”, and play count is 0, and only include checked songs. (Remind me to tell you how bad we need advanced boolean log­ic in iTunes playlists…) I’ll then ran­dom­ize the playlist, right-click on it and “Copy to Play Order”, and then uncheck the ran­dom set­ting. This puts them in a ran­dom order, but iTunes won’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly reshuf­fle it when I hit play on the playlist.

Once the playlist is set up, it’s sim­ple to review the songs. I start lis­ten­ing to them. As they fin­ish, their play count incre­ments, and they auto­mat­i­cal­ly dis­ap­pear. If I skip them, I make note of where I stopped before I sync the iPod with iTunes. Any songs that are still in the playlist, but are before the song that I stopped at, are songs I’ve skipped. I’ll label them to be reviewed again in a month (some­times I’ll get in a weird mood when lis­ten­ing to music and skip a song once that I actu­al­ly enjoy lis­ten­ing to), and they’ll get unchecked so they’re no longer in my main playlists.

Com­pli­cat­ed? Yes. Pow­er­ful? Absolute­ly. It took a while to fig­ure out the ide­al way to man­age this review sys­tem, but now that it’s set up, it seems to work fair­ly well. I do wish that iTunes was­n’t such a hardass about the Skip Count: a song’s Skip Count is only incre­ment­ed if you go to the next track some­time between 5 and 30 sec­onds into the song’s play­back. It ought to incre­ment the skip count if I skip while I’m more than 5 sec­onds into the song, and more than 5 sec­onds from the end.