Recently in wotsam Category

fred brooks wrote some books about how to design software. i read them in college and refer to them all the time, even though management doesn't listen, which is one of the things fred wrote about.

his book was written in the early 1970s about the development of an IBM mainframe OS. amazingly, not only are his lessons still relevant, they may be more relevant now than they were back then, if only because in the 40 intervening years, people haven't listened to his lessons much at all.

in addition to telling us how to develop software, fred makes a compelling explanation of why we write software.

i could not have said it better myself.

a couple of weeks ago i decided to give ruby on rails another chance. http://beans.sainttoad.com is the result of that.

at the time, i was seriously impressed at how easy it was to get my app up and running. in one week of part-timing it, i went from 0 experience with rails/ruby to a full, non-trivial deployment (reverse proxy, url-rewriting, url-prefixed deployment, har). at the end of the week i'd whipped up 90% of the features i wanted in my app, a decent (or at least consistent) style, and am now happily using the app with no problems.

except one problem: when i go back to polish off those remaining 10%, i'm left wondering: wtf am i doing this in ruby? i mean, really?

the problem with ruby on rails: ruby. i've been told that ruby makes much more sense if you're japanese. well shucks, i'm not japanese. is that why i think that "" == 0 == [] == true is a stupid idea?

rails makes it incredibly simple to get a useful app up and running with breathtaking speed. but then, in the real world (and not in the world of my tiny-dataset app), you'd go back and refactor and optimize your database access and so forth. that looks to be a pain in rails, where the ORM makes it difficult to do things well. or, perhaps the problem is that the ORM documentation makes it difficult to make the ORM do things well. that's a difference without a distinction.

at work, i use pylons. it's got a lot of the sugar of rails, but it's got a different philosophy: too much magic is bad. rails is all about the magic. in pylons, there's much less magic, and when i need to fix something, because i'm not relying on magic, i know how to fix it. rails? not so much (although i did find and fix a bug in the auth package: but to merge it back? i have to learn git? no thanks).

anyhow: i'm not making any sense. here i am saying rails is great and ruby sucks, then telling you why rails sucks. i've had minor exposure to each and this is the end result:

ruby: i get it, it's like python, only there's the bizarre 0 == true thing, and the block thing which is kinda cool but really a very complicated route to doing simple things, and less emphasis on functional programming, and not enough haskell influence (:D).

rails: super easy to get working. encourages some pretty bad design choices and also encourages beginners to think they know what they're doing, which leads to pretty bad design choices. this is a tough problem for framework designers to address, and i can't say i blame rails for making the choice they made. after two weeks of not using rails, when i went back to look at it, i wondered: wait, why am i using rails? maintenance is maybe not so enjoyable as the thrill of getting the app whipped up. and since maintenance is what app development is all about, maybe i picked a poor framework.

i know xslt.

i learned it in about the same amount of time neo learned kung-fu.

it's handy dandy. whoopie for separation of data and presentation.

i dont usually have much to say about politics, but here we go anyhow.

the system, at least here in california, worked. and taken from the context of the original intent of the republic of states that we live in, the entire system worked.

obama won the popular vote by a relatively small percentage, and won the electoral college by an enormous landslide.

i was thinking today (on my run, of course) that the reason folks these days don't care much for the electoral college is because most of the rest of the constitution of the US has been so trashed that it no longer makes sense. originally the EC served to prevent tyranny of populous states over small states. Now, though, we suffer from tyranny of a strongarm federal government over all the states, large and small. for this, we can thank an earlier senator from illinois.

whether one thinks a strong federal government is a good or bad thing, it is easy to see why the EC makes little sense in a system where the states have very little power. since the federal government has taken enormous powers from the people and the states to rule over each of us individually, it makes sense that each of us individually -- and not the states -- should elect the federal government. the EC makes more sense in the context of the original system.

speaking of the original system, it's playing out right now in my home state. prop 8 appears to have passed. the whole elect-democrats-externally-but-vote-republican-internally thing has always confused me about CA, but i'm not a very bright person so a lot of things confuse me. one thing that doesn't confuse me is that prop 8 passing, as odious as i find it to be, is a prime example of the system working as the framers intended.

unfortunately, times have changed dramatically since the times of the founders. whereas in 1847 if your state outlawed your way of life, you could always go out and settle some wilderness and continue with your life undisturbed. being a blacksmith or a teacher or a farmer in one place wasn't much different from being the same elsewhere.

but now travel between states is a lot different. the barriers are much larger, the economic realities are harsher, and there isn't any wilderness to default to if you decide city B isn't better than city A.

sure, if you're gay in CA and you want to be married, you could in theory move to hawaii or mass or some such place. but the opportunities you'd find aren't the same as the ones you'd have found in 1801. maybe that's actually good. good or bad, though, the loose republic of states, where if you didn't care for the conditions in one state, you could escape their tyranny to live in the frontier, no longer really exists.

i'm also a bit pissed to see that the price of meat is going to go up in CA, just when i got my grill. sigh. CA: where we care more about our chickens than our people.

hellboy

blu-ray

hdtv

wow.

it's been almost two years since my last post to wotsam. i've abandoned the old wotsam and learned me a new programming language which i love, whereas c++ i merely tolerated. having been a C badass and a C++ "i get it"ski, i'm in a position to really appreciate and not horribly misuse something like python, my new lang-de-jure.

so i find myself rewriting my old college "senior project" in this trendy new language, and i am delighted to see not only how gracefully the language handles the task, but also how gracefully my experience changes the embarassing crap of my senior year into the Much Nicer Code of my pre-retirement years.

i stayed up coding last night and jumped right back into it in the morning. it's been a long time since i had a hobby project at home. the irony is that it's keeping me outta the sun.

in fact, it's a huge irony is that i'm staying inside so much this summer, now that i'm at last an outdoorsy person. what the dillyo?

I thought I could weasel out of doing my own line breaks by letting the OS do it.

once I got the implementation in place I realized, of course, that if I let the OS do the line breaks then I can't scroll anything.

I'm boned.

gotta write a scrolling text display.

the hard part is taking an input string and busting it down into lines that can fit in the scrollable display.

no, that's not even the hard part. the hard part is hyphenating words as needed. i gotta figure out some way to weasel out of that.

So while I did have to implement an iterative font sizing method, it wasn't as ugly as I thought it would be. And, since it's currently only used for button text, which is relatively static, it shouldn't be a horrific performance hit to run it only at startup (or when changing button labels).

so, as of this writing, wotsam's got buttons that change color when you click them, have rounded edges (though the edges don't look right and probably need to be investigated), and have a caption that automagically gets the right sized font.

and to think i'm not a ui programmer by trade. how can that be? oh, right, it's because i always come up with ugly uis.

crud. say you've got a bounding rect

now, if you want to fit the string "bibble babble crunch" in there, obviously you're going to have to recalculate the font size because the font you're looking at now won't fit.

tragically, it seems on windows the way to do this is to guess and check until you get it right:

- do some crap to make a 12 point font
- ask windows if "bibble babble crunch" in 12 point fits in the rect
- yes? okay, try 18 point font
- ask windows if "bibble babble crunch" in 18 point fits in the rect
- no? okay, try 17 point font
- ask windows if "bibble babble crunch" in 17 point fits in the rect
- yes? okay, I guess we should use 17 point font

man, it's gonna look even worse in code. i hope i can think of a way out... i spose I won't if even the brainiacs at msft can't.