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Salon.com is running an article on the upcoming movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a book which, iirc, had more words I didn't know in it by chapter three (though somehow remaining eminently readable) than every other book I'd read for pleasure combined. Here's an interesting quote that I'll reach and tie into hacking.
Douglas Adams was always interested in making a movie, and he wrote the original screenplay. But various obstacles got in the way over the years, a major one being the beloved author's death in 2001. The project was revived with new writers and directors -- in addition to a core group of people who had been working on the film from the beginning with Adams -- and it will debut Friday...
Oh, VERY nice. It got shelved b/c of his death, but revived b/c some schmoe authors thought they should 'improve' on Adams' original design, "core group" nonwithstanding.
Made me start wondering about software authorship, esp at larger co's and with larger projects. Why don't we seem to care who wrote it first? John Carmack (and a young Bill Gates for all that matters seems to have been) is a great programmer; do you really want someone else's hands in there mucking up the engine in ways that break the style of the original?
Now there are a few homebrew changes to the Quake engine, eg, that are an improvement over that age old work. Is that accomplished because you're only able to 'really' understand code written in your own dialect? That is, is it easy enough to take a masterwork (realizing I can barely spell C, so the Quake example might be crap) and make it better, but perhaps the end result doesn't translate to the next person quite as easily? Perhaps one part of great code should be that it first teaches and then, rosetta stone in hand, can be read by anyone who was willing to put in that first investment for understanding.
I know there's a point at which code becomes horrible unweildy, and there is some code out there so bad it's impossible to use and should be trashed. Just thinking 'aloud' on how much of that is because of the style of writing behind the 0s and 1s.
posted by ruffin
at 4/29/2005 07:40:00 AM
This marks [hopefully] one of the most egregious issues with Swing desktop apps. If your box was busy enough, you could stare at a grey rectangle for several seconds after someone had tabbed away from your app for a few minutes and then decided to come back. It was really annoying -- at least I hope this is past tense.
... when a Swing based app is exposed after being hidden by another application there is a noticeable delay between when the background of the window is erased and when the actual contents are painted. We've come to call this the 'gray rect' problem. I'm happy to report that with the promotion of mustang build 32 this bug (4967886) has been fixed! Download it now and give us feedback!
posted by ruffin
at 4/19/2005 08:12:00 AM
But when I look at the boxes of software in CompUSA or an Apple Store, I don't think I have seen a single piece of popular or 'major' software written in Java.
What John [Carmack] said above is largely why. Java is a great general purpose language. I have written tens of thousands of lines of Java code for various random web and web related applications and enjoyed doing so quite a bit. If you remember, I was one of the handful of developers in the WebObjects community that fully embraced the move to Java.
Java has failed on the desktop because the architecture does not yield a decent and responsive user experience without a tremendous amount of effort fighting against the 'natural' patterns of the various toolkits. The promise of Write Once, Run Anywhere mostly-- well, pretty often-- works for non-UI applications. For UI applications, the differences between platform and UI philosophy mean that WORA also yields a user experience that is alien to the platform. (emph mine)
posted by ruffin
at 4/13/2005 09:36:00 PM
It's a grand idea and a daunting challenge: to create rugged, internet- and multimedia-capable laptop computers at a cost of $100 apiece.
That's right, the price of dinner for four at a moderately priced Manhattan restaurant can buy a Third World kid what Negroponte considers an essential tool for making it in the 21st century. The laptops would be mass-produced in orders of no smaller than 1 million units and bought by governments, which would distribute them.
Is this a good idea, taken as a whole? Are we really looking to give to 3rd world students, or just find a way to open a new market? I wonder if you can truly do both without being biased towards the latter. if you gave a laptop, say an old 486, to the people I worked with in the rainforests of the Congo, well, there ain't a whole lot you could do with it. That $100 could buy a heck of a heck of a lot of books, paper, and pencils for the local school.
Seriously folk, it'd be great to have a $100 laptop for underprivileged American school children -- and it'd be ever better to be to the point that students around the world would benefit from one. But if you check the average salaries of the parents, you'll see $100 can go an awful long ways put to better uses. If it's any help, I had a doctor pay me a house call, give me medicine, and give me a follow-up for $6 and change. I was eating for literally pennies a day. If I was making a buck a day, I don't know that I'd spend a quarter of my yearly salary on a laptop where I can't even find a phone to plug in my modem.
Good intent, but awfully naive. Because my idealistic, naive self just can't imagine that these people are motivated by exploitative self-interest. Right?
posted by ruffin
at 4/04/2005 08:08:00 PM
Today I had a few files passed to me from a Windows user of type .wpd. Well, that's a suffix long since dead on the Mac, but I was able to dig up a copy of WordPerfect 3.5 Enhanced to run in Classic. Still, I wanted to get the resource forkless files to show the correct four-letter Mac type, and to do that I need ResEdit -- duh! Well, a quick search on my iMac showed me (the iBook doesn't even have Classic installed, to save space) I've not got ResEdit anywhere!
Anyhow, just had to come clean on that one. If you're a Mac programmer or oxymoronicly a 'power Mac user' like me and have been for any time, you'll know what I mean.
(And yes, you're right, to open a file in the app of your choice in OS X, you need only to Control-click it or -- more blasphemy -- right click it and "Open With", which is what I did while waiting for ResEdit to download.)
posted by ruffin
at 4/02/2005 07:46:00 PM
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