pandoricity

Content warning: this is directed purely at programmers. At work we're deciding what configuration file format to use for a new piece of software, where the configuration will have to be produced or modified by non-expert users. Of course, as the developers of the project, it's always easy to forget about these, your most important users: those who won't have a deep engagement with your project and how amazing it can be, but to whom it is only a minor help or hindrance on their path to 'getting shit done'. Broadly, I think there are three choices you can make: the bad choice: design a system around the sum of the complexity involved the 'nice' choice: design a system that focuses on providing a straightforward view to the median user but is extensible enough that any kind of complexity can be represented the lazy choice: design a system that only really accounts for non-expert users, forcing others to either water-down their dreams or build elaborate...

A slightly amended version of this was subsequently published in the online version of the SMH    I have a confession to make. I was one of the 394 candidates on the NSW Upper House ballot paper. And I want to apologise for its ridiculous number of boxes, more than any sane person should need to consider. It doesn't serve democracy to offer so many choices that are ignored. Last time we had a 'tablecloth', the 1999 NSW election, it inspired reform of dubious utility. The bar was raised for party registration, which clearly hasn't been sufficient, and requiring 15 candidates on a group ticket only increases the amount of paper used. Even the system of optional preferential voting and above the line numbering, which makes it easier to vote as you would wish, adds to voter confusion due to the subtle differences from the federal system. If we accept that the minuscule number of people who vote for individuals below the line have no impact on the result, and that we ...

I'm happy that we're not all using COBOL and Fortran. Unfortunately, we're (almost) all still using some variant of the Bourne shell. There's no reason you have to... unless you want to worry about boring things like other people reading or running your code. So I've spent some time fiddling with es (it's a functional type shell with sane quoting rules; Jordan, you know you want it).

I often claim to live in the present; the past is a foreign land, and many will know how I feel about those. One of the many implications of this attitude is that I forget... and unfortunately, this includes forgetting 'ideas', which tend to blaze through my awareness only to fizzle in the atmosphere of my ongoing lethargy. When I went to write this post, I finally remembered a meta idea . Oddly, however, I'm intensely proud of having ideas. So, in one more effort to build not this pride upon sand, I thought I'd try to 'open-source' my brain, spending my limited enthusiasm for an idea by writing it on the indestructible clay of the internet instead of merely being intensely distracted for a few hours. What odds that this will be the last post I make on this blog? * Anyway, today's idea, which isn't all that exciting after all that waffle: Auto-completion seems to be pervasive nowadays, what with phones and word processors finishing words, and G...

Ambiguity of the week: How do I get this banana to work?

I always had this idea that we were a trifle self-absorbed when we studied history. Spending most of the time on the last century or two seemed wrong, and what there was of earlier times seemed to have huge gaps in the narrative. (let's forget about nationalistic obsessions for now) But somehow - probably the influence of xkcd - I realised that our scale was odd. After all, if we measure in years, human history is irrelevant (100,000 / billions); what we should be thinking about is the amount of human experience in those years. Perhaps we might see that all the waffle about the dramatic rate of progress is not so much a factor of industrialisation and western-society magic, but more about the number of people around. Thus, a hand-wavy human history where the intervals are normalised by considering the number of people living at the time. The interesting part is the dates - the rest is just me having fun. Apologies for the embarrassingly Eurocentric view. Not sure what I thin...