Posts filed under 'Rants'
There is a saying, “Start as you mean to go on“, which is good to keep in mind at the beginning of a new year. I have resolved that, as I have been meaning to do for ages, I shall actually use this server & domain for email and content, not just this pathetic blog.
And its not just me, the government seems to be getting off on the right foot, too…
Apparently, we’re all being spied on to determine if we’re paying enough Council Tax, we’ll all be arrested for loitering, littering, wearing a hoodie, etc… and, yes, we probably did ask the Greeks to torture those terror suspects. I’ll bet that didn’t take 90 days.
Just for once, I’d like the government to implement one of these crazy satellite schemes and find out that we’re all paying far too much already.
On the other hand, I did like the guy on the BBC Breakfast show saying how John Prescott was the only human being visible from space with the naked eye. Funny. He should have followed up with something about his mum…
January 1st, 2006
Literate Programming, or LP for short, is this wonderful idea that instead of writing computer programs with embedded comments, we write documents with embedded programs. This seems like a great idea and it is, but it seems to be universally poorly executed.
First there is the original CWEB, the LP system invented by Knuth to write TeX. The idea is to embed C/C++/Java fragments into the main TeX body of the article or report. This is nice because (almost) everyone agrees that (La)TeX is the nicest thing to write technical documents. And its revision-control friendly as well. However, trying to read a CWEB document is quite painful and mainly seems to consist of lots of `@’ symbols.
Then someone simplified and came up with noweb, but it seems to suffer from the same sort of `@’-itis.
Various people seem to have tried, at one time or other, to define LP schemes based on XML, but they end up looking even worse than CWEB.
Why is this nice concept so hard to translate into practice? Certainly one reason is editor support – the code fragments need to be highlighted and indented the same way as it would be if I wasn’t using LP. Currently with the emacs CWEB support this isn’t the case. Another reason is the evolution of code: I want to be able to write a report for each change set I make to the code. That doesn’t mean I want a report for each commit, but for each consistent set of changes, explaining the functions of new classes and files, but also the changes to old ones. This means my LP system needs to handle partial files and documentation as well.
Perhaps it would be better to include the documentation within the comments within the source, similarly to JavaDoc/Doxygen. The LP system would then have to be aware of the language, recognising documentation before classes and functions as different from that within the code body.
Maybe LP is entirely unnecessary if we all just commented a bit better?
PS: Happy Christmas!
December 25th, 2005
I used to be able, long ago, to sleep on planes, but apparently this useful and sanity-saving skill has been lost. There were all the usual impediments to sleep: a screaming baby, screaming kids, etc… I put my earphones in, wrapped my sweater around my head and tried to sleep for about 5 hours.
It didn’t work. So now my body has absolutely no clue what time it really is.
I was talking to a colleague who was also flying back on the same flight (but fell asleep instantly…) about what could be done to make flying more pleasurable. Just about the only thing would be to hook everyone up to some nice hospital-quality anaesthetics in the waiting lounge and bringing us around in arrivals at the other end. Just completely erase the experience of flying totally.
There wouldn’t be many takers to begin with, but I think people would slowly realise that travelling without:
- screaming infants/small children,
- airline food,
- extreme tiredness and
- DVTs.
would actually be far more pleasant. Because the last thing you want, after a really good holiday/ conference/ whatever is to spend 9 sleepless hours in a noisy tin can suspended 38,000 feet in the air…
November 21st, 2005
Commuting in London makes me feel even more like a wage slave than I normally do. Maybe its being crammed like sardines into a can with thousands of other bored, irritable card-punchers. Maybe its the silence, the one guy in the carriage who doesn’t know what soap is, the minimal eye contact.
Now, I remember why I hated living in London…
November 7th, 2005
Rachel announced that she’d like to use LaTeX for her thesis, which (in my humble opinion) is a very good idea. So, given that the whole “typing commands” interface is a bit overwhelming, I thought that LyX would be a much better option.
I’ve been using LaTeX for years for all kinds of stuff and I find its much better than Word for doing stuff like equations, formatting, bringing together several documents (possibly by several authors) into a cohesive whole. LyX attempts to give a more Word-like interface to LaTeX and, in my experience, is a very nice bit of software. But I’ve only ever used it on Linux, where “apt-get install lyx” is all that is necessary to get it working.
Its significantly harder to get it working on Windows and Mac OS X.
Possibly, a lot of this is not due to LyX itself, but to do with the necessary prerequisites: a working TeX installation. The Mac OS X installation, gwTeX, was a breeze to install as it is based on the i-Installer.app stuff. LyX installed nicely on top of that, but the PDF support was a little lacking. To get nice fonts in Acrobat you have to install the CM-Super package as well and re-run updmap. That took me a while to figure out! Even then, you can’t use pdflatex, as any graphics in the document are defined as EPS by LyX… You can use dvipdfm, but then you don’t get the nice hyperlinking and document structure.
On Windows it seems that the installation is even harder, possibly as Windows doesn’t have many useful packages installed by default, e.g: Python, a shell, etc… So the installation of LyX bombs at the last stage. Mind you, MikTeX seems to be quite easy…
Now, I could probably figure this out, fix the installs, get it working. But wasn’t the point of LyX supposed to be that it is easier to use than plain LaTeX?
October 25th, 2005
I got quite worried about this little article, which (amongst other ubiquitous arguments about open source software quality) talks about the rights of employers to their employees’ out-of-hours hobby productions.
The only real reference I can find to this actually being case law is this nice Word document which says that (in “Missing Link Software vs. Magee) :
a computer programme written by an employee outside of working time and on his own equipment was made in the course of his employment because it was arguable that writing such programmes fell within the scope of the tasks he was employed to carry out.
Now… I might be a writer writing copy for a newspaper, magazine, or something, but when I write poetry in my spare time then its still my poetry. Even if the subject matter is related to my work!
I’d be grateful to anyone who can dig up some more concrete information about this case, as I can’t find any online anywhere. (Despite it being a matter of public record, surely?)
Steve says that his old Ts & Cs specifically exempt open source software from this, but I’m not so sure about mine…
September 28th, 2005
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