The Kindle’s sweet spot

October 28, 2009 in Nerdery by Adam Keys | No comments

Given all the hubbub about Kindles, Nooks and their utility, I thought this bears repeating to a wider audience:

The Kindle is great for books that are just a bag of words, but falls short for anything with important visuals.

I’ve really enjoyed reading on my Kindle over the past year. You can’t beat it for dragging a bunch of books with you on vacation or for reading by the poolside. That said, I don’t use it to read anything technical with diagrams or source code listings. I certainly wouldn’t use it to read anything like Tufte, which is exactly why his books aren’t available on the Kindle. Where the Kindle shines is with pop-science books like Freakonomics and Star Wars novels1.

If you love books and reading, the Kindle is a nice addition to your bibliophilic habit, but it’s no replacement for a well-chosen and varied library.

1 Did I say that out loud? Crap.

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Testing declarative code

October 27, 2009 in Code by Adam Keys | 3 comments

I’m a little conflicted about how and if one should write test code for declarative code. Let’s say I’m writing a MongoMapper document class. It might look something like this:

class Issue

  include MongoMapper::Document

  key :title, String
  key :body, String
  key :created_at, DateTime

end

Those key calls. Should I write a test for them? In the past, I’ve said “yes” on the principle that I was test driving the code and I needed something to fail in order to add code. Further, the growing ML-style-typing geek within me likes that writing tests for this is somewhat like constructing my open wacky type system via the test suite.

A Shoulda-flavored test might look something like this:

class IssueTest < Test::Unit::TestCase

  context 'An issue' do

    should_have_keys :title, :body, :created_at

  end

end

Ignoring the recursive rathole that I’ve now jumped into, I’m left with the question: what use is that should_have_keys? Will it help someone better understand Issue at some point in the future? Will it prevent me from naively breaking the software?

Perhaps this is the crux of the biscuit: by adding code to make certain those key calls are present, have I address the inherent complexity of my application or have I imposed complexity?

I’m going to experiment with swinging back towards leaving these sorts of declarations alone. The jury is still out.

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Texas is its own dumb thing

October 25, 2009 in Wakka wakka by Adam Keys | No comments

Southern American English

OK, here’s the deal. Wikipedia has it all wrong.

  1. Texas is not part of the South. Texas is its own unique thing. Sure we have dumbasses, but they are our dumbasses, wholly distinct from your typical Southern dumbass.
  2. In Texas, the way you refer to “you all” is “ya’ll”; it’s a contraction of “ya all”.
  3. They neglected to mention the idiomatic pronunciation of words like “oil” (ah-wllllll) or “wash” (warsh).

Please take it under consideration: Wikipedia is edited by a lot of damn Oklahomans.

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Curated awesome

October 9, 2009 in Code, Curated, Design, Music by Adam Keys | No comments

A bumpy subway wall, loving things for their Unix-y qualities, Kurt Vonnegut looking dapper, the final movement of Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony (originally his fifth), and a music video by Talib Kweli that makes me want to go get my hair cut. Oh, and I can’t leave out the connection between prototyping physical things and applications operating on large data, Ben Scoffield’s take on database taxonomy and a screed on reading one book per week.

(Editor’s note: I recently took to using Tumblr again. For a while, I’ve been curating interesting stuff here. But Tumblr has evolved into a really fantastic application for doing this. So, my policy going forward is to post my stuff here and curate other people’s awesome stuff over there. That said, I’ll probably do “best-of” posts, like this one, to keep you interested and informed.)

Chance Encounter

October 5, 2009 in Wakka wakka by Adam Keys | No comments

Another meme-ish “film” by yours truly. This time, the idea is you do something in five seconds, plus a two second intro and a one second outro. Here’s what I came up with:

This is an adaptation of possibly my favorite improvised joke. I deploy this joke when a conversation is interrupted by some disturbance or noisy distraction. Right before the conversation is going to continue, I say “…and that’s how I met the president and the pope on the same day.” Works pretty well.

Funny aside: I found out about this on the Vimeo site, thinking there was a competition this weekend. Turns out, it was last weekend. Figures.

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Dallas could get a pedestrian bridge

September 25, 2009 in Curated, Expanded ideas by Adam Keys | No comments

Trinity gift is $10 million for pedestrian bridge. Catering to pedestrians, in Dallas? Surely you jest!

I’ll just sit here and quietly hope that the plans for an urban park around the Trinity aren’t derailed by everything that is politics.

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Ghostbusters then and now

September 24, 2009 in Curated, Nerdery by Adam Keys | No comments

What happens when you take scenes from Ghostbusters and see how New York used to look and how it looks today? Pretty awesome, actually. In two parts.

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Birthing Born to Run

September 23, 2009 in Curated, Music by Adam Keys | No comments

The birth of Born To Run. On the creation and evolution of the song and album. Great read for Bruce-o-philes.

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Representing time in our programs

September 22, 2009 in Code by Adam Keys | 1 comment

Time is the New Memory:

The time problem is not easy to see in today’s mainstream languages because there are no constructs that make time explicit. It is implicit in the system. We don’t even know that’s what we’re doing when we use locks to try to make this work.

I’ve been thinking about how we represent time in programs for a while. The problem is that concurrent programs are all about time, but mostly, we only use two mechanisms to represent it in our programs.

The semi-explicit way is through locks. When we insert locks around some bit of code, we are giving hints to the system that things should only proceed in a certain order. This ordering gives us a notion of time, but it’s not horribly comforting.

The completely implicit way we represent time in our programs is by ordering calls to functions and the lines of code within those functions. Line 10 always executes before line 11, etc.

The problem that Rich Hickey, who has some fantastic ideas about this time stuff, has in the article I quoted is that time is managed manually and implicitly. When you start writing large concurrent programs, this falls apart. We need better constructs to deal with it.

Think of it like the shift from unstructured programming to structured programming to object-oriented programming. At first we just had a long code listing; no functions, just line after line of code. This became mentally untenable, so we shifted to structured, procedural programming. But some of our data was global and it was often hard to tell what functions belong to what data. So we moved to object-oriented programming and encapsulation.

Hopefully Rich Hickey, Simon Peyton-Jones and other functional programming folks can lead us to is a nice way to structure our programs around time. I’m eager to have my brain melted by what they conjure up.

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Ain’t talkin’ ’bout the man

September 22, 2009 in Curated, The System by Adam Keys | No comments

Here’s a fun game. “The Government”:

Try something. Every time somebody complains about the evils or failings of “the government,” strike out “the government” and see what results.

Often, simply striking out “government” reveals a completely different, and far more useful, commentary.

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