The FuzzyBlog!
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Wednesday, August 28, 2002

Outline Based Programming: Leo!!! There are a lot of outline fans out there.  Anyone tried this? From Slashdot: "First proposed almost 20 years ago by Donald Knuth, the idea of Literate Programming is basically that of making program documentation primary, and embedding code in the documentation, rather than vice versa. Despite some obvious advantages apparent to anyone who has struggled to understand a poorly documented program, literate programming never really caught on. That all could change, however, with the release of a new program called Leo, written by Edward K. Ream. Leo supports standard literate programming languages like noweb and CWEB, but with a crucial difference - Leo adds outlines. The effect is striking: overall organization of a program is always visible and explicit. Much of the narrative of the documentation gets placed in the outline, making documentation simpler, and allowing viewers to approach the code at various levels of detail. Screenshots and tutorials for Leo are here - if that site gets slashdotted, you can download the visual tutorials in .chm form or html form from Leo's Sourceforge site. Leo is an open source program written in Python. Any current practioners of Literate Programming techniques out there? People who have tried it and given it up? Can the addition of outlines to Literate Programming make it more powerful / popular?" http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/28/1655207&;mode=thread&tid=156 5:24:34 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

How Did He Get There? Note: If you're not a cat person then disregard.  Else read on. One of my two cats is clumsy beyond belief.  He has managed to fall off the desk, slip jumping to his normal perch from above (he loves to look down on me; it's the master of all I survey thing), fall off my lap (about a minute ago) and knock my Kodak DC-4800 from a 3 foot height to the ground as he fell off the computer table.  How then, I ask, how did he get into there?  And he didn't knock anything over.  Not going on or even coming out.  How did he do it? (picture is on the hyperlink).  How???  I totally did not set this up.  I heard him jump up and went over to prevent breakage and I found this. 9:56:24 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Harping on Font Resizing Again .... I am going to harp on this point again.  And I'll even give an example of why you want to make your blog "size friendly" not a "size bitch".  Here's another reason why you want to do this: You don't know where and how I'm reading!!! After reading Russ's blog about how he's running again and dieting, I finally got off my lazy developer ass and picked up some new free weights (I'm not a big machine fan having had my first real exercise experience being with free weights and apparently being a creature of habit).  I now have a working but somewhat pathetic wi-fi system so I have wireless access up to my third floor where the exercise equipment is.  So, how do I lift weights, you ask?  With a laptop open and reading blogs while I do curls, etc.  What I do is this: Position the laptop near my free weights on a table dedicated to this. Set my fonts to the largest possible i.e. View => Text Size => Largest Go to my blog. Run down my blog roll link by link accessing blogs. If the blog text comes up large enough to read from a distance, I read it.  If not?  I just backup and try the next. So, while I somewhat applaud the position that Paolo takes that he's a designer and should be able to set his fonts however he chooses, I take the position that "I'm a reader and I'll read what I can see".  And, as someone who not only has read the ADA, but also has built ADA compliant websites for use by disabled folk, I think it's (pun intended) shortsighted to assume that because you like 10 point Times Roman, everyone will.  We're not talking about complex layouts here ... It's just words in a row going left to right, top to bottom.  Keep your sidebar and design elements however you want them -- all I really care about is the text flow (most sidebar links aren't all that followed at least based on my off the cuff, simple ass research). Coming tomorrow ... A list of "size friendly" blogs I read and "size bitch" blogs I skipped right over. 9:08:32 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Some Advice to Software Engineers On the Inbox Buddy from (an email product coming from me, due out "real soon now", or "as soon as Scott stops blogging and writes the damn manual" (really I'm doing it another window; honestly I am), our lead enginer made a fatal mistake last night.  He said: "I don't have anything left to do" Here's a tip for all software engineers out there -- never, ever say this.  All it does is kick in someone's (i.e. mine) killer "bug hunting" instincts.  Let's just say that I suspect Brian will have something to do today...  They are all minor things (spelling on select lists, etc) but they all need to be done.  Past software engineers I've worked closely with didn't refer to me as "The Bermuda Triangle of Software" or use the phrase "how the *(*)(*%$%(*%$# smack does he find these **($#*%($% bizarre ass bugs".  It is indeed a curse but I can generally crash just about anything. PS -- Beyond sending Brian a few bugs, the "I don't have anything left to do" kicked in my "Let's add a feature" instinct.  More than a few improvements were suggested.  They probably won't get put in but .... 8:02:45 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Getting All Jobs for You From HotJobs or Monster.com - or Understanding Online Jobs Searches (This is another document republished from my website but, again, it's a popular one and the economy still stinks so perhaps it'll be useful to someone) I don't know about many of you out there, maybe I am just different, but whenever I use Monster or another job service, I then have a friend send me an even better job the next day.  Its gotten so bad that I was thinking that 10+ years building search engines hadn't taught me anything.  Then I looked a little more closely and this is what the problem turned out to be. I am a 34 year old white male who has worked in high tech his entire career, predominantly in a leadership product management or engineering management role.  This is the job that I want to get again (fate willing).  NOTE: I'm no longer in the job market, having (again) started my own business, but I left the above text in to set the context. So, taking these criteria, I made up the following Monster Query: ==> Read Story <== 6:06:33 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Windows Tab Completion I've had this on my website for ages and ages (although it is offline now) and it remains one of the most popular things I've written.  Still a lot of Windows 2000 users don't know how to set this up and it is infinitely convenient. Hawaii, Kauai Before Storm Does tab completion work in Windows? Not by default but it is hugely convenient and available with just a registry change.  I've tested this in Windows 2000 Pro and Server and its supposed to work also in NT 4.  If you don't know what tab completion does, it lets the command processor "complete" commands you have entered by pressing TAB.  For example, type dir at a command prompt and then the first letter of the file you want and press TAB it will fill it in.  Press TAB again and it will give the next file and so on.  Tab completion is one of the unsung wonders of the Unix world and most Windows users don't even know it exists.  If you run Windows then you can make this registry change to get Tab Completion:  Windows 2000 Instructions For one thing, Make sure you run "cmd", not "command" to get to the command shell  Go to Start / Run - "Regedit"  Expand the tree under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and then Software and then Microsoft and then Command Processor and edit the value for "CompletionCharacter" to 9 Exit Regedit  The next time you run a command shell, it will have tab completion.  Type dir and then the first letter of the file you want and press TAB it will fill it in.  Press TAB again and it will give the next file and so on.   5:51:03 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Notes is Dead Pity (NOT!!!).  I won't miss it.  I do think that reports of its demise are over rated.  Software is like a disease at times in terms of staying with us.  We still run 360s (albeit generally upgraded), AS 400s and more. From Dave: Notes is dead Steve Gillmor NOTES IS DEAD. Kaput, pushing up daisies, canceled, an ex-application (apologies to Monty Python and Hollywood intellectual property gatekeeper Jack Valenti for appropriating material from the classic "Dead Parrot" sketch). According to police reports, Notes was killed by inventor Ray Ozzie, 45. Ozzie entered the Notes space on the Ides of August -- Aug. 15, 2002 -- armed with Version 2.1 of the Groove collaboration platform and its new peer-to-peer e-mail functionality. Notes, already weakened by years of assault by Microsoft and its Exchange/Outlook team, was finished off in recent days by Ozzie's commandeering of another growing collaboration model: Weblogs. Infoworld   5:48:33 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This