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Monday, July 7, 2003
 

turn on a dime and park on a nickel


It's small enough to "turn on a dime and park on a nickel," or so say the inventors of a 1cm-tall machine that lays claim to being the world's smallest robot. Popular Mechanics via Gizmodo

 


comments? [] 10:57:54 AM    

Reflections on OSAF as an Organization


Mitch Kapor on OSAF (developing an Outlook-alternative called Chandler)

If we can demonstrate that it's possible to create great product under these conditions, and if we can continue to find a balance between the pragmatic necessities required to actually ship code and the idealistic values we profess, if we can find ways to integrate those values into our day-to-day process, then I think that will be a contribution on the order of whatever it is we actually produce as product.


[Mitch Kapor's Weblog]

comments? [] 10:37:24 AM    

The network song


The first server I connected to the Internet sat on the floor of my office, close enough so I could hear -- and feel -- its response to heavy load. It seems weird to admit that I relied on those sensory cues, but I've talked to enough system administrators to know I'm not alone. The sounds of a working machine enable the pattern recognition engine in your brain to create a baseline -- and to detect deviations from it -- in ways that are effortless, automatic, and incredibly efficient. [Full story: The network song [Jon's Radio]

Jon concludes...

creating useful representations of states (how things are) and events (how things change) -- is always going to be hard. Edward Tufte's books lay out the rules for creating rich and effective visual information displays. Of course, we rarely see these principles applied successfully in books and magazines, never mind in system monitoring software. When the Tufte of sonic design emerges, he or she will likely suffer a similar fate.

And I aver that the secret will be in the mapping of data structures to biologically natural (aka intuitive and familiar) forms.


comments? [] 10:09:51 AM    


This from Simon Willison's weblog...

Simple Python Sockets

Moshe Zadka: Networking for non-programmers (and a follow up), via Hans Nowak. A nice gently introduction to sockets, with example code using Python's socket library.

Related Entries:

...prompts several comments from me.

1.  This is  indeed a very nice introduction to sockets.

2.  The FTP enty parallels something I've been doing while developing a web-app:

I created a python module called uploadself. 

When the line import uploadself is encountered, the program that invoked it (sys.argv[0]) is automatically uploaded to my webserver's cgi-bin directory. 

I often put this as the last line of the program I'm working on.  Therefore

if the program doesn't compile successfully, uploading doesn't occur and I continue debugging without interruption.

if the program DOES compile successfully, I can test the webapp through the web instantly.

Note: uploadself only executes when it finds itself on my PC.  When invoked on the server it just passes.

I've found this to be such a smooth way to develop that the only problem is that failures of this code (because of network lag for for example) are hard to for me to recognize, in the same way that bugs in the standard library modules are hard for me to recognize--I assume the problem is in my code, not in the infrastructure.

 


comments? [] 8:32:26 AM    


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