Friday 6 December 2002

Boy this Radio tool, activeRenderer.root, is very large and prone to backing up. 14 megs from 129 backups of the thing! Ble-ach. (This is my personal portmanteau of blech and yach.) I’ve just picked up the latest nightly build of Chimera, using the ChimeraKnight Applescript Studio application, after having used the standard 0.6 build. Pretty toolbar icons, less blocky looking with same-tone outlines and graduated fills. A “close tab” toolbar button, which allows for much easier mouse-only browsing: before I would open up dozens of tabs using the middle button, mapped to command-click, and not have a way to close them without going to the menu, and, even then, having the chance of closing the whole window rather than the tab (because I’m clumsy. Less crashing when I click the various tabs? We’ll just have to see. 9:18:59 PM    comment []

Boy that snow was cold and digging out my Jeep without a scraper or brush was difficult and wet and cold. I used a magazine covered in plastic to brush off as much as possible from my rather modest height. The miasma of cold stuck with me throughout my drive to the hotel. I think my cough is worse. I hope I won’t need a tonsillectomy. Driving through Route One even with most of the snow cleared was no fun either, with and accidents and slow people in the fast lane and people not moving in the slow lane. 8:41:32 PM    comment []

Couple of nights ago, at the Marker: the couple celebrating an anniversary at the fireplace. After leaving the restaurant, I asked if the woman reminded him of anyone. He knew exactly who I was talking about. I said she was like the person we were talking about, only with less class. He didn’t think so. I said that the person in question would never walk out on a certain friend while they were seated in a restaurant, but that since he knew the person in question longer, I would defer to his opinion. He averred that this is true; however the couple in question had not been married several years. I said neither had the couple in the restaurant: this was their first anniversary. He thought that they were married forty-one years. So I think I’m right: our certain person has more class. This did not prevent the two of us from congratulating the couple as we left. 8:35:24 PM    comment []

The ever-solicitous Paul Frankenstein sent me a link tying two of my passions, poetry and computing. Richard P Gabriel (I have linked him before) thinks there ought to be an MFA in Software, akin to an MFA in Poetry. Dana Gioia’s classic (now a decade old, written a few years after RPG got his MFA in poetry) essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” pointed out that one of the reasons poetry was suffering was because of those programs: The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones. Richard P Gabriel is just the kind of infusion that Dana Gioia imagined would shock the poetry subculture out of its malaise. RPG’s concerns though are towards bringing the feel of the MFA program to the software world. Can the literary workshop form that many MFAs take work to increase the quality of software design and construction? RPG has tried to bring about the workshop form to the patterns subcommunity in several PLoPD conferences and a book with no small success in that arena. It makes sense that reading more software can only improve the industry. Programming is at its heart a creative activity, one that benefits from experience in both reading and writing. Keeping in mind that programming and poetry are both creative activities reminds us why we do the work. 2:30:11 AM    comment []