Dorothy Sayers, in her excellent book, The Mind of the Maker, divides creative activity into three stages: the idea, the implementation, and the interaction. A book, then, or a computer, or a program comes into existence first as an ideal construct, built outside time and space, but complete in the mind of the author. It is realized in time and space, by pen, ink, and paper, or by wire, silicon, and ferrite. The creation is complete when someone reads the book, uses the computer, or runs the program, thereby interacting with the mind of the maker.
This description, which Miss Sayers uses to illuminate not only human creative activity but also the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, will help us in our present task. For the human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation. Thus it is that writing, experimentation, “working out” are essential disciplines for the theoretician.
In many creative activities the medium of execution is intractable. Lumber splits; paints smear; electrical circuits ring. These physical limitations of the medium constrain the ideas that may be expressed, and they also create unexpected difficulties in the implementation.
Implementation, then, takes time and sweat both because of the physical media and because of the inadequacies of the underlying ideas. We tend to blame the physical media for most of our implementation difficulties; for the media are not “ours” in the way the ideas are, and our pride colors our judgment.
Computer programming, however, creates with an exceedingly tractable medium. The programmer builds from pure thought-stuff: concepts and very flexible representations thereof. Because the medium is tractable, we expect few difficulties in implementation; hence our pervasive optimism. Because our ideas are faulty, we have bugs; hence our optimism is unjustified.
Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, pg. 15
Archive for category general
Stages of creative activity
Aug 31
Why programming is fun
Aug 26
Fred Brooks, in his excellent work, The Mythical Man-Month, has this to say about why we enjoy programming.
The Joys of the Craft
Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.
Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”
Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.
Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.
Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a
keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.
-Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, pg. 8-9
The original HTML documents recommended “be generous in what you accept”, and it has bedeviled us ever since because each browser accepts different superset of the specifications. It is the specifications that should be generous, not their interpretation. -Doug McIlroy, quoted from The Art of UNIX Programming, pg 21
This is the reason web development is so difficult. Every now and then I run across someone who considers web development to not be “real programming”. I suppose that is because web developers are not only faced with being generous in what they accept by way of input but also because they must account for a wide variety of environments (browsers), each of which requires slightly different output in order to achieve the same effect.
It’s been a while since I released Bible Flashcards version 1.0. Long enough in fact that I started getting emails asking whether I intended on updating past the 1.1.4 release.
Well I am proud to announce version 2.0 which includes a lot of requested features and a lot of bug-fixes and improvements. For this release I decided to take my time and re-factor the way various screens interacted, making them more modular and self-contained which should translate into fewer force closes. I also unleased the monkey on my app which helped me improve my code even more.
So without further ado here are the major features included in this release:
- Ability to mark cards learned/unlearned
- Ability to choose a random card
- Cards now cycle so that if you are on card 1 and you attempt to go backwards, you are taken to the last card. Likewise if you are on the last card and you attempt to go forwards you are taken to the first card.
- Menus also cycle so that if you hit the back button you will go from the active card view to the lesson chooser to the lesson set chooser and back to the card view.
- Preferences to control settings such as card text size, whether to display learned cards, and a button to remove all learned cards from the internal database.
Some interface items had to be chopped to make room for these improvements. So if you are wondering where the next/back buttons are, they have been removed in favor of the more intuitive gesture controls. Swipe right for next card and left for previous card. Tapping the card flips it over.
I also want to give a special thanks to everyone who contacted me with words of encouragement and everyone who brought to my attention things that were broken and things that could be improved upon.
This release also includes a new lesson set, RossWords, which is being put together by Samuel Rogers as he takes Hebrew this year. If anyone else is feeling generous and would like to help out, feel free to contact me about a lesson set that you could help me improve upon or create as Samuel is doing.
Here are some screen shots from the new version:
And as usual, you can find Bible Flashcards in the Android Marketplace by searching for “Bible Flashcards” or by scanning the barcode below:
Learning CSS can be a bit daunting if you’ve never encountered it before. Likewise, if you’ve only had limited exposure to CSS, the various ways browsers implement various aspects of the CSS standard (or make up their own) can leave you with the impression that it is all a giant hairy mess. So to help out, I’ve compiled a list of resources to make the learning curve not quite as steep for beginners and to hopefully help tame the CSS wilderness for novices.
First, here is a pretty good and in-depth video on HTML and CSS basics:
Next we have several handy beginner’s tutorial sites:
- HTML Dog’s CSS Beginner
- Friendly Bit’s Beginner’s Guide to CSS and Standards
- Your HTML Sourse’s Introduction to CSS
- W3 Schools CSS Tutorial (also an excellent reference site)
Finally, here are a few CSS frameworks designed to help make CSS a lot easier by providing a standard system that takes care of much of the common ugly quirks found in CSS:
As a bonus, here are a few inspirational sites to help give you an idea of what CSS can do if applied properly:
Here’s a handy list (created by the fine folks at AppBrain) of the apps I currently use (and mostly recommend) on my Motorola Droid:
I get asked many times from friends and family what the best storage solution is for ensuring data they find to be critical is not lost or corrupted.
Whatever storage solution you decide to use it needs to be unobtrusive and largely automated because, if not, then you’ll find out at the worst possible time (usually in a crisis) that actually recovering your data is nearly impossible and often times, incomplete.
The most unobtrusive solution I’ve found so far is to use a Network Attached Storage solution. The one I use and highly recommend is the D-Link DNS-321 which accepts standard SATA drives (which means they are fast and reliable) in a RAID-1 configuration. RAID-1 means the drives are mirrored, meaning the data is automatically duplicated to two internal drives. Just about any NAS system will work but make sure it includes RAID (most don’t) and isn’t simply a more fancy external hard drive.
Being attached a network attached device also gives you the benefit of not having to rely on too many additional moving parts. For a long time I used to use spare computer systems as storage units but what I quickly found out is that the individual parts in them posed as multiple unnecessary points of failure. Motherboards, RAM, even graphics cards can cause significant headaches when all you care about is the hard drives and the data they contain.
In fact, since Google’s high powered cloud computing infrastructure runs on common hardware like the kind you and I use, it is significant to note the hardware failure rate they discovered from constantly pushing common hardware to it’s limits over long periods of time. This simply means that when you are planning a computational strategy (in this case, storage of sensitive data) you need to plan for failure instead of hoping for the best.
In contrast, having a system that only consists of a minimal operating system and two drives should be able to give you enough time to replace one drive if/when the other one fails and the NAS unit itself is cheap enough that you could easily have a spare mothballed for the rainy day when you’ll need it.
It’s also a good idea to keep a copy of your data in an offsite location. The principle being that if one place storing your data were flattened then the you should be able to recover from the offsite location. The best way to achieve this is through a continuous online storage solution. I personally don’t use an online storage solution but some things to look for in one would be the backing company’s reliability, whether they back your data up to a cloud or a single server, and how well put together their interface software is. Try the free services first, chances are that if they are really as good as they claim to be (and they all claim to be good) you’ll quickly find out during the trial period (which often is a certain amount of allowed data storage). Here are a few free ones, I have used box.net before (for random file storage, not for regular automated backups) and can say it is pretty good.
I’ve also adopted the strategy of using as many online solutions (such as Gmail for email) which allow me to leverage reliable 3rd party clouds which provide inherent protection from data loss and provide the added benefit of allowing me to access my data from a wide variety of computers without having to sync data between every system I want to use.
Finally, focus on only backing up the files you know you will need. There is no reason to back up the entire computer in terms of applications, operating system, etc. Backing up unnecessary data will only serve to max out your storage capacity and quickly overtax your backup solution. Instead, plan on replacing your whole PC (and the operating system it uses, but keep a copy of the applications you use) in the event of catastrophic data loss. If you stick with reasonably reliable hardware your failure rate should be much higher than Google’s (3-4 years). Average costs of new and decent systems are low enough now that treating a computer as a disposable device (like a cell phone) isn’t all too uncommon or that bad of an idea.
Topic survey
Jan 8
What topics are you most interested in knowing more about? Take a minute to fill out the following short survey and let us know!
What are blogs?
Many of you are wondering what the big deal is with blogs. Well here is a short video on blogs and why they are important/useful:
What’s so great about blogs?
Aside from being able to access specialized information put out on a regular basis, there is one other reason I enjoy reading blogs and consider them to be an essential element in our modern forms of communication.
Blogs help you connect with people.
You learn a lot about someone’s character, thoughts, and passions if you follow what they say on their blog. The trouble is that since blogs are generally authored by one person on individual website it can become time consuming and cumbersome to visit each blog you’re interested in to check for and read any new posts.
How can I keep up with blogs?
The easiest tool I’ve found to help bring a variety of different blogs together into one place is by utilizing the RSS feed offered by most blogs.
Google Reader is a web-based RSS reader which requires a Google account and a little bit of setup, but once you get it going its pretty much automated and will allow you to check a number of blogs without having to spend time visiting each and every website to get updates.
Here is a short video to help you get started with Google Reader:
New Year’s Resolutions
Jan 1
According to surveys, only 12% of new-year’s resolutions are actually kept. So I’m not going to try and beat the odds by offering another list of items here.
However as someone who loves getting things done, I figured I would switch gears a bit and offer some productivity tools/methods I’ve found to be particularly helpful.
Inbox Zero
I went to lunch once with a well known speaker, Mike Licona, who lamented that he had almost 2,000 undread and unprocessed emails in his inbox.
While I don’t get nearly that many emails, I have been using a simple email management system known as Inbox Zero that helps me quickly process, sort, and manage my digital communications. Since telling Mike about Inbox Zero, he has managed (after some initial effort) to keep the number of unread messages in his inbox close to zero (hey, it improves your chances of getting a response from him).
Here is a video of Inbox Zero’s creator, Merlin Mann, giving a Google Tech Talks presentation about it:
Getting things done
Getting things done is a pretty simple program aimed at helping you optimize your workflow to help you get more things done.
I like this system because it works with any personality type and accounts for both short-term and long-range planning. It also has a very low learning curve, overhead, and since it does not focus on any single set of utilities or tools it is very adaptable.
Here is an excellent presentation of getting things done by it’s creator, David Allen:
Six sigma
A very popular system among large businesses is Six Sigma. Originally developed as a manufacturing process designed to eliminate manufacturing defects, it has since been adapted to a more general set of principles which can help you have a lot more consistency when it comes to the work you produce.
Six sigma can get pretty complicated, job boards are filled with management requirements of the various “levels” of six sigma experience. However here is a simple introductory video by Kaj Ahlmann of Six Sigma Ranch and Winery. In this video Kaj, one of the founders of Six Sigma, uses his hobby of wine making as an example of six sigma principles:
Hope these methods help you become productive in the new year!
