The Goldfish Chronicles

Just read news of Wrox going under. I’m not a fan of their books, though my wife and I both loved their HTML book at the start of their publishing career.

I spent some time last December draft-reviewing a Wrox book [as well as a Manning and an OReilly one]. The Wrox one was the largest amount of work, so a shame to feel that it’s down the drain.

One cool thing about blogs, the only news of Wrox’ death that I can find seems to be on people’s blogs. Also impressive, it seems Wrox are dead because their parent company are dead. More people seem pained at the death of ‘Friends of Ed’, some kind of designer-publisher.

I’m in two minds on the Wrox future. On the one hand, it’s quite cool to have a British publishing company, when they started they charged a lot less in the UK than US companies did, but slowly their prices went up. [An aside: Computer books in the UK were sold dollar-for-pound by US publishers, making them 40% more expensive in the UK or so. Wrox’s arrival seemed to bring things down a touch, while their prices went up to match it. ] Wrox are also a great way to get into authoring a book, the number of multiple-author books makes it easy for someone like me to try and write a chapter or two on a subject.

On the other hand, I’m not a big fan of many of the books, finding them to be either too dumbed down, or too article-like, disjoint. And a dead-wrox will leave a large catalog of books for whom the price might drop. I’ve no idea what’d happen to the stock on the shelves to be honest, depends exactly how they market their books.

Playing with hsqldb. Thought I’d mention that hsqldbserver needs the following lines added to it on OS X:

#H# As these are not available
echo_success() { echo ” [ OK ]”;}
echo_failure() { echo ” [ Failed ]”;}

There are probably better ways to do this, but this is the easy way

The best Football [international not yank] management game ever has released their demo for version 4. I’ve been addicted to this game since they first released for the Amiga 500 back in 1990 or some-such.

My current CM3 game has seen me manage a non-league team to european glory but I still can’t get my highly-skilled portuguese team past a quarter-finals, so reality continues to get in the way [and the chinese still take a single defeat as an affront and sack the manager, even if I did win their only Asian cup in history, the nerve of it].

Anyway, the new version is out for the Mac too [though it’s quite slow, that might be just because it’s a) a port of a demo and b) CM is a heavy game]. I”ll have to try the Windows version to see if that’s smoother at the moment. There are a lot of new features.

It’s downloadable [at about 7k a second] from http://www.sigames.com/

Very cool application, MacStumbler for the Mac. Helps you find what wireless networks are out there and what their stats are. Even better, it talks!

Woo. A reply from the INS [the USA’s immigration control department] giving me a temporary 1 year extension while they go through my documentation to take away the temporary clause on my residency. They do it to everyone who moves over before they’ve been married 2 years, we moved over a few months shy because I got a good job offer.

Anyway, government things are always a pain, so it’s nice to have movement, and it means I can goto Steve’s wedding.

Moatas has finally kicked me into using Eclipse, and I love it. I’ve tried to use it twice on my powerbook, and it failed both times. Today the RC2 worked fine, although I had to change the Info.plist inside Eclipse.app to use 1.4.1 JVM so that jcraft’s cvs-ssh plugin would work [useful tip I think].

It feels much cleaner and nicer than IDEA, and much more powerful. So I’m an addict. Now it just needs to feel easier to use than ViM.

I went looking for a new wireless router last night. I popped into Comp-USA [because they’re next to Barnes&Noble, I may prefer Best-Buy for consumerism, though that is waning, but Comp-USA lets me look at books] and saw that Linksys have an 802.11g router and pcmcia card on the market, for barely more than their 802.11b models. A guy next to me in the aisle seemed to be thinking the same thing and was leaning heavily towards them.

While I didn’t notice it on the router, I did notice the pcmcia card saying “draft-802.11g” and my bullshit detector was aroused. I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to go home, search the net, and come back the next day.

And I’m glad I did, Tom’s hardware have a nice piece on the linksys model that is not impressed at all at the quality of the router, and the register have an article on how gartner are advising us to avoid G products early.

So, avoid making the same mistake the guy in the aisle made and buy slow. G is not here.

Now I just need to decide if I want to buy another B router Just to play around and to have a work-wireless setup when I want it.

Yep, a nice cryptic title. I just read Russell Beattie’s blog entry discussing his mother entering his/her name into google to see where they were. I do my surname every now and then because it’s pretty rare and have noticed that one of the other Yandells on the net, Pete Yandell, has a blog.

Furthermore, he’s an OS-X believer too

How do you know when what you believe in is bullshit, and when what you believe in is your own righteousness.

This seems to me to be one of the fundamental aspects of an individuals approach to a multi-individual situation, be it a community, a society or a relationship between two individuals. So, 1..N, N..N, 1..1 or something

As a Maths student, I lack the education of many in the computing world. This makes me especially susceptible to not being aware of older wisdoms from computing [algorithms, bit-manipulation, protocol-creation] and far more aggressive in my self-education than others. It also makes it hard to know at what point my view on a computing subject has become uneducated, rather than focused and pertinant.

Being a newbie [mud upbringing showing] is easy, as you can take the view that you are a bumpkin on everything. This is probably why the Educated view that the newbie should go educate themselves [RTFM, RTFS, RTFML] is so painful to hit, but is one of the tried and tested ways in which a newbie gets educated to the next step.

Being an Educated [Wiz, Cre] is more insidious though. It is accepted that you grokk [tm, heinlein] a subject, but obviously in other areas you are still a newbie. Separating these from each other seems the tricky part, knowing when you are a newbie and when you are educated involves an extra process to double-check yourself. As you become educated in more subjects, I’m assuming it is hard to recognise the edges and things blur.

I would have assumed there was a next state, Guru, akin to humble wisemen who often seem to be in legends. However, some of the most Educated people I know don’t seem to have achieved it through humble-wisdom, they seem to have reached it via being very good at recognising their own bullshit so that either they know when to be a newbie and when to be Educated, or they avoid areas in which they are not Educated, or separate those areas. It often seems to go in hand that people in this next state are very strongly opioned in their education area and have the reputation of being a pain in the arse.

So installing a personal bullshit detector appears to be an essential step somewhere.

I’m sure this will surprise very few people, but I thought I’d mention it.

I’m in a very un-codey mood at the moment. Headaches + sleeping too much [not my usual 3 hours a night] seem to have killed enthusiasm for coding [or my vague attempts at qualifying for coding]. Lack of coding of course [maybe this isn’t an of course for everyone] leads to depression.

There is one bright star. HTML! I’m finding myself with a major urge to mess with html. I hacked the structure of one of the sites my wife and I did for a friend [www.bikehell.com] so the page download dropped from 50k down to 4k. We never really planned out what to do as he added more and more companies, so it was just getting ugly. I spent an evening messing with IFRAMEs and adding in little tweaks and now it feels much better, and I’ve found a real good use of IFRAMEs. Plus it’ll stop my bandwidth from exploding.

So why is HTML [PHP and JSP too, though JSP has issues] the one source of happiness? Is it because it employs a designer point of view [I don’t think so, I have no concept about design] or is it because HTML has high feedback. Not quite as high as say a Word document [as I don’t use a wysiwyg html editor] but for a coder, very high feedback. PHP is the same, and JSP is usually the same, though adding the occasional bean or making config changes usually needs a restart. I obviously think the latter. HTML makes me feel happier at the moment because the feedback loop is very short.

Taking that to the next step, will short feedback loops always feel best? Maven has a slower feedback loop than older Ant or shell script solutions, but it’s a standardised system so I get happiness from not having to expound as much effort. So it’s not all speed.