Saturday, May 17, 2003
Fractals revisited
The fractint site brings back memories. I used to play with fractals when I worked developing graphics software in the financial futures industry in the early Eighties. I remember one weekend in particular, in the offices of Dave Croydon, Software Writer, just outside Brighton. I had a 1024x1068 graphics card (a Texas Instruments something-or-other) plus a glorious high res CMYB photo-quality printer. The printer worked with ultra fancy paper and made four runs over the paper - one for Cyan, one for Mangenta, one for Yellow and one for pure black. I had coded up a Fractal Fern Leaf generator using the IFS algorithm. I let the generator run on Saturday night, let the print run on Sunday night and spent all day Monday showing off the print.
Was I a geek or what! (s/was/am/).
posted by Sean 12:16 AM
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Thursday, May 15, 2003
From standalone program to (standalone program + module of other programs) - the inevitable evolutionary path of iterative software development
I write a lot of stuff in Python. It goes like this. I need a program to do X. I write it. I use it. Then I find that the program would be useful as a module of another program. No problem - its already a *module* - thanks to Python.
Here Guido van Rossum gives some tips on refining your standalone Python programs so that they are also good modules for larger programs.
posted by Sean 11:59 PM
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Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Why are presentation slides boring? + The need for outliners...or something.
A peice for ITWorld about the eternal mystery that underlies the power of presentation slides to induce stupor just short of general anaesthesia. Why are presentations boring
posted by Sean 12:52 AM
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Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Powerbook
I got a good look at an Apple Powerbook for the first time today. Drooooolllllllll.
posted by Sean 10:19 AM
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Sunday, May 11, 2003
A must-have tool for those who think in words
I think in terms of words when I work. DOS/Unix, whatever. I sit at the command line (actually in Emacs in a shell, on the command line, but it amounts to the same thing). I navigate through directory-space which, for me, is a hierarchical set of words - not a set of pictures. I use applications which again, are words - not pictures - and I invoke them through language.
GUIs have their place of course - I use GUI apps for mail and WP etc. One my pet peeves is the mismatch between pictures-land (GUI) to words-land (CLI) - how to use pictures to do cli type things and how to use cli's to do picture type things.
If what I'm saying makes even a modicum of sense to you, check out ActiveWords.
Hint, I'm in by browser, editing a blog entry. I got here from a mail client (GUI) by typing Cntrl-Space and then "blog". This word invoked my browser at the right URL to directly edit my blog. Beautiful. "wurd" fires up MS Word. "att" gets me to "C:/program files/qualcomm/eudora/attach", you get the idea.
A perfect tool if you think in words but live in pictures.
posted by Sean 12:37 PM
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