2001

14Dec2001

The Joys of Plane Travel

By carlfish on

We sat on the plane for another half an hour. I could hear the sound of power-tools coming from the left wing, but I was sitting on the right side of the plane so I couldn't look out the window. We all sat, there's not much else you can do on a 747.

09Dec2001

Three Kinds of Projects

By carlfish on

It's category three that's the problem. This is how 90% of my personal projects start, and how 100% of that 90% finish. I get a neat idea, and I start thinking "Now, how would I do this?" It's that thought I can't get out of my head. I don't really want the program, I just want to know that I can do it. My head is filled with ideas of how the various bits would work, how it would fit together, what it would look like and so on, and I need to write code just to get all that out of my head.

02Dec2001

Watching Schindler's List

By carlfish on

I HATE people who chat during movies. You are not in your lounge-room watching a video, nobody else around you knows who you are, or cares what you are saying. What you are doing is disrupting an experience that everyone about you paid a premium for.

05Nov2001

Sandwich Shop Architecture

By carlfish on

But it's more complicated than that. I don't give them all the RollMetaData at once. The shop needs to make a number of callbacks to the customer in order to finish the request. The obvious candidate here is the Visitor Pattern (Design Patterns, Gamma et. al. p331), but it's not quite applicable in this instance.

28Oct2001

Zen and the Wok

By carlfish on

I was expecting to show up, find a whole shelf of "Stir-fry stuff" books, and pick the one that looked most user-friendly. Such was not going to happen. The closest I came was the half-inch thick "Womans Weekly Asian Cookbook", which I wasn't going to buy because it would have been confirming stereotyped gender-roles. Then I saw it. Zen, the Art of Modern Eastern Cooking.

25Oct2001

The Livejournal Friends List

By carlfish on

The friends list is really a confustion of three features. Firstly it is a subscription list. Secondly, it is an access-control list. Finally, it's a friends list on which you list names of people you like. Anyone can tell that while these three lists overlap significantly, they're not by any stretch of the imagination the same thing.

23Oct2001

My Formula for Success in Retail

By carlfish on

The trick to surviving eight hours full of unique human beings is to recognise that people really aren't unique at all. There's a limited number of personality types when it comes to shopping, a very limited number of applicable situations, and given a week you can come up with a script that covers all these situations.

15Oct2001

The Ubiquity of Templates

By carlfish on

Remember a year or two ago, when the web was a little younger, and it was the height of embarrassment to have a website that was generated for you by some tool, rather than written by yourself in emacs? Hasn't that just flipped around completely in the last six months. It's like at some point, a switch was flipped, and everyone started thinking "What the hell are we doing this for?"

16Sept2001

Groupies

By carlfish on

Ya know, that's what this business needs. Groupies. Forget higher salaries, or better perks, or more vacation time. Screw stock options, they're worthless anyway. Just once, I'd like to have three or four beautiful women bat their eyelashes at me and act fascinated when I talk about the cool new hack I invented.