Thursday, December 30th, 2004
I’m a fairly easily distracted person. My schoolcards always had comments on them along the lines of “Good student but easily distracted”, “Sometimes a bit too much of a daydreamer” and “Needs to work on his short attention span”. I’ve always known this, and kind of assumed it was just my personality. But when I read articles like this one, I wonder if I’m the only one.
When I got interested in computers, everything was so amazing to me that nothing could divert my attention from the task I was performing at the moment. Quite frequently, people would talk to me and I would awnser them in a distracted sort of way while I kept looking at the screen and bashing on the keyboard. Later, I would recall nothing of even having talked to the specific person. Friends would visit me and find four rolled, unlighted cigarette’s next to my ashtray, two unfinished cigarettes which I was smoking at the same time and three half-rolled somewhere on my desk. I was so emerged in whatever it was that I was doing on the computer that I would forget about the cigarettes. Talk about concentrating on a single task. Naturally, those were very productive times.
Then.. I got an internet connection. Since then I’ve been much more easily distracted and haven’t been nearly as productive as I was before that. Instant messaging, IRC, E-mail, browsing, newssites, they all sucked up my time and attention. When my internet connection dies for more than about a day, my productivity suddenly goes through the roof.
I’m seeying the same thing at my work. Just when I really go up in my work and am coding like crazy somebody swings by to complain about this or that bug. The telephone rings, a high-priority e-mail comes in which needs immediate attention (or so claims the sender), etc. It’s killing my productivity.
I am now thinking about ways to stop being interrupted all the time while doing my job. Here are some rules that I’m going to adhere to:
- No e-mail reading/replying after 10:00 in the morning.
- No instant messaging clients running
- No IRC windows open.
- Firewall rules that kick in at 9:30 and which block all access to the Internet except for some specific resources (documentation, online radio stations, etc).
- No more listening to people that stop by my desk for useless stuff. They can send an e-mail (which I’ll read the next day) or they can file a bug-report in bugzilla if the want something from me.
- No telephone. I’ll simply won’t awnser it if I’m busy. (This one might be kind of tricky.. I hope my boss won’t get pissed off.. but it’s for the best)
I’ll be applying the same rules at home from now on. I’m even thinking of going unplugged at home. Since I now have a laptop, this should be do-able without too much crawling under the desk.
Thursday, December 30th, 2004
I’m normally not much for donating money to charities, because usually those charities are only aiding in the further destruction of the human race by trying to cheat on mother nature. But I’m making an exception for the victims of the earthquake in Azie. All you dutch people, please consider donating to Giro 555.
Tuesday, December 28th, 2004
A lot of sites (PHP.net amongst others) are imitating google’s ‘Suggest’ feature (See this post). No doubt google will receive all the credit for this invention, even though plenty of other people already implemented similar features elsewhere. That, however, is not my gripe with this technology..
The problem is that this ‘feature’ FUBAR’s my browsers ability to autocomplete previously entered information. I hate that. Now when I enter something for the first time in some entrybox somewhere, it’ll help me by showing some possibilities.. but each time I return to retrieve the same information, I’ll have to find it all over again. Damn.
Oh, and by the way, I retract my oppinion about which example I like better. Google’s implementation is completely useless (the chances anybody who types ‘a’ into the searchbox would be wanting to search for ‘Amazon’ if fairly slim; seems more like a cheap commercial to me) while the Apple Developer example is a useful real-life example of how this could be used.
Update: PHP.net’s News page says the following about the implementation of the function-completing searchbox: “The function list suggestions we started to test a year ago seemed to be working better as some bugs were found and fixed, so it was time to make the result available on all php.net pages.“. So PHP isn’t really copying google after all. Doesn’t make the feature less annoying.
Tuesday, December 21st, 2004
GrokLaw announces, in this article the following:
“In a totally unexpected turn of events, the EU Council took its proposal for a software patent directive off its agenda during today’s meeting. […] Polish undersecretary Wlodzimierz Marcinski asked for additional time in order to be able to write up a “constructive declaration”. The meeting chairman accomodated the request since no country raised objections.”
Somewhat further down into the article:
“The Dutch parliament had passed a resolution on July 1st, asking its government to abstain, but the Dutch government decided to ignore the will of its parliament. The Polish government reiterated on November 16th that it “cannot support the current proposal” but was pressured by the Dutch EU presidency and other countries to support the decision. At times it looked like Poland would give in to that pressure.”
Hooray for Poland. Fuck the (worst ever) Dutch government!
Weg met de huidige Nederlandse regering. Honden zijn het.
Monday, December 20th, 2004
Chello has upgraded the speeds for my internet connection.
I’m now on 4096Kbit down/1024Kbit up, which is equivelant to 512kb down/128kb up. Sweet. Here’s a little proof:
I just downloaded the OpenOffice.org 2.0 preview release (94 Mb) in 4 minutes.
Friday, December 17th, 2004
On Folklore.org, you can read all about the people at Apple and the development of the Macintosh. Very entertaining, in-depth and educational stuff.
(Sorry flux)
Friday, December 17th, 2004
They just released GTK 2.6. It’s got a lot of new features that I’ve been wanting:
- GtkCellRenderers for dropdowns and progressbars (these can be used in a list.. nice for ListPatron)
- The combo box can now display trees, insensitive rows and separators.
- Path entry in the file chooser widget (no more need for using ctrl-l
- Performance improvements in GtkListStore (not in GtkTreeView though :( )
Hope it’ll be packaged for Debian Unstable soon, though I’m not holding my breath for it. I really want to use some of these new features for use in ListPatron, but I’d rather not have my project depened on such new libs.
Wednesday, December 15th, 2004
Sometimes it takes a little while to realise something is actually really stupid.
Take this for example:
“Chalk one up for teachers. What better way to present educational materials than with a template that evokes the classic image of the teaching profession?”
It’s an KeyNote theme. KeyNote is a tool for creating presentations for the Mac. The theme can be applied to your presentation to give it a “blackboard & Chalk” look. How nice.
The following high-tech state-of-the-art equipment is used to create a presentation:
- Laptops/Desktop PC’s which can proces bilions of instructions per second
- Fancy Operating Systems with swooshy thingies
- Highly user-friendly software tools which took many programmers many hours to create
- Expensive Beamers and screens
And that presentation looks exactelly like something that cavemen drew on the walls of caves some 10.000 years ago? Something that could just as easily be done on a real blackboard and some chalk. Only difference is that instead of having to whipe out the chalk and drawing/writing the next diagram/text, we can now click the button of a mouse. Whooptiedoo.
Really, with all our super-duper high-tech stuff like planes, trains and automobiles.. computers and what not.. we’re still just advanced cavemen. Craving for status, power and procrastination. Makes you kind of sad, doesn’t it?
Wednesday, December 15th, 2004
I’m still working on ListPatron.
Here’s a little in-between screenshot which shows the sorting rules.
What’s still left to do before releasing version 0.1?:
- Finish the sorting
- Sort rule loading/saving (70% done)
- Dialog polishing (80% done)
- Code cleanup (80%)
- Sort list on header click
- Some memory-leak fixing
- Bug fixing
- Testing
- Package building
That’s aboutit.
Tuesday, December 14th, 2004
I’ve heard about XMLHttpRequest before, but never really gave it much attention. Which means I didn’t even know what it was supposed to do, and therefor never looked into it further.
Turns out it’s pretty neat though. If you’re a webdeveloper, you must know how we deal with stuff like changing the values in a dropdown box depending on a chosen value in another dropdown box? You either send all possible information with the page when you construct it and then use Javascript to fill in the information on demand. Or you submit a form when something is chosen by the user and fill in the information server-side.
XMLHttpRequests let’s you retrieve information from the server using a client-side Javascript XML object without requiring a page reload. In essance, it’s a mixture between the two hacky methods mentioned above.
For more information, check out this article. An example is also present. While that example is nice, I like this one better.
I only had time to quickly skim through the article, so I’m still left with some more researching to do:
- What about security? Can we XML request over a secure connection?
- Do we have to transfer server-side session ID’s manually?
- Any complete frameworks available where have a XMLHttpRequest enabled front-end (client side) which queries a bunch of server-side pages which in their turn query the database (or stored XML information) and return information in XML?
- Can this be a nice platform for three-tire webapplications?
(Thanks to Joel On Software for posting about this)
The text of all posts on this blog, unless specificly mentioned otherwise, are licensed under this license.
