Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle
Before CUSEC 2012 I didn’t know much about Bret Victor, and I wasn’t even all that interested in his talk. I knew he would be talking about user experience, but that’s all. I thought his website was pretty cool, but I didn’t look too closely at it. The night before, I started to suspect his [...]
Thoughts on the Quorum paper
Recently on the “It Will Never Work In Theory” blog Greg Wilson blogged about a paper by Andreas Stefik, Susanna Siebert, Melissa Stefik, and Kim Slattery on “An Empirical Comparison of the Accuracy Rates of Novices using the Quorum, Perl, and Randomo Programming Languages” (pdf). The paper compares Perl, a popular programming language, to two [...]
Sebastian Thrun’s driverless cars
This semester I’ve been taking Stanford’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence in my spare time. The course is fantastic, and I’m learning a lot. One of the best things about the course is how practical it is. Artificial Intelligence is not science fiction any more. Sebastian Thrun, one of the professors, is a charming guy. Not [...]
NaNoWriMo starts today!
NaNoWriMo, also known as National Novel Writing Month, is a novel-writing ‘contest’ where you write a 50000-word novel in a month. The first and only time I did NaNoWriMo was in grade twelve. I wrote a terrible book, and it was fun. Fast-forward a year, and I wrote another book, but I didn’t do it [...]
Lessons learned from writing on the Evolving Web blog
The other day I wrote about my Redmine Google Docs integration plugin over on the Evolving Web blog. We got a ton of traffic and a lot of interested commenters — including one enthusiastic commenter who forked the repository on GitHub, offering to contribute. It’s been great having so many people look at my code, [...]
Open Close Open Close Open Close
My new experiment in focusing is this: open Hacker News, close it. Open Hacker News, close it. Open Reddit, close it. Open Reddit, close it. Read the headlines, BAM, closed. The goal is to make it just as automatic to close it as it is to open it. Speaking of open, there’s a guy called [...]
Randall Munroe’s focus hack — it works!
Randall Munroe (the guy behind xkcd) recently blogged about how he defeated his Reddit addiction: I made it a rule that as soon as I finished any task, or got bored with it, I had to power off my computer. I too am easily distracted by websites that shovel a bunch of delicious novelty in [...]
Set in our ways
An hour ago, I finished writing an email to my colleagues, with whom I will be developing a large software project this semester. We haven’t started yet, so inevitably the discussion revolves around one central theme: what programming tools will we use? Programmers are opinionated about their tools like no one else. Everyone has a [...]
Living out of a usb stick
(A little background: my computer has been in the repair shop for almost a month now.) I think I will start living out of a usb stick from now on. Not having your computer is an inconvenience, but accessing your data easily becomes way harder. I have a bunch of accounting data that I would [...]
Exams are almost over…
def parseanswer(ans): if ans == “yes”: return True else: return False def doneyet(b): if b: print “Now go sleep.” else: print “Study!” assess() def assess(): print “\nAre you done exams yet?” ans = raw_input() doneyet(parseanswer(ans)) if __name__ == “__main__”: assess() Engineering exams are weird. They make up most of your mark, but they’re quite meaningless. [...]