Tcepsa's Thoughts

Too many things to do

tcepsa — Sat, 04 Apr 2015 03:42:34 GMT

I've figured out at least one reason why my postings here have become severely curtailed: I have too much other stuff going on. I have so much other stuff going on that even when I have a few free minutes to work on some of the more optional free stuff, I can't decide what to spend those precious free moments on, and so I end up reading Hacker News or playing a videogame that I've already beaten half a dozen times. Those things are fun and all, but they're generally not what I'd consider the top of my priorities list.

And maybe it's just that sometimes when those moments show up it turns out that I've just plain run out of gumption, and I can mostly live with that. It happens. I just wish it was easier to tell when I was already out of gumption versus having my gumption sapped by having to choose just one thing to work on (and, by extension, pay the opportunity cost of not working on ALL THE OTHER THINGS).

Okay, now that I've established that, I'm going to go do SOMETHING on my mental to-do list.

Have a great weekend ^_^

Still Alive!

tcepsa — Sun, 22 Mar 2015 05:04:18 GMT

I feel like I should have more to write here, but as I do not have time to write a concise entry, you get a short one instead. Here is a list of things that are awesome for me currently:

Work (though it is starting to go in unexpected directions)

Family (though there are sometimes bumps)

Clojure and Emacs (seriously. So awesome)

I think I can safely say it is going to be an interesting year. Maybe I will even start posting here regularly again! (Wouldn't bet on it though ;-) )

Humble Mojam

tcepsa — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 15:26:24 GMT

I'm enjoying watching the development of the games for the Humble Mojam Bundle--it's very cool to see the details of these talented folks at work!

http://humblebundle.com/

Check it out if you have some time (and note that there are three different streams as of the time of my writing this: one for Mojang, and one each for two of the Wolfire folks)

Obligatory New Year's Post

tcepsa — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:35:43 GMT

Well, 2011, you were a pretty good year for me. Some rough spots, but also some great spots. Still working on sorting some of that out. Already in over my head for projects for the new year, but I like the look of them. They're almost entirely things that I either want to do or desire the immediate consequences of having done them. Maybe this could be characterized as moving into the realm of "intermediate" with a number of my skills. Maybe it's a further mental shift away from my perfectionism. Not taking any more classes also will definitely help also. Okay, time to get started!

Moore's Law is Dead (to me)

tcepsa — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 06:12:55 GMT

In my past, the week leading up to Thanksgiving has always been one of anticipation. For almost all of my life, this has been due in no small part to the fact that my birthday tends to fall on or shortly after that fourth Thursday of November. However, it had been heightened by the tradition of Black Friday. Ever since I discovered that, if one were staunch of heart and geeky of spirit, incredible loot could be gotten at a pittance by rising early enough* I have been seeking out these bargains and prowling the aisles of Staples and Office Max at entirely unreasonable hours of the morning.

This year, I'll be there again, but while in the past I have often been keeping my eyes open for anything that I could use (a USB memory stick that's less than $1 per GB? Heck yes! A stack of DVDs for $5? Never know when you might need one!) this year I have only one item on my list: massive hard drives so that I can set up a RAID array because our old drives are getting old and we have no backups. Previous years I'd have a list of 5-10 things I'd be actively trying to score, and I'd map out my route between stores in a delicate balancing act between which ones had the things I wanted most and which had the most things I wanted. A new monitor. A video card. I think I even got my Nintendo Wii on Black Friday five years ago.** But this year? There's pretty much nothing. Part of that is because I just got a new laptop, and it's harder to replace internal components on that, but mostly it's because there's just nothing out there that's all that much better than what I already have for what I want to do. I'm not going out for some shiny new awesome toy this year***; I'm going out in order to do an arguably critical piece of maintenance**** that I should have done years ago.

Which brings me to my (slightly inaccurate) title. The main reason as I perceive it that I am not going out actively looking for more stuff is that there's nothing out there that I want that I don't already have. The biggest monitor I've seen in the ads for 2011 I've looked at so far is 27". I got a 24" one last year and it's already bigger than I use most of the time.***** Videogames? I have such a backlog already, and there's nothing that I've seen lately that really gets my interest anyway. Memory sticks? Yeah, I'm still loving that $1 per GB price, but I have about a dozen. DVDs? Do people still use those things? Backlit keyboard? I stopped using the one I have so I could switch to a wireless all-in-one. Nintendo 3DS? I just got a DS earlier this year; see also the aforementioned videogame backlog. Humongous TV? I have a projector that I'm thinking about upgrading when it dies, but I use it, on average, probably about once a month and I don't think I'd use a TV any more. Digital camera? Got one, love it. MP3 player device thing? We have 7.******

So it seems to me that at some point the computer and consumer electronics industries simply stopped making new things that I thought were awesome enough that I wanted to have them. Since I already have pretty much all of the things that they have already made that I think are awesome enough that I want to have them, I'm having a tough time getting particularly excited about this year's Black Friday sales. This isn't limited to Black Friday; it's just highlighted by Black Friday because Black Friday is when I'd rush out and try to get as many of these amazing things as I could.

"Effective computing speed" may still be doubling roughly every 18 months, but "net ability to capture my imagination" seems to have completely gone off a cliff. Where's my polychromatic e-Ink monitor? Where's my hi-res heads-up display? Where's my Murphy computer station? Where's my home automation system? Where's my chording keyboard?

Actually, I know where my chording keyboard is. The prototype is currently on the workbench in my basement. Which brings me to my final point: if you reach the stage where nobody is selling what you want to be buying, sometimes you just have to build it yourself.

*Or perhaps simply not going to bed at all in the first place, though I don't think I ever did that. Braved the hordes with three hours of sleep, yes, but pull an epic all nighter in Best Buy's parking lot? No, I don't think that ever happened.

**Good grief the Wii has been out FOREVER!

***Though having my own RAID array does have a certain level of geeky appeal ^_^

****Which is arguably completely unnecessary at this point, but I'd rather trust my data to a stack of drives that I'm maintaining than some cloudy corporation; who knows what they'd do with it, and I don't want to deal with the hassle of encrypting it before backing it up, etc. Baby steps.

*****That having been said, when I do have a use for the whole thing, it is FANTASTIC.

******You want thingamabobs? I've got TWENTY!

Let the progress continue!

tcepsa — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:21:02 GMT

Okay, I've managed to work out all of the major show-stoppers that I wrote about here and am moving on. That serial port not connecting problem? I had to give myself adequate permissions (or run PuTTY as root, hrm...) Not being able to compile? Apparently the latest version of avr-gcc doesn't support the straight-up Atmega328 anymore (or maybe that was never a real chip, or maybe it's fully compatible with the Atmega328p object file that one must now compile against). Fixed by telling it the compiler, "Heh, well, I know I said that I was using a 328, but what I meant was a 328p." (Yeah, super embarrassing. That compiler must think I'm a complete baka by now, considering the wacky stuff I keep asking it to do...)

Not able to use the native Arduino programming environment? Don't care! I have Emacs!

One down...

tcepsa — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 03:36:23 GMT

N to go. Fixed the GTK PLAF problem by inadvertently opening the arduino script in Emacs (I hadn't realized it was just a shell script). Saw that it was explicitly specifying the GTK PLAF, and took that part out.

Now it's kvetching about not being able to find the preferred system font. I swear, these computers, they are never happy!

Computers are Educational and Fun

tcepsa — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 02:59:02 GMT

New ThinkPad e420. Ubuntu got me through GiveCamp last weekend, but then I tried to upgrade to the official drivers and the display stopped working, and also it was having issues compiling my favorite window manager (stumpwm). So I've switched over to ArchLinux, which is a lot more hard to set up than I thought it would be, but maybe that's because I never tried to use it with a dual-monitor system for Arduino programming before.

I have managed to get StumpWM (and X.org) up and running with the proper driver. Having a heck of a time getting the Arduino stuff to work, though/

Can't run the super-simple programming environment because it can't find the Java GTK PLAF (translation: it can't find the collection of resources that tell it how stuff should look. Hopefully I can find it later or tell it to use a different one)

Can't compile the code because it can't find one of the libraries, even though I've installed avr-gcc and avr-libc and avr-binutils and avrdude. Not sure what's up there.

Can't actually talk to the chip because of something wonky with the FTDI cable. It says it's on /dev/ttyUSB0, but when I try to connect PuTTY tells me it can't open the serial port. (This has worked on previous systems; no clue why it's failing today).

Three strikes and I still refuse to yield. However, it looks like I'll be continuing to boot off of the external hard-drive that I set up to use with my wife's laptop for the purposes of doing my homework assignment for this Monday...

(Linux may only be free if your time is worthless, but it's still cheaper than all of the leisure activities that you have to pay for!)

Legos are Fun and Educational!

tcepsa — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 03:12:28 GMT

My class this semester is Real Time System Development. Our first project is to install a real-time OS on a Lego Mindstorms brick (one of the new ones, the NXT) and then build a robot* and write a program to make the robot follow a line.

The operating system is nxtOSEK, which is apparently an operating system often used on the computers in peoples' cars and has been ported to run on the NXT. There were a few minutes of serious anxiety as I realized that I had no idea how the operating system actually worked and that it was apparently much more complicated than I expected it to be**. So I downloaded the specification and started going through it. Then, in a fit of boredom and desperation I start looking at the example code that came with the Lego version; rather than forcing myself to read through the entire specification and fully grasp how the OS works, I figured maybe I could scrape out enough information from the examples to cobble together something Good Enough. I started looking through the C code first and kind of sort of got an idea of how it works and it wasn't terribly scary except there are some weird things that don't work the way I expected when I started tweaking at the source code.

Now normally I am more comfortable with C than with C++, but I figured I'd have a look at the C++ examples as well just in case... and found something that Made Sense. At this point, I am far enough along in the assignment that I am reasonably confident that I can figure out the additional daunting stuff over the course of tomorrow. It'll be a little tricky to get all of the sensors to play nicely with the main goal of following the line, but I'm not nearly as freaked out about it as I was 5 hours ago!

*Surprisingly, this may be the first actual robot that I have ever built!

**Project is due Monday. Seems a bit tight to be trying to learn the nuances of a whole new operating system by then...

Current Development Projects: Real Time Embedded Systems Class

tcepsa — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 02:37:13 GMT

Due the week after this coming Monday (i.e. ~10 days from now) a line-following Lego robot and an Arduino that will blink an LED in the Morse-code equivalent of whatever strings are sent to it.

It's gonna be a busy weekend!

Quote of the Day

tcepsa — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 01:59:13 GMT

I'm working on getting my Linux computer talking to a Lego Mindstorms NXT brick for my Real-Time Systems Development class, but I'm having a little bit of trouble getting over the final hurdle of actually being able to upload compiled code to it. In one of the howtos that I've sought out, I came across the following gem:

You MAY or MAY NOT have to reboot at this time, I cannot tell

See the full howto here

Can I remember how to do this?

tcepsa — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 03:33:44 GMT

Woo, C-i. Got it in one.

(Apparently there is also an Emacs package for editing LJ entries, but for now I'll settle for just being able to edit a text field).

I should probably check my last post to make sure I'm not repeating myself

tcepsa — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 03:23:48 GMT

but it'll be more funny this way if I am actually repeating myself...

I think I'll be posting more stuff here than on Social Media 2.0 (yeah, I consider LJ part of Social Media 1.0 and frankly, the only thing that I think Social Media 2.0 has added that is actually useful is the "like" button and its equivalents so that I can let someone know that I saw and appreciated their post without having to take up all the space associated with a comment just to say, "Hey, nice post.") in the nearish future. It doesn't make me use my real name, and I'm reasonably certain that the only way someone will see something I don't want them to see is if I actively mess up when I'm picking which groups to share something with.

I keep hoping that Diaspora will get to a usable point (actually, it might be there now; I think I saw something on the blog about downloading and installing it) but in the meantime, I'm less and less interested in Facebook and Google Plus (and I've been practically absent from Twitter for probably at least a year by now).

Next step should probably be seeing whether there's an Emacs plugin that I can use for browsing and posting. That'd be awesome.

Editing text areas of a webpage from within Emacs

tcepsa — Sat, 14 May 2011 04:34:56 GMT

Yes, it is as awesome as it sounds.*

1) Set up emacs to start as a daemon (ideally as part of your .profile or .xinitrc or something so
it's up and running whenever you're logged in):

$ emacs --daemon

This by itself is an amazing thing. It only reads in your config file, etc. once and sets it all up
behind the scenes, and then you can connect to it with

$ emacsclient -c

and it'll open up an emacs window for you all ready to go. Yes. Fast enough to
compete with vi.

2) There's a catch: you have to be using a browser that lets you edit in an outside editor.
Conkeror does, but I have no idea about anything else. Anyway, set it up to run emacsclient -c

With conkeror, in my .conkerorrc I added the following:

editor_shell_command = "emacsclient -c"

It might also work if you set your environmental EDITOR command (and this is good for other programs
that automatically open an editor for you, too!)

export EDITOR="emacsclient -c"

3) When you invoke the external editor, it'll start it up and connect to the daemon, and BAM,
nigh-instant editing joy! To close the frame, use C-x 5 0; to close the buffer when you're done
editing and commit the changes back to the browser, you can also use C-x #.

It's a little bit fraught with peril, however; I'm seeing weird behavior if I open up another
client--or even another document in the same client!--in the middle of editing a text area. It's
like it doesn't make the association to let the browser know "Hey I'm done here's your text!". I
lost this entry ~~once~~ twice as a result. Fortunately, conkeror opens a NEW temp file in
your temp directory each time, so I was able to just retrieve the text from the previous one once I
figured out that I needed to open the other client first. Annoying, but I can live with it,
especially since I almost always have an emacs client up already anyway.

Also, you'll probably want to disable fill-mode. You might want to add a hook automatically
disabling fill-mode for text files anyway; I find that it's more annoying than useful much of the
time...

4) THERE IS NO STEP FOUR XD

*I'm totally doing it right now!!!

Ask teh Lazyweb, because teh Intarwebz did not know!

tcepsa — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 03:19:57 GMT

So it turns out that the Internet does not, in fact, know everything yet (and it uncertain on a couple of other points).

First off, it doesn't know about Jefferson Country in Northern California, which may or may not be a secessionist movement to get Northern California to be its own state. After gipsieee managed to remember that she always confuses "Eureka" (Coastal NorCal) and "Yreka" (Central NorCal), I managed to find a single article from a cycling organization in southern Oregon that referenced an attempt by the northernmost counties of California and the southernmost counties of Oregon to form their own state in the 1930s. Aside from that, nothing.

Secondly, it was very uncertain of the origins of the phrase "West by God Virginia".

If you happen to know about either of these, gipsieee and I would be very curious to learn more ^_^

Today is a Great Day...

tcepsa — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 04:41:19 GMT

... FOR SCIENCE!!! XD

Today I have discovered that one can, with the careful application of microwave energy, make popcorn in a jar!

In discussing with gipsieee the hazards of commercially available microwave popcorn, the thought popped into my mind that, "Hey, it's just popcorn in some butter/oil/salt concoction that you microwave for about two minutes. I can do that!"

And I was right! The initial batch came out a little burned because I left it in an extra minute in a vain attempt to get better pop percentage. However, the second batch is delicious and has a reasonably (for microwave popcorn) satisfactory popped/unpopped ratio. Here's how it works:

Microwave Popcorn in a Jar
You will need:
Glass Jar (The wider the bottom, the better; you will be able to make more popcorn in a single batch)
Something That Is Not Metal And Can Safely Be Microwaved With Which To Cover The Jar (I used a ceramic plate)
Popcorn Kernels
Olive Oil
Hot Pads or some other insulative material to protect your hands as you remove the jar from the microwave

NOTE: Do not use anything that will create an airtight seal on the jar (e.g. a plastic screw-on lid) because the popping of the popcorn releases steam; if the jar is sealed, pressure will build up inside it as a result of the popping. This could cause the jar to explode, and that is a completely different experiment from this one!

Optional additional items:
Your favorite salt for popcorn
Other toppings

Drizzle olive oil into the bottom of the jar until the bottom is covered, then add a bit more
Add enough popcorn to get a layer 1-kernel deep across the bottom of the jar
Shake it up to try to ensure that all of the kernels are oiled (the oil gets heated by the microwaves and transfers that heat to the kernels, causing them to pop)
Place jar into microwave and cover with the not-metal microwave-safe jar cover
Microwave for 2 to 2.5 minutes, or until 2-3 seconds pass between pops
You'll have to listen closely, as the jar is much more soundproof than your typical paper bag and it muffles the popping
THE JAR WILL BE REALLY FREAKING HOT. Carefully, using a pair of hotpads or other insulating material, remove the jar from the microwave and dump it into a serving bowl
Add salt and other toppings as desired
Consume, relishing the taste of hot, fresh science!

Mwahahahahaha!!!

tcepsa — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 04:15:55 GMT

I will do Science to it! BD

Things I want to get done this year

tcepsa — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:34:02 GMT

In 2009, the highlight of the year was definitely the part where I got married to gipsieee. There were some other good things, like getting the porch reparged and maintaining straight A's in my Master's program, and there were some things that I'd like to have done better or more consistently, like house maintenance and mowing the lawn and playing videogames (though 2009 was actually a decent year for me and gaming; I am apparently coming out of the "I don't get to play videogames until EVERYTHING ELSE is done" zone, which will probably paradoxically end up with me getting more stuff done).

That having been said, here are some things that I'd like to make sure get done in 2010. Some of them are specific one-offs, and some of them are more habit/lifestyle changes.

1) Use gloves when cleaning up after making food. With that added layer of invincibility (and not having to adjust the faucet if I get it too hot or clean my hands off if I get them all gunky and need to go do something else briefly), cleaning seems much less daunting. This may just be a temporary NRE thing, but hopefully it will persist if I do.

2) Improve my flexibility and posture. Sounds like a sales-pitch for a yoga class, but this has been an ongoing desire of mine for years. The trapeze class last fall made me realize that I can actually build up my strength to levels that make me a lot happier in not-a-huge-amount of time. I am hoping to learn and practice some stretching techniques that will have a similar effect on my flexibility and posture.

3) Re-floor the basement. Now that we have the tiles up, time to put something better down! This is primarily a daunting project because it's big, it's permanent, and I've never worked with floor epoxy before. Mental note: do some kind of practice run first.

4) Increase my R-factor! In Autumn 2008 I learned that the upstairs of my house isn't really insulated for crap. In 2009 I got a better handle on what I'd need to do to prepare for someone to come in and fix a lot of the current problems. In 2010, I want to actually address the things that I need to take care of and then make the rest of it happen.

5) Legal paperwork. Get Gipsieee on everything that we want to own together, and get our wills finished.

6) Budget. Get everything relevant into Quicken and figure out what we really have to work with for building our lives together, how realistic our current dreams are, and what we need to adjust.

7) Get good at Clojure. There's a philosophy that suggests that software developers try to learn a new language each year. I got my feet wet with Clojure in 2009 and I am really excited about it, so it's going to be the language that I try to learn for 2010.

8) Make significant progress on Mandarin. We've had the CD for over a year and gotten two upgrades, but I haven't made it past Chapter 3. I want to get at least to 15, if not finished, by the end of the year.

9) Continue cooking. It's awesome, and I want to get better at it. I also want to get better at organizing myself for it, so that when it comes time to actually do it I don't feel overwhelmed and cranky about having to.

10) Maintain grades. They're great, and I want to keep them that way ^_^

11) Videogames! Focus on ones that I like, don't waste times with ones that I don't like.

12) Fiddle. Coming along nicely, but my practice schedule--such as it was--got disrupted by the holidays. I want to be practicing at least 15 minutes 4x/week by the end of the year. 5x/week would be awesome. 6x would be fantastic, but at this point seems unlikely. Maybe that'll be a 2011 goal.

New Year's Resolutions

tcepsa — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:14:29 GMT

900x1440 and 1280x1024

Signal Boost

tcepsa — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 06:24:55 GMT

Because this is unacceptable and I am PISSED: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/11/dr-peter-watts-canad.html

This.

tcepsa — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:57:09 GMT

(Minus a couple of personal-life details ^_^)

First off, I’m actually perfectly well off. I live in a good-sized house, with a nice yard, with deer occasionally showing up and eating the roses (my wife likes the roses more, I like the deer more, so we don’t really mind). I’ve got three kids, and I know I can pay for their education. What more do I need? The thing is, being a good programmer actually pays pretty well; being acknowledged as being world-class pays even better. I simply didn’t need to start a commercial company. And it’s just about the least interesting thing I can even imagine. I absolutely hate paperwork. I couldn’t take care of employees if I tried. A company that I started would never have succeeded -- it’s simply not what I’m interested in! So instead, I have a very good life, doing something that I think is really interesting, and something that I think actually matters for people, not just me. And that makes me feel good.
-- Linus Torvalds -- 8/15/07 -- http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/TechGovernment/News.asp?id=44682&PageMem=2 --

"In bits no keyboard stroke had flipped"

tcepsa — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 04:44:14 GMT

I'm working on my final project, which is due on Friday, but took time out to say goodnight to gipsieee. We snuggled in bed for a bit and talked about Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken. As I climbed out of bed to return to my project, I told her I'd be back in an hour or so unless I got really caught up in things, which got me the following in response.

"Yet knowing how code leads on to code
I'm thinkin' I'm gonna be sleepin' alone..."

A Day Late, But No Less Meaningful

tcepsa — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:54:57 GMT

I am thankful for gipsieee. For her support of my hobbies, and my geekiness, and my wackiness. It makes me incredibly happy to know that she's looking forward to our next camping adventure, and that we have Bromptons, and that we're seriously looking at making or buying a tiny house in the soon-enough-that-I-can-keep-being-excited-about-it-rather-than-tell-myself-no-you-have-to-wait-it's-too-far-away-to-really-think-about-yet timeframe ^_^ I'm also thankful that she's been encouraging and helping me learn how to cook since we started dating; I think dinner yesterday has been our biggest triumph so far. We're going to be eating well for quite some time!

I'm thankful for my job and my coworkers. Last year was not so great as I spent most of it working on things that I'd really rather not have been working on (realistically, the tasks themselves were fine; it's the codebase that I really wish I hadn't had to deal or interface with). This year is shaping up to be a lot more fun and more interesting and less wondering "what am I going to break with this?" and I'm really looking forward to it. I'm also really glad that they're putting me through a Master's degree; I'm loving the classes that I've been taking so far, and I think they've helped me develop as a, um, developer. So that's good. ^_^

I'm thankful for my family, both sides, who called me up to wish me a happy birthday even though Thanksgiving was the next day, and who did so much towards helping our wedding be the wonderful occasion that it was.

Contrived Example of the Importance of Polymorphism

tcepsa — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:19:15 GMT

(Posted to the local Java Users Group mailing list. Reposted here for your edification, or at least hopefully enjoyment ^_^)

There are lots of reasons why polymorphism (one object being treated as a different kind of object) is a valuable thing to have in a programming language.

As a fanciful example, let's say that you are the MI6 program and you
have an object reference called "doubleOhSeven" that refers to an
instance of class Spy.

The Spy class extends (is a subclass of) the Person class.

The Spy class has an instance variable "car" that refers to an
instance of class SpyCar. So doubleOhSeven has a spy car that he can
use in his missions.

SpyCar extends (is a subclass of) the Car class, which has instance
variables like "gasPedal" and "steeringWheel" and methods like
accelerate(float rateOfAcceleration) and honk(float duration).

In addition, the SpyCar also has instance variables
"hiddenCompartment" and "rocketLauncher" and methods fireRocket(Object
target) and selfDestruct(int delayInMilliseconds)

Now, say that doubleOhSeven has been assigned a mission, and he's
trying to win the trust of beautifulWoman who is somehow connected to
the suspiciousOrganization he is supposed to infiltrate. She's
expressed an interest in his car and wants to take it for a spin. If
he lets her drive, then she'll like him and tell him her secrets (at
least that's how it always works in the movies, right?) At the same
time, he isn't sure how far he can trust her; she might be in on the
organization's shadier side, or she might just be part of the front.
Either way, he doesn't want her firing rockets at anything.

So he gives her the car, but instead of telling her that it is a
SpyCar, he pretends that it's just a Car. He can do that because it
has all of the things that a Car has and behaves just the way that
beautifulWoman (who can use Cars) would expect a Car to. She drives
it and doesn't suspect anything, has a great time, gives the car back
to him and spills her secrets to him. He later successfully
infiltrates the organization, and sufficiently damages them to put
them out of business, but then something goes wrong. His cover is
blown, he's getting shot at, and his enemy will follow him to the ends
of the earth to see him destroyed. He jumps into the car to buy some
time because its materials are all BulletProofed subclasses of
standard Car components. In addition, since he knows it's a SpyCar,
he can use the SpyCar specific methods. He calls
car.selfDestruct(90000), then car.fireRocket( badGuys ) (badGuys is a
List) to create a distraction. While they're milling about, he sneaks
out of the car and dives behind a convenient stack of crates just as
the car detonates. None of the badGuys saw him get out of the car, so
they report back to their ringLeader that doubleOhSeven was garbage
collected along with the car, and ringLeader calls off the search.

In which I swoon over automation and gripe about popular user interface models

tcepsa — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:11:42 GMT

Oh AutoHotKey, is there anything you can't do?

My capslock key is now a middle mouse button and I have smooth scrolling whenever I want it despite my two-button trackball. All it took was Capslock::MButton.

UI tweaks FTW! ^_^

When I first found out about 3-button mice, and that the middle button often caused it to go into smooth scrolling mode, my first thought was something between "Well that's annoying!" and "Meh?" It never seemed to respond the way I wanted, I didn't have a 3-button mouse at home so I couldn't really use it, and mice whose scroll-wheels also acted as middle-buttons were just really annoying, because it's a pain in the butt to keep it from scrolling while you're trying to click.

Besides, I have a perfectly good set of arrow keys right here and, failing that, there's a scroll bar. With arrows if I don't want to scroll very far.

That worked out for me just fine for several years. However, for some reason (quite possibly the rise of the touch display) I have in about the last two weeks become painfully aware of just how cognitively unfriendly those methods are. The arrow keys, for example, tend to move things line by line, or possibly even a couple of lines at a time. This makes sense; they're toggle buttons and are either off or on, so the easiest thing to do is "when you get this keycode, move the text by a line." There's no way to modulate the speed they go at, so they have to go fairly fast (which is compensated by the fact that they only go so far each time you press them so you know approximately what you're going to get). Unfortunately, when that happens, everything is shifted and your eyes have to take time to seek out the location where they had been (this is especially egregious in things that don't actually move by a line of text--web browsers, I'm looking at you--but instead by some fixed amount of pixels, so you might end up with another line and a half of text, or two-and-a-third new lines of text). It's a small break, it takes a fraction of a second, but it is still an interruption and is, I believe, deleterious to maintaining flow.

The arrows on scroll bars are in some ways better and in some ways worse. When you click one, it usually moves things by a pixel or two, much easier for your eyes to follow. But it does it so slowly that you have to click several times, or hold down the arrow. That does scroll pretty smoothly in most cases, but you're still limited to one speed--and usually it's a speed that's too fast to actually read at, but too slow to get anywhere quickly.

Next, the scroll bar itself. This is good for getting around quickly... sort of. It is good because you move the mouse and the page moves in accordance with the speed at which you moved the mouse. However, it is bad because this is proportional not only to the speed at which you moved the mouse but also to the amount of content on the screen at one time versus the amount of overall content in the document/image/thing being viewed. If you have two screenfuls of text, you can move the mouse pretty quickly and not get terribly lost; it generally moves slowly enough that you can keep track of where you are, even if you're slinging the mouse around at a decent clip. (I have just demonstrated this to myself in the textbox for this journal entry ^_^) However, if you have, say, hundreds of pages of text--PDF's, I'm looking at you--then the scrollbar handle becomes very hard to grab on to and if you even move it a couple of pixels you could end up several pages away from where you had just been, and they've gone by so fast that you are now completely lost. So it's great for moving around quickly, but tremendously poor for getting anywhere specific.

Finally, paging (pgup, pgdn, and clicking in the scrollbar somewhere that's neither the arrow or the handle). This is another blessing and curse, and is largely subject to the same complaints as the arrow keys: it moves by a fixed amount, but usually the amount by which it moves is suboptimal. Again, trying it in my browser text area for this journal entry, I find the results to be frustratingly arbitrary: if I click in the scrollbar area to move the page down, the bottom line becomes the top line. That's annoying because if I'm paging, my brain really wants to assume that the new top line would be the one following the previous bottom line, so it's another little hiccup where I go "Oh, no, wait, I already read that, hang on, is there anything else I've already read on this 'new' page? No, okay, moving along..." Even worse, if I use the page down key, the bottom two lines become the top two lines (WTF?!) The only really good use I have found for paging is in PDFs (so they do have some redeeming qualities ~grin~) when I'm viewing them in one-full-page-at-a-time mode, and then it actually flips me to the next page.

Against this context, smooth scrolling looks like maybe it's not such a bad plan after all--especially now that I've remapped that capslock key and turned it from a liability into an asset.(Seriously, does anybody actually use capslock other than by accident or to yell at people on the Internet? If you want to yell at someone on the Internet, you should have to make the effort to hold down the shift key while you do it.) Just press a key, move your mouse a little, and away it goes. If you don't move your mouse too far, it'll go at a speed that you can keep an eye on it and watch for the place you want to get off. If you want to go a little faster, it's easy to change speeds so you can slow down and check whether you're close to where you want to be. I especially like it for reading long things (like LJ) because I can set it to scroll at about the same rate that I read, so I no longer have to do much manipulation at all beyond that initial setup. Sure, I have to tweak it now and then if I want to spend more or less time on something or I have to look away, but so far it still seems very preferable to having to re-find my place every time I get to the bottom of the screen.

I'll probably try to put up a follow up post in a few days/weeks/months to confirm/retract this entry as I get more usage, but for now, yay smooth scrolling!