Did I not call it?

It’s not often I acutally manage to predict something useful. But today when reading Richard Dale on TiddlyWiki I thought “did I not call it?” Way back in June, too. A TiddlyWiki or RippleRap placed on an n810 which is borrowed for the duration of a conference makes an excellent tool for distributing schedules, monitoring updates to the conference programme, taking notes and keeping in touch. With the right UI and customization, that might be a selling point for conference organization bureaus doing larger commercial conferences, and it might save on paper, too (but be costly in terms of devices “lost”).

Bertjan triggered a lot of comments with his musings on code style. It’s a perennially good topic. Good because there are aspects of efficiency (assuming the compiler doesn’t handle it well enough), readability and maintainability, consistency and quality. For me a real eye-opener was a talk at VVSS 2006 concerning the correlation (not cause!) between certain harmless coding “errors” and real bugs in production code. My theory then as now is that such errors are indicative of sloppiness of some sort and that is a cause of real bugs. But getting the checks right without annoying developers is the real trick here: no one likes to be told “your code scores .. three turds.” On the other hand, being told “this stuff could be better, because ..” can be a good motivational tool. You can see it happen on -core-devel regularly.

Anyway, back to drawing pictures for some entries on DVCS. I really miss kolourpaint right now (seriously: raster graphics folks strongly encouraged to work also on apps that satisfy simple needs; I miss kolourpaint mostly because I don’t have it compiled right now.) Using the GIMP or CS3 for the kind of illustrations I want to do make me think that paper, a pencil and a cell-phone camera might be the best approach to graphics and illustration for me.

The Wayback Machine does not archive everything. Broken links are marked with a 💔.