I think it's been a good week for me, and by extension, for the company.
It has been a rare occurrence in my life to be working regular hours,
sleeping at the appropriate time, eating some number of square meals in a
day that is greater than one and getting to sleep at a reasonable hour.
Normally, working happens in fits and starts for me, and I struggle
painfully, waiting for inspiration to strike. As I've been hammering myself
into a routine and trying hard to eliminate distractions, though, I find
that my day has a certain natural rhythm.
Over the past few days, I have noticed a serious improvement emerging in my
habits. When 1pm rolls around, I am already thinking about what I'm going to
be coding. If I have a design problem, I start mulling it over automatically
as lunch approaches. I have also started a more regular schedule for
consuming caffiene, which seems to be helping me cope with A.D.D. Today, I
found a sushi place with really cheap lunch specials, and of course the
focus-friendly properties of raw fish are nice to have at reasonable
rates.
What does this have to do for the company? Well, I feel like I'm making some
serious progress on our most serious impediment to open signup right now,
which is really exciting. This is an invisible barrier which has haunted me
almost since my ill-fated experience with E.K. (my first software startup
project, when I was 14). Never got to see an actual box to put that software
in. Never got Divunal to an open beta, into the hands of actual players.
Never got any game at Ninjaneering off the ground to the point where real
customers were playing it. Finally, with real customers actually testing the
software, I'm getting ready to cross a finish line both personally and for
Divmod.
I suppose the eating and sleeping stuff sounds pretty mundane in comparison
to the eve of such an achievement, but for me, they're the same thing. I
don't know how to put it, if you haven't had a few hundred sleepless nights
and groggy afternoons yourself. It's a welcome and long-overdue change for
me, though, and I imagine there are a few readers out there hoping for the
same sort of transformation; I hope it sticks.
I'm going to have to stop with this blog entry now, because it's late, and
I'm tired. I'm going to sleep.
I am very, very bad at estimating how long software will take to write.
When I was very young, my mother was concerned that I never laughed or smiled, and having forgotten to pre-load my positronic net with the "humor" module, she realized she would have to do some work from scratch. I am told that the original transcript went something like this.
and so I replied, without a trace of
irony,
When I estimate programming tasks, I still have a similar sensation to when I was 2 years old and building that little picture in my head. Then, I grossly underestimated because I didn't have a mapping between astronomical distances and inches, because I didn't know what units distance was measured in among the stars. Now, I grossly understimate because I don't know what unit you can measure programming effort in. It's not "hours" because I can't reason about that - one does not do a uniform amount of work within one hour on a program, especially since several hours are spent thinking. I know various ways to measure finished programs, and I know of various ways to measure programs by specifying them to death - however, neither of these gives me the accurate estimate when I want it, which is to say, before work has begun and a great deal of resources have been invested. It is harder, and takes longer, in my experience, to accurately estimate (in hours) how long a program will take than to just write it in the first place; and even if you do go through that process, you can't estimate how long the esimation will take (and the estimation process cheats, by stealing work from the programming process so that it is shorter.)
All this thinking doesn't do anything to make the need for good estimates go away though. So how do you tell how big, or how hard a program is, without first writing the program several times and getting lots of different people to do it? When you know how hard it is, what units do you express it in?
When I was very young, my mother was concerned that I never laughed or smiled, and having forgotten to pre-load my positronic net with the "humor" module, she realized she would have to do some work from scratch. I am told that the original transcript went something like this.
Mom: Do you know how humor works?Now, my mother actually kept balls of yarn in various places around the house, and I had seen the moon, so this didn't strike me as very funny. I thought about how big balls of yarn were, how surprisingly long they were when unrolled, and how slowly they got smaller. Then I attempted to mentally estimate the distance to the moon, in terms of how quickly the balls unrolled, how quickly they got smaller, pictures in books of the relationship between the moon and the earth, and how far away other things I had seen were. I don't remember the rest of the conversation, but I distinctly remember the mental image that I built during this process, as it has stayed with me during the years. It looked like this:
Me: No.
Mom: I am going to tell you a joke, then. It is one of the first jokes that my brother used to tell.
Me: Okay.
Mom: How many balls of string does it take to get to the moon?
Me: Three.My mother thought this was hilarious, so my initial understanding of humor was that I should run up to everyone I met and say: "howmanyballsofstringdoesittaketogettothemoon?doyougiveupyet?THREE!HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA". Reading doc/fun/Twisted.Quotes in the Twisted distribution can show you how little it's progressed since then.
When I estimate programming tasks, I still have a similar sensation to when I was 2 years old and building that little picture in my head. Then, I grossly underestimated because I didn't have a mapping between astronomical distances and inches, because I didn't know what units distance was measured in among the stars. Now, I grossly understimate because I don't know what unit you can measure programming effort in. It's not "hours" because I can't reason about that - one does not do a uniform amount of work within one hour on a program, especially since several hours are spent thinking. I know various ways to measure finished programs, and I know of various ways to measure programs by specifying them to death - however, neither of these gives me the accurate estimate when I want it, which is to say, before work has begun and a great deal of resources have been invested. It is harder, and takes longer, in my experience, to accurately estimate (in hours) how long a program will take than to just write it in the first place; and even if you do go through that process, you can't estimate how long the esimation will take (and the estimation process cheats, by stealing work from the programming process so that it is shorter.)
All this thinking doesn't do anything to make the need for good estimates go away though. So how do you tell how big, or how hard a program is, without first writing the program several times and getting lots of different people to do it? When you know how hard it is, what units do you express it in?
As many of you know, I just returned from vacation. My first day back was
kind of crappy, so let's just pretend that didn't happen. The second was
pretty good though! I've had relatively few frustrations with technology,
and I've managed to start getting back in the groove work-wise.
My summer vacation was relaxing, but it wasn't fun. I didn't really go anywhere, but I caught up on sleep (LOTS of sleep) and I didn't stress out about anything. I didn't even work on my hobby projects very much, and I didn't do more than talk about Imagination for an hour or so. I did go to new york to see my father, my family and some friends, but I got back here in time to avoid the RNC. That was what I did with my summer vacation and I ate hibachi and tenth was there too. The end.
Evil Epilogue:
Today I finally got software suspend to work on my linux laptop. So, of course, what does any good hacker do when he has done something like this? take it for a test drive!
What better way to test-drive this than to go warwalking through my neighborhood. I was lucky enough to find not just an open access point - not just a high-bandwidth connection - but a linksys device with the password still set to the default and adminnable through wifi! The connection appeared to be idle, so I helped myself to a heaping helping of bittorrent ports and began to make merry in the park at midnight.
So now I'm writing some specs, playing some nethack, blogging, downloading, and generally having a good time in the park at midnight. Some late-night joggers have given me some really weird looks.
The best part of this is that I am actually looking at the message "Hello glyph, the elven Wizard, welcome back to NetHack! You are lucky! Full moon tonight." while there is actually a visible full moon directly in front of me.
And I'm thinking... wouldn't it be cool if I had a backpack full of solar-powered computers with wifi cards and repeaters that I could just sprinkle around the country... building a redundant, distributed filesharing overlay network on accidental connections... are there any such devices available for the average consumer-level evil genius?
My summer vacation was relaxing, but it wasn't fun. I didn't really go anywhere, but I caught up on sleep (LOTS of sleep) and I didn't stress out about anything. I didn't even work on my hobby projects very much, and I didn't do more than talk about Imagination for an hour or so. I did go to new york to see my father, my family and some friends, but I got back here in time to avoid the RNC. That was what I did with my summer vacation and I ate hibachi and tenth was there too. The end.
Evil Epilogue:
Today I finally got software suspend to work on my linux laptop. So, of course, what does any good hacker do when he has done something like this? take it for a test drive!
What better way to test-drive this than to go warwalking through my neighborhood. I was lucky enough to find not just an open access point - not just a high-bandwidth connection - but a linksys device with the password still set to the default and adminnable through wifi! The connection appeared to be idle, so I helped myself to a heaping helping of bittorrent ports and began to make merry in the park at midnight.
So now I'm writing some specs, playing some nethack, blogging, downloading, and generally having a good time in the park at midnight. Some late-night joggers have given me some really weird looks.
The best part of this is that I am actually looking at the message "Hello glyph, the elven Wizard, welcome back to NetHack! You are lucky! Full moon tonight." while there is actually a visible full moon directly in front of me.
And I'm thinking... wouldn't it be cool if I had a backpack full of solar-powered computers with wifi cards and repeaters that I could just sprinkle around the country... building a redundant, distributed filesharing overlay network on accidental connections... are there any such devices available for the average consumer-level evil genius?
Blame my
sister.
You are an enzyme. You are powerful, dark,
variable, and can change many things at your
whim...even when they're not supposed to be
changed. Bad you. You can be dangerous or
wonderful; it's your choice.
Which Biological Molecule Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
A brief list of things I can do with my new laptop in Linux:
Last time I had a laptop, getting these things working would have been a 6-month project, minimum. This time things are working in less than a week, even given a really stupid mistake that hosed my installation completely and forced me to re-do all the configuration work. It really blows my mind. The only thing that I really haven't gotten working that I have in Windows so far is software suspend, or "hibernate", and I know exactly what I need to do (but haven't yet because of the annoyance of a kernel compile).
I hope that works when I try it next, because if it works that will mean I have a portable, dual-boot, dual-display machine that can swap from Windows to Linux in a matter of seconds.
Linux still has a little ways to go in the "automatically detecting your hardware" department, but at least things work more or less the way they say they should these days, if you spend a moment with the appropriate documentation. I'm really pleased.
- Connect USB hardware (keyboard, mouse, camera)
- Display to multiple screens (internal flatscreen and desktop flatscreen at a different resolution) simultaneously)
- Connect to wireless networks, using a card which is not supported by linux, by loading the Windows NT driver for my card
- Connect to wired networks.
- Watch movies.
- Play OpenGL games with good hardware accelleration. (e.g., Neverwinter Nights)
- Play music.
- Use voice-over-IP, courtesy of Divmod and Shtoom
- Get accurate reports of remaining battery life.
- Conserve battery power when I'm not using the processor's full capacity.
Last time I had a laptop, getting these things working would have been a 6-month project, minimum. This time things are working in less than a week, even given a really stupid mistake that hosed my installation completely and forced me to re-do all the configuration work. It really blows my mind. The only thing that I really haven't gotten working that I have in Windows so far is software suspend, or "hibernate", and I know exactly what I need to do (but haven't yet because of the annoyance of a kernel compile).
I hope that works when I try it next, because if it works that will mean I have a portable, dual-boot, dual-display machine that can swap from Windows to Linux in a matter of seconds.
Linux still has a little ways to go in the "automatically detecting your hardware" department, but at least things work more or less the way they say they should these days, if you spend a moment with the appropriate documentation. I'm really pleased.