Crazy ideas

Posted by wizzard0 on

I hope for a discussion, and maybe for the like-minded ones. Drilldown on request.

Here are cool things that would be cool to implement, if only for a concept. Plus I know how.

  • P2P instant messenger (possibly, even a blogging system). For added lulz – browser-based, secure and anonymous. Even a free hosting or a HTML file on your computer will suffice, but Chrome/Firefox extensions will be even better (yes, I’m crying the blues and envy Diaspora developers, because just too lazy to get up and launch a fundraising PR campaign for more developers and designers)
  • Development environment a la Pharo (self-contained environment), encrypted and fully polymorphic. And the software created with it should have those capabilities, too. Moreover, if desired, it should be able to turn back into editable source code (see below about the IDE)
  • Lifelogger (hardware and software “black box”, that would collect the objective statistics about what is happening with its owner. It’s a treasure for medicine and forensics, IMO. Good as an exo-memory, too.)
  • Cross-translator for Python/C#/JS/AS/(your-language-goes-here), working in any direction. Perhaps, with enough craziness it should be able to support even functional languages, it would be like a supercompiler (a term) of sorts, tuned for minimizing code size, not speed (by abstracting out recursions, etc). Because that’s a pity that so much code is already written, but lots of people are involved in cloning existing code to new platforms, f.ex. Given enough metadata about the platform, it could be automated.

And for these, there are still open questions, but could be possible too.

  • Graph-based database with user-friendly UI and PIM built on top of it, transparently synchronized between user’s devices. Including cell phones and BT headsets, f.ex.
  • Software IDE which would grow it from semantic specifications. Disguised as a digital pet making game. And then, on the basis of the accumulated experience…
  • Knowledge-mining system that would deal with (foreign) intelligence and eliminate the need to read shitloads of garbage just to find interesting projects among others.
  • 3d-space-sandbox game (online and browser-based, too), not too realistic, but with explorable planets, destructible and constructible/designible ships and buildings.

And lots more. Need to fix my self-confidence and do.

[Russian version of this post, please discuss there, plenty of commenters understand English too]

after the attempts of making green threads on .NET

Posted by wizzard0 on

In the free software scene “we support feature X” – “hooray, we successfully reproduced one of the X’s usage scenarios!”, and in the commercial (non-free as in non-free beer) software scene “we support feature X” – “we will preserve compatibility of feature X in accordance to the specifications during this and\or next release cycle”.

Seems like i like the second definition more…

How should the graph look like?

Posted by wizzard0 on

If you draw it on paper, it looks natural.

If you make it out from the matches and jar – it looks natural, too.

And the text is somewhat cumbersome. Trees show beautifully (JSON, s-expressions and others). Lists – even simpler. But what about graphs?

Yes, you can use names and references (most of programming languages, YAML, etc).

Is there any other methods?

sane posts about Linux vs Windows

Posted by wizzard0 on

[RU] http://dlinyj.livejournal.com/467800.html from the advanced user standpoint

[RU] http://www.fclab.ru/2009/10/20/770/ bird’s eye industry overview (beware of trolls in the comments btw)

I want to underline that the low prevalence of the software for geeks is normal. When the market share is less than 20% – it’s called niche product. And that is good, because mass product means very different requirements, for example, favor of unification over the ability of fine-tuning. Linux won’t die, it has enough users, but unlikely to become the main OS, which (as a brand) is known to billions of *end* users

We don’t have a leading* browser today. And nobody complains. Moreover, people started to think about standards and compatibility. Just don’t try to push the software outside its applicability area. It’s the main point, i think.

*leading = more than 60% of users

personality bipolarity

Posted by wizzard0 on

at nights i’m happy and euphorical, because the self-sufficient TRIZ wakes up, which combines loads of encountered thoughts and objects in arbitrary ways, and the resulting ideas spit out at an enormous rate, literally dozens a day.

and with the daylight, depression and annoyment comes, because i find myself in the noizy, distracting environment, night ideas became forgotten, and i can’t really do any tasks or materialize ideas, because of distractions

that’s how the latest 5 or so years of my life had passed…

Linkroll

Posted by wizzard0 on

They’re different, too small to write posts for each one, too large to just close them and forget.

Posts:

  1. [RU] http://ivanov-petrov.livejournal.com/1354796.html#cutid1 “New Social Class Separation”
  2. [EN] http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php “What colour are your bits?” ingenious article about different kinds of information and different kinds of dealing with information
  3. [EN] http://misko.hevery.com/2008/08/21/where-have-all-the-singletons-gone/ and http://misko.hevery.com/2008/08/17/singletons-are-pathological-liars/, “why singletons cause problems and how to avoid them”
  4. [RU] http://localstorm.livejournal.com/211164.html “About the rankings” (more precisely, how to evaluate values and risks in IT)
  5. [EN] appleinsider.com/…/why_apple_keeps_iphone_specifications_quiet – how people fight with abstraction leaks, at the same time making the device more user-friendly :)
  6. [EN] http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ – why the Wolfram Research tops my internal Evil Corporations Ranking :) (but they are unquestionably cool guys, yes)

Interesting blogs:

  1. [RU] http://www.sdfgh153.ru/ << “I write about Objective-C, Smalltalk, Ruby and Haskell. About aliens on spring and autumn, but only when i run out of the sedative drugs.”
  2. [RU] http://dimahardie.blogspot.com/ << “Dima Hardie” (most intense futurological/scifi blog to date)
  3. [EN] http://oleganza.tumblr.com/ << “Oleg Andreev is a ruby/io/actionscript/objective-c hacker writing about his personal experience in software development.” Should be interesting for the dynamic language adepts :)
  4. http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ << “Mini-Microsoft” insider blog about the corporate things in MS.

On Heuristics and Human Factors

Posted by wizzard0 on

In college computer science classes, we learn all about b*trees and linked lists and sorting algorithms and a ton of crap that I honestly have never, ever used, in 25 years of professional programming. (Except hash tables. Learn those. You’ll use them!)

What I do write – every day, every hour – are heuristics that try to understand and intuit what the user is telling me, without her having to learn my language.

The field of computer interaction is still in its infancy. Computers are too hard to use, they require us to waste our brains learning too many things that aren’t REAL knowledge, they’re just stupid computer conventions.

Wil Shipley ( http://wilshipley.com/blog/2009/08/pimp-my-code-part-16-heuristics-and.html )