All things technology. Very popular here on Justinsomnia.
with dad. over IM. that was fun, i learned a lot. it’s nice to work through conceptual things with someone who has massive implementation experience. it’s almost calming and zenlike: “this is the way we’ve found to do things that is the best.” it’s funny. kind of like god, except god/dad is saying stuff like *with deep booming voice*: “your main method should only have three lines of code.”
and so i wrote only three lines of code, and it was good.
so here i am, home from new orleans, feeling like a little unfiltered stream of consciousness to end the day.
yesterday i woke in chapel hill and flew to new orleans for lunch. did some work and had an amazing dinner, duck appetizer in crepes, salad, and the most wonderful duck for dinner. with a beer before dinner at the bar and a half bottle of wine with, my night was complete. well, almost complete. can’t forget the obligatory stroll down bourbon street, with obligatory beads and obligatory onlookers. we can now say trip #4 to the big easy is complete.
today some work, some lunch, and then some riding in the plane. unlike most trips where i feverishly try to make database improvements up until the last possible moment, during this short trip i pretty much sat in meetings and listened, voicing an occasionally cautious note of “maybe we shouldn’t have me do anything until we figure out what it is we want me to do…” fun though watching the process of telling faculty and researchers things like: we need you to find a way to spend $750,000 quickly.
it does seem there is a pressing need for greater access to and centralization of all manner of information, with the web being the most obvious candidate for extending access to people outside the office. unfortunately microsoft access makes doing that a wee bit tricky (which is good for microsoft, forces most people to purchase SQL Server) but bad for us techy chaps who’d rather roll our own system out of whatever else seems appropriate and free.
more and more i’m questioning the viability of the traditional table data structure and thinking more in terms of ‘documents’ as the starting point. it seems to me that something is lost when we take what start out as documents and chop them up to fit in a database and suddenly have limited powers for reconstituting the original document (as a document). maybe if we left the document as a document, impose some rigorous structure (xml?) and provide some way to query a collection of documents (xquery?) as if a database, we could forgo using a database in some cases altogether.
oh, and my last thought: user interfaces. access is nice, but really it mostly sucks. the web is insufficient, but… mozilla is not. if rather than using $300/per user access as a user-interface client to access data in $0 mysql database with $0 myodbc so that $0 php can spit the data out to web, maybe we just ought to use $0 mozilla and its XUL+CSS+Javascript technology to replace the access user interface. i wonder how feasible/powerful that is? glad i bought the $40 mozilla book by oreilly (which is also available online for $0) to read for fun.
i’m working on a database to track trainings for a project in kenya. somehow the kenyan(s) who designed it initially created one massively big flatfile (picture a very large excel spreadsheet with lots of gaps and duplicates) to hold all the data.
so i just really started pouring some of my energy into this, about 10% of which has so far gone into creating the design, and about 90% of which has been spent taking the data from this massive flatfile and cutting out the dups (one entity at a time).
my supreme goal however is to see how fast I can prototype this system from start to finish. i’m talking design, data, user-interfaces, and reporting. by the end of thursday? friday maybe? if you consider data massaging is almost done (probably another hour or two) and reporting is fairly straightforward afterthought, the big question is how fast can i scale up some fully-functional, professional user-interfaces?
JW: i’ve finally broken the access/vba learning curve. i’m actually programming, like a madman. … (meanwhile I’m researching like crazy for a programming alternative)
BW: What do you mean “(meanwhile I’m researching like crazy for a programming alternative)”. For example, what would that be?
JW: I guess i meant an alternative to vba. Another language. not an alternative to the act of programming in general.
BW: Why is it I cringe every time you say VBA, maybe because it’s so Microsoft. Keep looking…
funny that i’m finally managing to do cool things with something i find so revolting. there seems to be a constructive pattern worth extracting here: that we excel under adverse conditions–and that being actively hyper-conscious of said adversity makes it easy to ignore (and trample) the sacred status quo.
since not all situations are inherently crappy, you too can fool yourself into perceiving them as crappy. this isn’t as masochistic as it sounds—all you need to do is raise your standards, or find something particularly ‘sensitive’ or ‘broken’ and make a lot of noise.
what i’ve learned is that though the strategy above works on many situations: work, school, hobbies, home improvement, self-improvement, physcial fitness, etc., it does not work on friendships. it seems painfully obvious written down, but people still raise their expectations of others and send out blistering criticisms in hopes of livening up a limp relationship.
*visual basic for applications – the programming language ’embedded’ in all microsoft office applications
wow.
Update: This is, by the way, my third blog post. Ever. Anyway, the reason I wrote it and the reason I’m updating it is to say that at the time I posted this, I was reading an excellent book about the history of Xerox Parc called Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. Check it out.