Adam L. Davis

My Brother's Music

Thu, 17 May 2012 16:20:15 -0400

My Brother's Music:

Check it out if you like Techno, Dubstep, House, etc.

Here’s Z on rails (ruby on rails).

Thu, 17 May 2012 15:59:04 -0400

Here’s Z on rails (ruby on rails).

Light Table

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:45:28 -0400

Light Table:

So, it looks like someone else was inspired by Bret Victor’s talk and decided to do something about it. This looks really cool and implements some of the same ideas I have for Z (code is broken down to functions, not files). It looks nice. I wish they would do Java/ruby (right now they are only targeting Clojure and Javascript) but still, looks awesome.

Buying Happiness

Mon, 07 May 2012 11:00:06 -0400

Buying Happiness:

Great post by Jeff Atwood about the latest science on happiness. I’ve been reading Stumbling on Happiness myself, and he makes a lot of the same points. What I find most surprising/interesting are the following:

Buy many small pleasures instead of one big one (another reason to go small)
Buy less insurance (I had a feeling this was true)
Follow the herd (we aren’t very good at prediction)
Buy experiences, not things

Complexity vs. Flexibility in a UI One of the things I’ve...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:00:19 -0400

Complexity vs. Flexibility in a UI

One of the things I’ve learned again and again in user-interface development is that flexibility (what you can do) is intrinsically linked to complexity (as shown in the above graph). Maybe this is just a truism, but I think it’s easy to overlook.

I think this story probably gets repeated a million different ways everyday all over the world:

We need the product to do this, that and the other.
A solution is built at point B in the graph.
OMG, that’s way to complex!
A solution is added at point A which does much less but is also way easier to use.
Then, maybe, features get slowly added to “A” adding additional points between A and B.
In some cases, even worse, “A” eventually gets so complex it overtakes “B” and keeps going, getting ever closer to a Turing Complete language (Code).

Even in the programming world itself, we have similar situations. Imagine a coding framework comes out that makes everything so much easier (in a specific domain). Rails was one such framework. Spring was another one. In these cases they start out at point B, but progress further and further towards what they replaced, plain old code. For Rails the domain was web-applications. I’m not saying there’s something intrinsically wrong with these frameworks; on the contrary they serve a great purpose. I’m just saying let’s not fool ourselves about where we are in the graph.

37signals and other like them flourished by building products towards the left of this graph: simple. Others, like Microsoft build things towards the right: complex.

If there’s something to learn here about UI-design, it’s you can hide a “B” UI by creating a bunch of “A” UI’s that do different things, and hiding them properly (like sub-menus or ribbons).

itsfullofstars: Happy Earth Day 2012

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:16:04 -0400

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

itsfullofstars:

Happy Earth Day 2012

Okay, here it is! I threw it together in a couple days, so...

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:00:11 -0400

Okay, here it is! I threw it together in a couple days, so I’m making no promises as to how well it works, but it kind of works (on a simple Maven project like itself). I’m calling it Z for now. Here’s the code on github: Z, experimental IDE. By default, it shows dependencies on the left and “sub-modules” on the right. It works with Java and Maven, but it has an api to theoretically work with other languages/build-frameworks. It uses neoeedit as a lightweight code editor. The next things I’d like to add are: controlling imports (as nodes), and drag-and-drop refactoring.

So, here’s a crazy idea I had. The idea is partly inspired...

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 10:14:08 -0400

So, here’s a crazy idea I had. The idea is partly inspired by Reginald’s talk (the part about how IDE’s are not well integrated with version-control, etc.), but really it takes ideas from many different places. I’m working on implementing a research-level test of this idea.

The core idea is looking at code differently; what if we abstracted away the idea of code being in files? Instead we should be able to visualize code in a more abstract way, but still reusing the concepts of objects, packages, methods, and “imports” - just in a more abstracted and visually appealing way. At the same time, version-control, and dependency-control should be seamlessly integrated (in the way that Go integrates dependency-control so nicely into the language).

Stay tuned.

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle (or "show the end result")

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 08:36:11 -0400

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle (or "show the end result"):

Really great talk about an alternative path or “career” in software which resembles social activism. I’m not sure that part really applies to many people but the stuff he demos is amazing.

Reginald Braithwaite - Beautiful Failure

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 08:27:56 -0400

Reginald Braithwaite - Beautiful Failure:

Interesting talk from CUSEC 2010 by Reginald Braithwaite. He makes some good points:

Don’t follow in the footsteps of sages (seek what they sought)
Don’t confuse correlation with causation (tools != success)
The plural of anecdote is not data
History is written by the survivors
A market for lemons (bad currency pushes out the good)
Local maximum (sometimes you need to leap)

Zed Shaw - The ACL is Dead (or why working at big companies sucks)

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 08:16:51 -0400

Zed Shaw - The ACL is Dead (or why working at big companies sucks):

I watched this video from CUSEC 2008. Partly it’s about how the ACL (Access Control List) is not a turing complete language, but mostly it’s about working within a huge corporation and all the crap thattends to go with it (and advice for programmers in general). I have very little experience of this, but he reminds me why I’m happy working at a small company.

Warning: Lots of cursing, and a little bit of southern accent

2011 Garden Recap

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:40:05 -0500

It was a fairly good year for the garden, although I didn’t get to devote much time to it. We doubled the garden size from the previous year and had two whole different seasons of growth (spring/summer, and fall). We can do this since we’re in Florida. We grew (in descending order of success): green beans, black beans, basil, tomatoes, radishes, various types of lettuce, egg-plant, green peppers, and spinach.

We also started a few pots of strawberries but I’m not really counting them since we haven’t had any fruit yet.

We had an unusually warm December, so we still have lettuce in the garden. :-)

Mr. Fancy Pants, Jonathan Coulton

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:56:00 -0500

Mr. Fancy Pants, Jonathan Coulton

TED: Shawn Achor: The happy secret

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:34:16 -0500

TED: Shawn Achor: The happy secret:

Really good talk about the “Happiness Advantage” and how you can cultivate happiness. If you like the talk, consider buying his book, The Happiness Advantage

"Anyway, if I was still in those stuffy, hateful rooms where they plotted to ban technologies, I’d..."

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:23:56 -0500

““Anyway, if I was still in those stuffy, hateful rooms where they plotted to ban technologies, I’d print out a stack of this Matador Network infographics, which are a handy guide to the pig-ignorant campaigns that Hollywood has waged against new technologies since the industry’s founders ripped off Thomas Edison’s patents and fled to California.”—Cory Doctorow”

- TODAY in BoingBoing. (via areasofmyexpertise)

BlackBeltFactory is now KnowledgeBlackBelt

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:01:29 -0500

BlackBeltFactory is now KnowledgeBlackBelt:

This is a link to my profile on KnowledgeBlackBelt, it has exams on Java, and many other programming-related things.

Jon Coulton

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:04:03 -0500

Jon Coulton

Grail, made using divvr

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 08:40:51 -0400

Grail, made using divvr

WWII poster (source: treehugger) I plan on expanding my...

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:03:42 -0500

WWII poster (source: treehugger) I plan on expanding my vegetable garden this year. Last year I had some success with okra, green peppers, cucumber, tomatoes, as well as basil and rosemary. There’s nothing like growing your own food. I highly recommend it.

"the stone age didn’t end for a lack of stones"

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:40:00 -0500

“the stone age didn’t end for a lack of stones”