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Monthly Archive for June, 2006

There is something to a positive attitude

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on June 30, 2006
in Asides
. 2 Comments

“Positive thinking” can certainly be overdone, but I think has a bit of a bad rap these days. There is something to the idea, if nothing more than the fact that the person who is optimistic is more likely to act.

Let’s say you are thinking about creating a web application; not just a toy, but something to base a business on. A startup, if you will. Alarm bells might go off in your head — everybody is doing that, you might think. The market is saturated. There are more “web applications” out there than you can shake a stick at.

All of which is true. I don’t doubt, also, that if you were to share your hypothetical web application startup with someone, their first response would be something similar to the thoughts expressed above.

Consider this, though: will there be more successful web applications? The answer is almost certainly yes. Will there be more multi-millionaires created by internet software startups? Again, there almost certainly will. No, not everyone with a web startup will be one, but some will.

Who will they be, the next round of successes? Well, you can guarantee who they won’t be: they won’t be those who are now saying, The market is too saturated. Everybody is doing that now. There’s too many web applications out there already, and none of them are getting rich…

This isn’t to say that I’m going to start a web startup, or that you should; the same reasoning applies to anything. You can’t win the game if you don’t show up.

Just a thought before I go on vacation. :)

I’ll be in Vancouver, BC, for a week, and this site will probably be pretty quiet for most of that time. But then, I don’t think you’ll run out of things to read on the internet in the meantime….

Counting Infinities

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on June 29, 2006
in Asides
. 2 Comments

It’s safe to say that I became interested in computers, especially computer programming, because of math.

I don’t mean algebra or calculus, but the sort of mathematics that deals with logic, recursion, and paradox (or seeming paradox). My introduction to this sort of math was in the book Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, to which I recently paid a small homage in a post having to do with new years resolutions. Hofstadter’s book is full of interesting ideas, about math, art, music, and artificial intelligence — and somehow or another, it all also ties in to computers. At some point I decided that if this was what computer science was all about, then that was bound to be pretty darn interesting.

Back to math. An interesting thing to think about is simply the idea of counting.

Counting probably seems pretty boring; it’s possibly the most basic math-related concept one could think of. However, there are a lot of interesting ideas related to counting.

Continue reading ‘Counting Infinities’

Gliffy: Visio killer?

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on June 28, 2006
in Asides
. 2 Comments

Gliffy looks extremely cool; it’s intuitive and smart, and my first impression was that this would be a genuinely useful app.

Gliffy is an online diagram-creation application. It has shapes for flowcharts, floorplans, networking, even UI design. You can print your diagram directly, or save it as a SVG, JPG, or PNG file — pretty good options, I’d say. Below is a test diagram I made in just a couple minutes…

My hesitation is that it is built entirely in Flash; the Linux flashplayer, I’ve found, frequently breaks complex flash applications/designs. (The Doom3 web page was a famous example). I’ll be able to test Gliffy on Linux later; hopefully I’ll be pleasantly surprised. If it works, then I don’t have a problem with it; I’m not one who is very worried about software being RMS compliant.

Check out gliffy; if you ever need to make diagrams at all, it looks like a handy (free) tool!

Save The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on June 27, 2006
in Asides
. 4 Comments

Now that that’s off my chest (see previous post), please remember to help Save The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.

A focus as razor sharp as a baseball bat…

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on June 27, 2006
in Asides
. 4 Comments

Conventional wisdom for creating a successful blog is that you keep your focus razor sharp. Write to your niche, the advice goes; whatever your passion (or preoccupation) happens to be.

I’ve more or less tried to do that; at least, intermittently. I do tech support, work a lot with Linux, and various related activities — so that’s what I decided I would “focus” on; mainly tech support. In practice, this has become more of a general tech blog, with topics threading in and out of my various other tech-related interests, mainly web or programming related, with the occasional foray into math or politics (which are not necessarily unrelated).

The problem is, I have a significant interest, and spend a significant amount of time thinking about other things; specifically, topics related to practical Christianity. I’m a Christian and a Bible teacher outside of the 9 to 5 world, so it’s certainly reasonable that that would be something I think about as well.

It has always seemed somewhat incongruous, to me, to follow a post about installing Linux with one about a literal interpretation of the letters of Jesus to the seven churches, in the book of Revelation. Then after talking about faith, or revival, or some other such topic, to follow up with “Google launches fart.google.com” seems a bit odd as well.

The problem, for me, is that I’d really like to write both of these type of posts.

For awhile I tried keeping a separate blog, called What would Jesus blog? (a title I owed to some of Brian Bailey’s creativity)… Somewhat predictably, it soon became only intermittently updated, and eventually not updated at all (I’ve since discontinued it).

So, why say all this at all? Good question; the main reason is that I’ve decided to try to remove the self-imposed moratorium on writing anything “spiritual” on this blog. That’s not to say that every post will be about faith, the Bible, or being a Christian — but some will certainly be. Conversely, I reserve the right to stop and talk about Linux, Google, programming or the Lambda calculus if I feel like it, which could happen at any time.

There we go. See you later.

It’s been a nice vacation

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on June 25, 2006
in Asides
.

Yep, I haven’t written a thing in a week.

I don’t think I intend to stop altogether, but it was nice to take a break. It’s a pleasant reminder that I’m not keeping a blog for any particular reason… and there’s no need to feel like you “have to” write something.

For now, I’m going to sleep.

.9 repeating == 1

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on June 20, 2006
in Asides
.

Here’s a good, interesting article which attempts to explain why .9 repeating is equal to 1.

I’m an amatuer fan of almost all kinds of mathematics; by amatuer, I mean I’m not going to help you with your homework and I don’t spend my spare time doing math for fun (though I have, on occasion). But there’s hardly any branch of mathematics that I don’t find interesting in some way, and I generally welcome the opportunity to study it when I have time/opportunity.

The .9999…. == 1 idea seemed very non-intuitive to me when my college algebra teacher mentioned it for the first time… like most people (probably) it seemed obvious that it must be slightly less than 1… even if only imperceptibly less.

If you’re like me, probably your first inclination is also to think that 1 must somehow be greater than .999…. Well, it turns out we’re wrong.

As a note, the comments are quite interesting, if occasionally infuriating; it’s amazing to me that so many people are confident that their understanding of mathematics is better than that of those who have dedicated decades of their lives to studying and explaining it…

O’Reilly’s Safari Redesigned

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on June 16, 2006
in Asides
. 1 Comment

O’Reilly Network’s Safari service has just undergone a redesign.

This is not a drum I’ve beaten in awhile, but I’m firmly in the design matters camp. Design can mean a lot more than whether the product is “pretty” or not (for “product”, insert website, magazine, gadget, etc) — it can make the difference as to whether it is usable, functional, and intuitive, or not. It can mean the difference between a product that makes you go WOW! and one that makes you shrug your shoulders and move on.

It’s partly a science (or an art, if you prefer), but I think a great deal of it is also personal preference. I was pretty interested in Ma.gnolia when it was introduced, partly because of some effective marketing buzz, and partly because the site looked great (thanks to Zeldman and Co., I think). However, after using it for awhile, I eventually just stopped visiting. Is ma.gnolia “prettier” than de.licio.us? I’m sure it is. But I still wound up preferring de.licio.us… I’ve yet to put my finger on exactly why this is.

Maybe I’m not going to be able to express the why to that question — I have a feeling that, if I could, I could probably make a living as a highly paid consultant instead of a tech support professional blogging in obscurity… ;-)

Back to Safari: I like the redesign. I think it’s excellent, and not only that, I think it was needed. Their user interface has not changed too much, which is fine because it was quite good to begin with; in their case, much of the change is indeed aesthetic. Other changes are more subtle; it now seems to “remember” the last book I was reading, and takes me straight there. Transitions “feel” smoother, though I have no way to benchmark that.

My one gripe about the design is an ajax-ish feature which is not new to this design, but which remains… on each book’s “main page” you will see a brief summary. Under the summary is a button labelled “Expand”, which, if clicked, will smoothly slide down to reveal the rest of the truncated summary. Nice… but in almost every case, there is only an extra line or two of the summary revealed by this exercise. In many cases, the summary is so short that you can read the whole thing without clicking the “Expand” button (which is there anyways, ready to expand some helpful whitespace). It seems like a wasted feature — just an excuse to use some fancy Javascript where no such feature is really needed.

All in all, that’s a small gripe. If you are a voracious consumer of tech books, but don’t want to buy every single book that you just might need to refer to for a month or two (and may only need a few chapters from), I still recommend the Safari service. And kudos, once again, on the smart-looking redesign.

Backpack reminders in Google Calendar

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on June 15, 2006
in Asides
.

If you use Backpack, you might have noticed that the reminders feature is generated in iCal format — which means, among other things, that it is compatible with the Google calendar.

Using this is surprisingly simple; just copy the webcal link from your Backpack reminders page, and paste it into the search field below your list of calendars (left column, Google calendar).

It didn’t succeed the first time I tried it, but it did the second time — I’m not sure why. Also, I have heard that some users have found their timezones to be off when doing this, but mine were okay, so perhaps this is fixed.

Neverwinter Nights goes Roguelike

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on June 15, 2006
in Asides
.

Bioware just released a module for Neverwinter Nights called Infinite Dungeons. Basically, it generates a random dungeon each time you visit. Never the same level, always a different map, different monsters… why, it sounds like…

It sounds like Rogue.

You might be more familiar with Rogue variants/derivatives like Hack, Nethack, Moria, or a host of others. A hallmark of that genre were the “graphics” created entirely from ascii-characters (which didn’t detract from the gameplay whatsoever) — but one of the main features of most of the roguelike games was that each level was different, randomly created and populated, every time you visited. Some variants (I believe Nethack was one) kept the levels which you had already visited persistent, but others (Moria, at least) did not.

My personal introduction to these games was with a port of Moria to DOS. We spent (I won’t say “wasted”) hours exploring the “maze of twisty passages” which was created anew for us each level we visited. Among the most engaging features of the game was that it was actually challenging — and death was final. If you descended to a deeper level (they are harder as you go down) than you could handle you would die, and you would have to start over at level one. No saves, no resurrections, no joke. It was fun.

As plain as it might sound, this might just be the mod that gets me to reinstall Neverwinter on my PC…

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