Jay McGavren's Journal

The slide continues...

$ itch --find "Chemical Brothers We Are the Night" --print-info "%n: %r stars"
No Path to Follow: 3 stars
We Are the Night: 1 stars
All Rights Reversed: 2 stars
Saturate: 5 stars
Do It Again: 2 stars
Das Spiegel: 3 stars
The Salmon Dance (feat. Fatlip): 4 stars
Burst Generator: 3 stars
A Modern Midnight Conversation: 2 stars
Battle Scars: 2 stars
Harpoons: 3 stars
The Pills Won't Help You Now: 3 stars

…Come on, guys. Where’s the next Dig Your Own Hole? At least Saturate was good. (Blessed, blessed distortion!)

Man, Ruby-Gnome2 widgets are an absolute breeze. I got a GUI slapped together in four hours, and I had never even used input widgets before.

Going back to the Bhagavad Gita… I don’t have my copy handy to quote from, but it also talks about following your duty in life… I emphasize “your” there because it’s easy to find yourself doing the duties of another, in the pursuit of wealth. Your duty is determined by your inner nature, and going against it is the path to unhappiness.

I am rather literally doing the duties of another right now - the guy before me who retired. Writing convoluted programs in archaic languages to update mundane databases was this man’s nature. It is not mine. I’m being paid rather well to maintain these programs, but I am rather unhappy right now. It is my nature, and therefore my duty, to produce work that is substantially more elegant than this.

There is hope, though - evidently support for this old language might be going away, and that’s creating a drive in the organization to rewrite everything in a more modern language. It’ll be Java, of course (yech), but anything’s better than the mess we have now. My schedule’s a bit packed to be doing full rewrites, but I can barely motivate myself to keep working with the old stuff. I think I need to be looking very hard at reimplementations.

Scratch

http://scratch.mit.edu/

Reminds me of Logo, but the turtle can be any sprite you want, there can be any number of turtles, and there’s sound support and collision detection. The language itself is cooler, too: I don’t remember Logo having event handlers.

Lenny wants to program a game with me, and I think this is what we’ll be doing it in.

“Desire for the fruits of one’s actions brings worry about possible failure… When you are preoccupied with end results you pull yourself from the present into an imagined, usually fearful future. Then your anxiety robs your energy and, making matters worse, you lapse into inaction and laziness. … The ideal, Arjuna, is to be intensely active and at the same time have no selfish motives, no thoughts of personal gain or loss. Duty uncontaminated by desire leads to inner peacefulness and increased effectiveness. This is the secret to living a life of real achievement!” -Krishna, The Bhagavad Gita chapter 2