Jay McGavren's Journal

Just got this automated e-mail from our new Microsoft Project Server installation:

> Below are the latest schedule changes. Contact your project > manager if there are any problems with the changes. > > > Project: Admin Time Commercial Development Phoenix > 2005-2006 > Assign to: > ———————————————————– > Task Name: Sick Request > Start: Jun 1 ‘05 Finish: Jun 1 ‘05 Work: 2h Rem > Work: 2h > > Task Name: Bereavement > Start: Jun 3 ‘05 Finish: Jun 3 ‘05 Work: 0h Rem > Work: 0h > ———————————————————–

Well, yeah, I do have one problem: the fact that I’m scheduled for bereavement!

A tale of soul and swords...

Someone had left a copy of Soul Calibur II on the shelf in front of me at Target, and I finally decided to stop stalling. I showed the screenshots to Diana, saying “This is the game I told you about that’s similar to Dead or Alive 2. Interested?” Her answer was a giddy “Yes!”, so into the cart it went.

She’s a bit of a button masher, but she’s actually getting pretty good. After playing the section of the quest mode that requires you to parry to defeat your opponents, she can deflect a few of my attacks now.

DOA Ultimate’s Live support was awesome. Why, oh why don’t more fighting games have online capability?

Dunno where I stumbled upon the review of Head First Design Patterns from O’Reilly, but after reading the sample chapter online, I knew I had to have it. The style is easy to understand, condensed, and every bit as hyperactive as me (sidebars include conversations between Grasshopper and his master on the tao of object-oriented design, for example).

One hour with the first chapter, and I already feel comfortable with the Strategy pattern, something I might not have accomplished in a week with the original Gang of Four book. I also know how to make simulated ducks fly under rocket power as easily as with a pair of wings. What more could you ask for?

FOAF interests...

So I’ve been listening to the new Prefuse 73 album, and I hop on Google to do a little research. I read he’s doing a tour to support the CD, and it occurs to me to check to see if there are any Phoenix dates.

Holy crap, he was here last night. :( That was a chance that is unlikely to come again for some time.

I’ve been thinking for some time about a centralized system which you can tell about your interests in bands, movies, actors, games, whatever, and it will go out and find news on them for you. I’m sure Prefuse 73 has a mailing list I could subscribe to that would have told me about the tour, but that’s just one artist, and besides, it would have subjected me to huge amounts of spam from his label, possibly regarding unrelated artists.

No, I want a system that lets me build a list like this: prefuse 73 david fincher sonic the hedgehog the pillows …

And then keeps me informed on those topics, with a minimum of spam. It could even update my LiveJournal and FOAF interests lists for me at the same time.

Fortunately, nowadays you can create an RSS feed that provides you with the results of a Google News search, and I think that could be used to build a prototype. I think that little project will be going on my someday/maybe list.

Archy...

I’m typing this message in Archy, the Raskin Center Humane Interface. I’ve been waiting for this day roughly five years, ever since reading the (now late) Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface, which basically informed me that the entire direction human interfaces to software has taken for the last two decades has been wrong.

At one point, I was convinced I’d have to code this thing myself if I was ever going to see it, but here it sits on the screen in front of me; split-cursor blinking merrily away. A year ago, the installation instructions included directions to get Python and outdated versions of several libraries, because Archy wouldn’t work with the most current ones. Then the Raskin Center got a two-million-dollar grant to develop this (roughly coinciding, unfortunately, with Jef’s untimely death of pancreatic cancer). But his son Aza and associates have carried on, and now the program comes with a self-contained Windows installer. Evidently the Linux and Mac builds work fine too, although they’re officially unsupported while a few bugs are worked out.

So what the heck is it? At this point, little more than a glorified text editor. “Leaping”, a form of search, is absolutely central to its use, as there is no mouse. (Yay!) Rather than wait for a search dialog to load, I simply hold down the left Alt key to search backwards, or right Alt to search forwards through the text. It’s so easy and automatic that I find myself doing it a lot. If I don’t like the last sentence I typed, I simply leap to the period of the one before, highlight the text I leapt over, and hit delete. Gone in half a second. Infinite levels of undo (still available even after quitting the environment) ensure I can change my mind later. Demos can be found here to give you an idea.

Commands to use within the editor are easy to write, since they don’t need a GUI. I’m going to be submitting versions of several basic Unix utilities (sort, grep, etc.), and I expect each will take maybe a single night to code. There are already commands to access and respond to e-mail, right within the editor.

Most interesting is that Archy has no concept of files. “Document characters” separate sections of the text, which is auto-saved upon exiting and restored upon reentry. It’ll make work with formats where files are central (like MP3s, HTML documents, and Perl modules) quite challenging at first. I think it’s doable though.

One year from now, I expect this program will have replaced not only my text editor, but my e-mail client and iTunes as well, and I think I’ll be loving it. It’s that powerful. I’m already a lot less awkward than when I started typing this entry, and learning fast. Someday soon, I will likely refuse to work in anything else.