Oliver Steele

Today my office is an airplane. I’m visiting the home office in San Francisco for the week. I get to remind everyone that those of us in the Boston office are real people (insert your favorite joke here), and come back with enough to understand what’s behind the email and phone conferences for another month.

One of the geek games you can play on an airplane is stretching out the battery life of your computer. I have enough batteries to last me through a six-hour flight now, but old habits die hard.

Since I save my files every minute or two, spinning down the hard disk isn’t an option. (I tend to use programs that communicate use the file system to communicate. And I don’t want to be in a position to lose more than a few minutes of work anyway.) I don’t usually use a CD or DVD player, so I’m already optimizing there. The CPU that I’m using steps down to 800MHz when the plug is out, so that’s taken care of for me. That leaves screen brightness.

Miles told me about the computers at his elementary school:

They’re running anti-virus software, but they’ve installed a virus! It’s called Novell. It makes the computer boot slowly, it does a lot of stuff while it’s booting, and then you can’t log on.

Patrick Roberts has written a fascinating post on Responsive User Interfaces. It’s easy to make a specific application responsive, through careful coding and by limiting what the user can do. An architecture for doing this, with arbitrary functionality, is one of the holy grails of GUI frameworks. Patrick’s post is a step towards this.

Patrick defines responsive as “the UI never locks up and provides at least partial results ASAP, not that every operation is completed instantaneously”. His design uses a UI thread that runs performs fast operations, and pushes slow operations onto a queue. A background thread runs these operations in priority order.

Python really is becoming lisp. With the type/class unification, decorators, and generator expressions, it’s jumped from 80 percent of Common Lisp + CLOS to 90 percent¹, and for web tasks the web programming libraries often make up the difference.

I gave Miles a set of Logo programming problems:

• sv 3 draws a square divided vertically into three columns
• sh 4 draws a square divided horizontally into four rows
• svn 3 4 draws a square with three columns and four rows

(These are going to build towards some work with fractions, but he won’t know that unless he reads my web site. Hi, Miles!)

The first thing he did was place a slider and a button on the screen. The slider ranges from 1 to 10, and the button calls sv with the value of the slider. He used these to test the program while he wrote sv, to quickly try it on different arguments without typing. When he added sh he added another button, and so on for svn.

Tucker asked me if there was a name for the phenomenon where someone you don’t know asks you to watch over their possessions. I’m asked to do this a few times a day, for anything from books to laptops, at the ERC. (At the yuppie establishments that I also frequent, I’m not asked at all.)

If you’re worried that a total stranger might steal your belongings, why is it safe to ask a total stranger to guard them? There are at least two reasons.

(For Miles.)

Read across the rows to see words that are easily confused with each other. Read down the columns to see the patterns.

Things to note:

• All of the contractions have apostrophes ’.