Just A Summary

I just got word from O’Reilly, I’ve got press accreditation for European Open Source Conference in Amsterdam next month. So I’ll be interviewing various Perl 6 luminaries and hopefully summarizing any Perl 6 hackathon activities, doing photojournalistic stuff and generally enjoying the ‘hallway track’.

I expect I’ll also try and have a word with the Ruby people as well. The last OSCON I went to was a couple of years ago in Portland Oregon. It’ll be interesting to see how the European and US versions compare.

I’m 38. How did that happen?

It looks like the iPod Shuffle I bought in a fit of exuberance and silliness not long after it was launched is finally proving its mettle. Because it’s so tiny, it happily fits in my waistcoat pocket and supplies me with interesting listening on a boring trip to the place where I’m temping at the moment.

Once I get to work, it gets plugged into a USB socket and I’ve got a small programming environment with Ruby on Rails and a reasonably competent editor (it’s not Emacs, but Emacs is huge.)

Of course, now I want an iPod Nano, but I shall resist.

The trouble with version control systems is that, if you’re not careful, it’s almost as bad as having no version control at all. I’m currently juggling about 4 active branches of typo: the local development branch, the production branch and a couple of branches that isolate some of the local changes so I can make clean patches for the typo developers.

So far, I’ve managed to upload about 5 patches, and I’m still not sure if the patches that are up on the Typo tracker are sane. And back porting the clean new system’s been a complete nightmare.

Still, it could be worse. I could be still trying to understand the inner workings of Moveable Type.

So, I’m temping now, just another admin worker bee for the council. I can’t say that I’ve found my vocation, but it’s certainly an eye opener.

Tags’re great aren’t they? Yet another way of slicing through the thicket of information. The only problem with adding tagging support to your blog is deciding if you can be bothered to go back through the archives adding tags to everything.

I’m leaning towards the ‘not adding tags’ option.

There’s a print hanging above the reception desk at the place where I’m temping. It depicts a line of silhouettes of poplars. It bears the title Southern Trees

I’m finding it very hard to resist the urge to add a couple of bodies hanging from one of them. I wonder if the artist and whoever bought this print realised what they were evoking.

Shakespeare describes the Globe Theatre in one of Chorus’s speeches from Henry V, so it’s no great surprise that, when the newly rebuilt Globe opened its doors for the first time, Jane Lapotaire strode out between the two great columns and declaimed

O! For a Muse of Fire that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention.
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the setting scene

One of the great things that the internet allows us all to do with music is to share it. I don’t mean ‘sharing’ copyrighted material that we have ‘liberated’ from the media we purchased it on – I know enough struggling folk musicians to realise how important royalties are to those people.

What I mean by sharing is sharing the music we make ourselves.

A definition before we start:

intentional, a. (n.)

1. Of or pertaining to intention or purpose; existing only in intention. intentional fallacy: in literary criticism, the fallacy that the meaning or value of a work may be judged or defined in terms of the writer’s intention

2. Done on purpose, resulting from intention; intended. Rarely of an agent: Acting with intention.

The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed

If you do much reading about good coding practices, it won’t be long before you come across the phrase “Intentional Programming” which is claimed by Charles Simonyi of Microsoft. Read Kent Beck or Martin Fowler you’ll soon be familiar with the Composed Method pattern and its handmaiden the Intention Revealing Selector. Kent Beck wrote an entire book about the tactics of programming that turned on the concept of the composed method. If you truly grok this pattern then more strategic patterns flow naturally from it.

Kent has said that he views comments in code as indicative of either insufficiently well factored code or of badly named methods. From this viewpoint, Intentional Programming is writing code that makes our intent clear to anyone reading the code. Computers don’t care about style (or anything else for that matter). Humans care deeply, even if they don’t realize it. So, given a choice, choose to express your intent clearly.

That’s one way of reading Intentional Programming. An equally important way is to look at the second meaning of ‘intentional’ in that definition. In the light of that, ‘Intentional Programming’ becomes “Deliberate Programming”. Programming you’ve thought about.