Nelson Elhage wrote a post about Git and usability, in which he discussed one of the reasons why Git seems to be so confusing to users who have come in straight from a Subversion-style workflow. When discussing this issue offline, one of the things that came up was the fact that, while Subversion imposes a fairly rigid workflow upon its users, Git is flexible enough to do almost any sort of workflow. This is terrible for a user placed in a shop that uses Git: when they go Google for how to use Git, they’ll get any multitude of tutorials, each of which is for a different workflow.
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As treasurer for the Assassins’ Guild, I often have to beg and plead GMs to get posters for their respective games, since the UA Finboard has a requirement that, to get funding for events, you need to supply posters.
So I was quite surprised, amazed and impressed by Lauren Gust’s work on posters for Arcadia. The composition is simple, but effective, and definitely adds to the atmosphere of the game. Click for larger versions, and you can get full size PDFs of the posters in Lauren Gust’s public. For a little more background into what the posters are referencing, check out the Arcadia Rising scenario.
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In my younger days, the stylistic convention of MM/DD/YYYY confused me; why on earth would people opt for such an illogical system that placed months, days and years in non-hierarchical order? Surely something on order of YYYY-MM-DD would make far more sense: this format is sortable and, all-in-all, quite logical.
Eventually, though, I grudgingly accepted that MM/DD/YYYY, trades machine-friendliness for human-friendliness; after all, the year entry rarely changes, and for humans the month and date are the most important pieces of information. Context is usually more than enough to implicity specify what the year is.
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An unusual workflow for Git, one that Wizard employs extensively, is when a single developer needs to perform merges inside lots of working copies. Normally, a maintainer would pull from the branches he cared about, and offload a large amount of the work to those who were interested in contributing patches. However, Wizard is using Git to provide a service for people who don’t know and aren’t interested in learning Git, so we need to push updates and merge their software for them.
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A bad habit in the domain of cooking that I’ve picked up from being a starving college student is the propensity to cook all of the ingredients I have on hand. Combine this with the fact that vegetables make a lot of food, the fact that you were planning on feeding 15-20 people (but realistically only fed 10), and that Costco has very large portions, and you have a recipe for post-Mystery Hunt leftover disaster.
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Have you ever performed a merge in Git and not have it quite turn out the way you wanted it to? For example, you accidentally converted all of your UNIX line endings to DOS line endings, and now the entire file reports a conflict? Maybe you see a conflict that you don’t really care about resolving, and want to resolve as theirs? Or perhaps the conflicted file is empty and you can’t figure out just what happened there?
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Typeclasses matter. In fact, I’ll go as far to say that they have the capacity to replace what is traditional object-oriented programming. To understand why, however, we have to review the traditionally recognized benefits of object-oriented programming:
- Organization. For C-inspired languages that don’t have a module system, this is so incredibly important; without a discipline for organizing code finding the location of any given function is difficult unless you are intimately familiar with the problem domain. With object-oriented programming, all of these aspects are obvious: classes map into obvious filenames, methods go in obvious places, and overall organization is a function of how well the object model is designed, not how well thought out the include files were.
- Encapsulation. Objects were the first widely utilized method of hiding data and code from clients. Declare something
private or protected, and you have compile-time guarantees that your clients won’t have their grubby fingers all over your innards. Used properly, modularity follows. - Polymorphism. The ability to change behavior based on data is a powerful idea dating back to the days of
(void *), which can lead to incomprehensible code flow but more often is a more elegant and concise way of writing complicated interactions than a giant switch statement. These benefits compound in situations that multiple dispatch is appropriate, and interfaces can lead to compile-time assurances that a particular class does what it says it does. - Inheritance. While a problematic facet of object-oriented programming (especially when manifest as multiple inheritance), inheritance is still an extremely powerful mechanism of code reuse in object-oriented designs. Subclasses get a default implementation for methods, as well as the ability to break through a level of encapsulation and use
protected methods.
Typeclasses directly fulfill some of these requirements, while others are achieved due to Haskell’s strict types and module system.
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Update (September 1, 2012): This post is a bit out of date. I’m planning on writing an update, but the main new points are: if you have an SSD, the startup time of Sup is really fast, so you can easily run it on your laptop and you should use the maildir-sync branch, which gives you backwards synchronization of your labels (or my patchset, which is pretty sweet but needs to be polished and published.)
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The VX-8R is the first Ham radio I’ve ever owned; I have used the VX-7R before, but the extent of my usage of it was someone handing me the radio is “Here is the radio preconfigured to the frequencies you’ll need; here’s how squelch works; here’s how to debug common problems; don’t fuck it up.” Here are my impressions of the VX-8R
- Despite the sturdy construction, I am sending it back for warranty replacement. The battery indicator is defective; it is stuck at 100% battery while discharging, and 0% battery when charging. According to a HRO representative, this was highly unusual. Having to send the radio back for replacement is kind of obnoxious, but eh, what can you do.
- The Yaesu tries hard to be non-modal, but when it is it’s slightly difficult to tell what keys do what. For example, when scanning, pressing the PTT terminates the scan, but so does BAND and the arrow keys. PTT is actually a fairly reliable method for getting out of FOO mode
- I love the scanning interface. Hold UP/DOWN to initiate scanning, use the dial to nudge it if it gets stock on the wrong thing, whack PTT when you hear something interesting.
- The stereo headphone jack is by far one of the best things about the VX-8R, and partially offsets the suckage of needing two adapters in order to get a split speaker and PTT microphone set. I’ve, uh, been listening to a lot of FM radio with my Yaesu (perhaps not the most interesting use, but a use nonetheless!) The stereo plug is contained inside a somewhat appreciable well, so you may have some difficulty getting shorter jacks to plug in soundly.
- On the subject of mods, it appears that despite having been released about a year ago, the VX-8R still has no software mod software available. The current hardware mod only opens up MARS/CAP transmission frequencies.
Still no word about the microphone dilemma; I might just pony up some cash for a Pryme headset (they’re a smidge more expensive than I’d like them to be).
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Language selection is a contentious thing, and often a compromise between “pick the right language for the job” and “use as few languages as possible to increase mindshare.” Google, for example, limits the programming languages their employees are allowed to use; and I have come to associate picking whatever language you want for your own projects as irresponsible, having once been told, “Yeah… that project was written in X and no one besides the guy who wrote it knows X… probably not a good use of your time to work on it.” Of course, I’ve been quite culpable of this myself; I wrote the member dues tracking system for the Assassins’ Guild in Haskell, and unless a miracle happens I am kind of doubtful future maintainers will be able to deal with it.
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