Monthly Archives: July 2007

Are 80 Columns Enough?

Slashdot asks the question “Are 80 Columns Enough?” Luckily, we have several hundred years of “best practice” in trying to typeset material for maximum legibility to guide us.

Typography guidelines normally limit line lengths to fifty to seventy characters per line, often in narrow columns. The reasons are fairly well understood: your eyes have a fairly narrow range of acute focus (about three inches wide, and having long lines means that you have to have larger amounts of eye motion. You also have a tendency to lose track of where the next line begins when you shift back to the left when lines are long relative to the size of the type you are using.

It is true that most programming languages result in text which is considerably less dense than most prose. It is considered good form to make use of indenting to illustrate the basic blocks of your program, and to break programs into a series of modules which can be fairly easily assimilated by themselves. This by necessity creates a large proportion of white space which one might reasonably deduce softens the effects of long lines, but I know of no research which actually suggests that is true. Anyone?

In the end, I’m guided by a principle that I first heard from Tom Duff: good programs can be read like prose, starting at the top, going to the bottom. Anything which causes you to leap your attention up and down or interrupts your ability to read the code should be viewed as stylistically and structurally questionable. I think that long lines certainly qualify. Often they are used to justify long and confusing combinations of boolean conditions, or to simple cram more operations in a single line. Neither practice enhances legibility, and therefore the reasons for having long lines is on pretty tenuous grounds.

There’s my two cents.

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Brainwagon Radio

Brainwagon RadioFor those relative newcomers to my blog, it might shock them to find that I actually used to record a rather geeky podcast. After recording 98 episodes, many using my Dell Axim x50v in my car, I decided that I was working too hard at it, and decided to fold my tents. As part of my reconstruction of my website this week, I realized that all the links to these audio files are currently broken. That’s probably not a great tragedy to anyone but myself, but I think I’ll spend some time this week fixing that, and going back through them all, retagging them and making them available for download once again.

Stay tuned for an update! Okay, now I’ve got them all uniformly named, with sequential tags, and fixed a few of the broken titles that I had. I haven’t yet gotten all the broken links rewired, but you can check out the master list on this permanent page.

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50 Dollar Paint Job

I’ve seen some bad paint jobs on cars recently. One guy had some kind of Franken-car that looked like half Gremlin, half Honda, lowered, with huge rims and a body that looked like it was made poorly from paper mache. But as I have often suspected, it’s often just the craftsman that makes the difference. Witness the nifty paint job on this Corvair:

50 Dollar Paint

The trick? It’s done with Rustoleum and rollers. Lots of coats. Lots of wet sanding and buffing. Very neat. If I had some beater to paint, I might even think about doing it this way. Maybe some future robotics project will benefit from this knowledge…

Transformers on the Wii: It Blows

I felt like I needed a new game. I was at Best Buy. I saw the new Transformers game on the shelf. I thought it might be fun. I plunked down my hard earned money without consulting a review.

I made a mistake.

It blows. It’s not the graphics, the sound, or the repetitive gameplay. It’s the stupid camera.

It’s one of those games where you’d imagine that having a camera follow along behind you would just work, and be simple and reasonable. After all, Mario 64 had this kind of a camera interface, and it worked rather well. Transformers has a camera which seems pathologically committed to viewing your robot from precisely the wrong angle. It seems almost designed to make it impossible to see where you are going and what is attacking you at all times.

I’d give it a 2/10. Don’t waste your time or money. Not even worth a rental.

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Weekly Geekshow Podcast

I’ve been listening to some new podcasts today. A particularly nice podcast dealing with geeky topics such as video games, and showing particularly insightful comments on movies starring rat chefs is the Weekly Geek Podcast:

Podcast for 07-02-07 | A Peasant Dish – Video Game Podcast and Blog | The Weekly Geek

They have almost enticed me into getting an Xbox 360. Thanks Chris, Collette, and The Geek. I’ll be checking out your podcast more regularly.

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Happy Independence Day!

In between cookouts, fireworks, going to see movies about giant robots or rat chefs, I hope that some of you will take a moment and consider the meaning of the day off and contemplate these documents which lately have faded into history as only of historical importance:

The Declaration of Independence
The United States Constitution

If you are feeling less skeptical than I, consider Dick Cheney’s recent claim that he’s part of the legislative branch, rather than part of the executive. Further consider that he’s trying to execute executive privilege, which, well, doesn’t exist for legislators.

Or just have a hot-dog and a soda, and go see a movie. We all need a day off. Here’s a little flash video of some fireworks I did a couple of years ago.

Ongoing Construction…

Well, I shook up the blog a little bit, and as is typical, a few things broke. Most notably, my feedburner feed was screwed for a few hours, I’m hoping that it is back and functional again. Expect a few more rough bits as we head toward nirvana.

One of the reasons that I’m doing this is so that I can use the new widgetized plugins that WordPress 2.2 has begun to support. I’m going to be back porting some of my own modifications to my old themes into a widgetized format (notably, my plugin that gives baseball player birthdays) and have used them to create a few new items, such as an “on this date” entry that shows postings from the same date in previous years (thanks Steve!).

Yes, I know the layout is a bit ugly right now. I’ll be tweaking it as time goes forward.

Theme Instability

I’m sick of my default theme. I’m starting with something minimal, and then trying to improve it. Consider the look to be somewhat in flux.

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Addendum: I’m using the rather minimal Sandbox theme now. I like it. I’m going to try to tweak it as little as humanly possible.

What’s wrong with cell phones, and why the iPhone might change the game…

Okay, my previous post detailed why I think most criticisms of the iPhone are off target. But what features the iPhone does or doesn’t have are for the most part irrelevent. I think that the iPhone is going to change the cell phone business at its most fundamental levels, and here is why.

The universe of cell phones is oddly split between two industries: the industry which manufactures phones, and the industry that provides the network.

The cell phone manufacturers would love to sell you phones. To do this, they want to add nifty features that people like: cameras, higher resolution screens, Wifi, GPS and the like. They’d love to sell you a new one every year. They’d love to sell you one every six months if they could.

Then there are the service providers. They sell a service to you. They don’t care whether you get new stuff on your phone unless it is somehow tied to a service that they can charge you for. If your phone had wifi, they have a decreased ability to sell you a $60 month data plan. So… your phone probably doesn’t have it. They don’t want you to upload music to your phone (say, by simply dragging music onto it like even the cheapest mp3 player), they want you to buy it from their online music store, likely paying again for a song that you already have. They want to ding you $2 for a ringtone or wallpaper, when making such things should be trivial.

Enter the iPhone. Half a million units sold in the first weekend. Half a million phones out there this week with wifi. With a fairly affordable unlimited data plan. With the ability to sync the music you already bought to your phone. No AT&T store icons. Merely the ability to use the web from your phone in the way you use the web from pretty much every other device.

Apple got AT&T to bite the poisoned apple, and now everyone is going to have to take a bite. Nokia and Motorola are going to ask for similar deals with network owners. Consumers from other networks are going to demand unlimited data and Wifi.

A caveat: the iPhone does come with the same 2 year contract that AT&T screws you with. I wonder how long such a thing will last. Ultimately Apple will have a new upgrade to their phone, and probably in a lot less than 2 years. All 500,000 of their customers will feel the urge to upgrade, but won’t feel that paying AT&T for the privilege of buying a new phone from Apple is reasonable.

It’ll be an interesting new game.

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Ten Largely Irrelevent Things You Should Know Before You Buy an iPhone

I must admit it: I’m beginning to contemplate purchasing an iPhone. They are just very, very cool. I mean, really cool. I know it won’t make me cool to have one, but it is a very neat gadget. That’s why I find lists like the below so amusing.

Buyer’s Guide: Wait! Ten Things You Should Know Before You Buy an iPhone – Gizmodo

Let’s work through them one at a time, shall we?

  1. Not all ipod accessories work. Well, duh. You know what? Not all ipod accessories work with my cell phone either. In fact, it’s really annoying that most cell phones use a completely different type of jack than every every device with a headphone. My Dell Axim of courses uses one even different than THAT (at least for the microphone). Them’s the breaks.
  2. AT&T is evil. Again, duh. Compared to? Verizon? T-Mobile? Sprint? I’ve used ’em all. I see no stellar entries in customer service among any of them. Long contracts are for most part the standard operating procedure.
  3. No video recording or MMS. Valid, but given the poor quality of 99% of all cell phone cameras, perhaps this isn’t really such a big issue.
  4. No instant messaging. I’ll grant you this one. Even my little LG CU500 includes AIM/Yahoo! chat (of course billed against SMS totals, which is completely absurd, especially given AT&T’s refusal make an all-you-can-eat SMS plan).
  5. Not for business use. Duh. Not marketed for it. Mostly people complaining about this are really upset that they can’t justify getting their businesses to pick up the tab for a new toy.
  6. It’s not a full iPod replacement, and has no games. I don’t play games on my phone or my iPod. It holds more songs than I need (or likely even have). Oh, and did we mention it is a phone and a web browser?
  7. It’s not a smartphone. Given that smartphones aren’t actually all that smart, I don’t see this as the biting criticism that was probably intended.
  8. The data connection is slow. Yes, they should have used AT&T’s G3 network. It does have wifi however, which depending on your situation, might make the point more moot than you imagine. I spend 90% of my time within range of either my own or other open networks. EDGE is likely good enough while trying to get movie times while standing in line. And AT&T bundled all you can eat network access with even the lowest cost plans.
  9. No GPS. Yes, an obvious feature that I think it should have. But then I’m a GPS nut, and have sworn my next phone will have one in it.
  10. No custom ringtons. Oh darn. No “La Cucaracha” for me.

Sure, people should be aware of these things. But I’m wondering what mythical phone exists that addresses these criticisms. Anyone got any suggestions?

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