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Something that’s been on my mind recently was the process of troubleshooting. Specifically troubleshooting while asking for help.
my writing
All posts tagged my writing
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Hackers >
I have an interesting trick where I have a piece of myself watching the rest of myself doing whatever it’s doing. It helps me understand my inner workings quite a bit, because I can review how I was feeling and thinking after all the main activity is over and done with.
Reviewing the last week and a bit, I noticed that I’ve had periods of uptime then downtime. This is normal for someone working at a computer, because at the very least you need to take a 2 minute break every 20 minutes, to catch up on your blinking and to stare at objects in the distance so you don’t ruin your focus. If you’re not doing this, you’re doing damage. If you’re an employer, you need to force your employees to do this, even if you have to put a timer on their computer.
But aside from the eye-strain (and tendinitis, carpal tunnel syndrome or other repetitive strain injury) breaks, I’ve had periods of mental “downtime”. But it’s not like walking away from the computer when getting burnt out. I take breaks under two conditions.
- A major success.
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An interesting problem.
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I can’t count the number of times I’ve updated/upgraded only to be kicked in the teeth by some smartass programmer’s bright idea for a feature.
It’s one thing to add bloat to a program, it’s another to force it down your users throat.
I really don’t mind having a featureful program. Really, I don’t. However, when I’m used to things working one way I don’t like having things change without my permission.
I also really hate when that happens and I can’t figure out how to change things back the way they were.
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Reading earlier things I’ve written, I’m like some kind of half-drunk crotchety old man on a rocking chair on his front porch, shaking his fist and muttering at “those crazy kids”.
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Holy shit. I was able to complete my largest and most complex shell script to date, autotest.sh. It was a nearly total rewrite of a series of scripts that act as an automated testing environment.
That sounds fancy, but it’s not. The basic idea is that as you edit, you save a lot. Well, I do. Now every time I save, the change is noticed and the script is run automatically. It even goes one step further, doing some debugging if your script fails to run.
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Blogging is an interesting concept. It’s something I’ve toyed with since before the term was coined.
It’s never seemed to be particularly useful to me. Each item is a kind of pointless bit of gossip whose usefulness is at first questionable and which becomes less and less valuable over time.
See also:
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Every once and a while I go through old notes, todo items and such. Today I bumped back into the GNU Proofreaders mailing list. It’s an effort which herds cats towards improving documentation.
just some rough thinking.
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Anonymity and mechanics enable immorality + YouTube >
This is a folowup to Anonymity and mechanics enable immorality, which – in short- explain some trolling and describe why I think direct opposition to trolling is not as effective as addressing underlying mechanics.
Now I want to go over some issues with YouTube features.
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- (likely written earlier than this porting date)
- Originally titled “Explanation, Escalation”, and directed toward YouTube, but it’s universal.
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This appears to be incomplete, and might have been badly-ported from an ancient system to the earlier system, with information being lost in that transition.
There have been previous and there are current efforts to organize users to resist certain trollish behaviors.
My concern, and my suggested solution runs much deeper.
