programming

Creating a markup language isn’t so hard after all

2009-08-25

compiled website, documentation, hacking, my writing, programming, Questions / Wanted, todo, writing

One of the things that’s been a real killer for me using most wikis has been the syntax. None of them get it right.

MediaWiki has been bearable, and over time I’ve grown used to it. The problem is that nobody agrees on a remotely similar syntax. There were some early efforts to create a generally agreed-upon syntax, and it did fairly well.. but it’s still not used everywhere.

I’m not just talking about wikis, but about markup languages in general. Even something like Ruby’s RDoc decided on its own syntax.

And they’re all wrong. Seriously, who thinks that __this is italicized__ ?

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I’ve put in my 10,000 hours

2009-08-23

documentation, my writing, programming, writing

Update: I’ve put in my 10,000 hours – update

Lately I’ve been reviewing my skills and interests, and sketching out what I’m interested in learning and accomplishing.

Malcolm Gladwell was on The Hour, and he talked about his “10,000-Hour Rule” from his book Outliers.

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Re-learning to Program, “The Right Way”: Behavour-Driven Development and Test-Driven Development

2009-08-23

Development, HOWTO, my writing, personal, programming, Questions / Wanted, todo, writing

I act in cycles. I am inspired by and I work on something new, and that inspiration shifts around. I also have a tendancy to drop and pick up projects in cycles. In the past I’ve dropped ideas for long enough for all effort to become meaningless given enough time, but these days I’ve been careful to cycle back to earlier ideas to scrape off the cruft and re-launch the project.

When I re-launch a project, I often find myself bringing significant maturity to the table. I have new ideas and techniques, and I take a kind of sick pleasure in redoing much of my previous work. This isn’t just a programming thing.. it applies to anything that I’ve been working on.

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For hackers, “doing nothing” is still hacking

2009-07-07

hackers, hacking, HOWTO, my writing, programming, writing

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.
An interesting problem.

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Re-learning to program – Fixing my broken brain

2009-05-20

bash, hacking, HOWTO, my writing, personal, programming, shell scripting, writing

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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