Doing things or getting things done (and gone)

By Sharpy | Published: July 12, 2010

Steph:

If I am feeling discouraged, I add things to my list that I can do quickly and boost my feelings of achievement, or break up big tasks into multiple tick boxes so I can tick at least some :D

Me:

[...] if I add little things to my list then tick them off, that doesn’t feel like progress at all. It’s having fewer things that makes a difference.

And I used to think we were similar.

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Drowning doesn’t look like drowning

By Sharpy | Published: July 7, 2010

Scary (especially for parents), but a must read. Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning, via John Gruber:

So if a crew member falls overboard and every looks O.K.—don’t be too sure. Sometimes the most common indication that someone is drowning is that they don’t look like they’re drowning. They may just look like they are treading water and looking up at the deck. One way to be sure? Ask them: “Are you alright?” If they can answer at all—they probably are. If they return a blank stare—you may have less than 30 seconds to get to them. And parents: children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.

This was a bit of a wake-up call for me: TV and movies have conditioned me to think that a drowning person flaps and flails and yells for help. I’m so glad I know what it really looks like now; but here’s to hoping you and I never have to put the knowledge into practice.

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Saving the world with Facebook

By Sharpy | Published: July 6, 2010

“Internet guru” Clay Shirky on new media:

Look, we got erotic novels, first crack out of the box, once we had printing presses. It took a century and a half for the Royal Society to start publishing the first scientific journal in English. So even with the sacred printing press, the first things you get serve the basest human urges. But the presence of the erotic novels did not prevent us from pressing the printing presses into the service of the scientific revolution. And so I think every bit of time spent fretting about the fact that people have base desires which they will use this medium to satisfy is a waste of time – because that’s been true of every medium ever launched.

Let’s all stop focusing on the bad Facebook brings out in people (that is part of them whether we see it or not), and instead start focusing on the good we can do for people. With whatever medium presents itself. Yes, Facebook included.

Posted in Computing, Social Media, The Web | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Why I’m not a fan of ClearType

By Sharpy | Published: May 20, 2010

Knocked up a quick test of the new Google Font API: see how it looks on your system.

This is why I’m not a fan of Microsoft ClearType.

Mac OS X 10.6.3, in Safari (full-size version):

Inconsolata in mac os x

Windows 7 Professional, in Internet Explorer 8 (full-size version):

Inconsolata in Windows 7

Posted in Mac OS X, The Web, Typography | Leave a comment

My new MacBook Pro (15″, 2.53 GHz Core i5, w/ Hi-res antiglare display)

By Sharpy | Published: April 28, 2010

Got a shiny and new MacBook Pro today. It’s a beautiful machine: incredibly durable, a dream to type on, great antiglare display, powerful graphics and processor, and more battery life than any Windows laptop owner could probably dream of. It’s everything I need, and more.

I’ve had my trusty white late-2007 model MacBook for two years now, and it’s really served me well. But I’ve been feeling for a while that it’s time for something new. You see, I really want to get some serious creation done on this thing. I can see myself using it for the next three, four five years—maybe even more.

Could I have done what I needed to do on my (now) old computer? I probably could have. Maybe not high-powered graphics stuff, but I’m not planning on getting into the game industry any time soon. So why did I spend more than $2000AUD on a new one? A couple of reasons:

  • I could get a discount. A great discount, through the Apple Developer Connection (which has now unfortunately been superseded by the Mac Developer Program, meaning no more discount). I won’t dance around it, I wanted to get a great computer on the cheap! I got 20% off, a saving of more than $500, which easily offsets the $119 membership fee. And if I hadn’t purchased the membership last December I would’ve had to pay the education price instead.

  • My MacBook is beginning to hurt. There’s chipped plastic and the power adapter is on the fritz. It flexes when you hold it by the corners. The aluminium unibody on the Pro is great design.

  • With 4 GB of RAM built in, I’ll have no trouble running Windows 7 side-by-side with Snow Leopard using Parallels. This means no more booting into Windows!

  • And when Valve release their Source games for Mac OS X, I’ll be able to put Apple’s new graphics-switching technology to work.

So if I hadn’t invested now, I would’ve had to pay more in the long run. I’m planning for the future here—me and my mate Luke are planning to do some serious creation for our undergraduate IT project (stay tuned).

And in the meantime I get to experience the joy of working with a machine that does exactly what I ask it to.

Posted in Apple, Personal | 1 Comment

Could the iPad be the tipping point?

By Sharpy | Published: February 8, 2010

Update: To get where I’m coming from here I highly recommend that you read the following articles from Joel on Software: Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems and Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!.

The tipping point, Joel on Software:

One thing you see a lot when there is a transition from an old monopoly to a new monopoly is that there is a magic “tipping point”: one morning, you wake up and your product has 80% market share instead of 20% market share. This flip tends to happen very quickly (VisiCalc to 123 to Excel, WordStar to WordPerfect to Word, Mosaic to Netscape to Internet Explorer, dBase to Access, and so on). It usually happens because the very last barrier to entry has fallen and suddenly it’s logical for everyone to switch.

Whilst reading this, a crazy thought popped into my head: could the release of the new iPad be the tipping point for Apple?

What are the most commonly cited barriers to users adopting Apple products?

  • Macs are too expensive. The iPad is probably the cheapest Apple computer to date.
  • Macs are too hard to use (you can’t right-click, everything’s in the wrong place, ad infinitum). Apple has been wearing away at this for a while: you can right-click. And ironically Windows has become more Mac-like with every iteration. And then there’s the iPod and iPhone…
  • Macs don’t run the software I need. There is a version of MS Office for Windows. Apple’s software opens MS Office formats. You can run Windows on a Mac.
  • Macs are just for graphos. iPad + iWork.

I could probably think of some other reasons, if it weren’t so late at night.

But I think the final piece of the puzzle, wonderfully accounted by Fraser Speirs (in his article “Future Shock”) and many others, is the great pent-up frustration with the fact that computers still don’t quite seem to just work. And if you’ve only used Windows, they never have.

This is a “chicken and egg” scenario (see linked article), and Apple have managed to remove almost all of the barriers to adoption. The dissolving of the usability barrier could mark their transition from 20% of the market to 80%.

It usually happens because the very last barrier to entry has fallen and suddenly it’s logical for everyone to switch.

Just maybe.

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Software is hard

By Sharpy | Published: February 8, 2010

Allan Odgaard’s Textmate Blog lead me to the linked article:

If you’re doing top-down design, you produce a specification that stops at some level of granularity. And you always risk discovering, come implementation time, that the module or class that was the lowest level of your specification hides untold worlds of complexity that will take as much development effort as you’d budgeted for the rest of the project combined. The only way to avoid that is to have your design go all the way down to specifying individual lines of code, in which case you aren’t designing at all, you’re just programming.

It’s true, software is hard. Does that make me sad? No, actually I delight in the challenge!

Posted in Computing, Programming, TextMate | Leave a comment

The complexity stick

By Sharpy | Published: February 7, 2010

It’s 12:01 AM. I’m still half-dressed, and dawdling to get ready for bed. Listening to a really great album, which is making me very happy. I think about what I have and I can only be thankful.

But, there is something that pulls on the inside of me—a memory of something that once was but is now fading. It’s 12:03 AM. And there was once a time where that very simple fact would have meant a world of things: excitement, anxiety, dread, joy, rebellion, empowerment. I would have ignored the fact that my eyelids were sagging, ready to fall in a heap like the ceiling of the chook shed out the back of our old place, buried under a mountain of pine needles. There was a time when being up at midnight was a triumph over all that big people told us about being kids.

And so this question crossed my mind: why is staying up past my bedtime no longer magical—merely impractical?

I don’t mean that flaunting authority is a joy I generally want to return to. I think I want the simplicity back in my life. The words of a great song come to mind: “God is not a white man.” What is God? He is love. What is love? Love is laying down your life for another. It is no overstatement to say that that is simply what God is: one who laid his life down, not for one, but for all.

Really, it’s very simple.

So why am I not? Humanity has a habit of glorifying complexity. “Gritty” movies are hailed as masterpieces, whilst wonderfully simple stories of love and loyalty perform poorly. I wonder if someone hit me with the complexity stick too many times. I wonder if it was me.

So as I sit here, I’m deciding to marvel at one simple fact. I’m up past my bedtime. And I like it. I’m happy.

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Thematic

By Sharpy | Published: February 4, 2010

Wrote a post a little while back saying that I’d returned to the default WordPress theme Kubrick. This is no longer the case. (I can’t actually remember when I switched away.)

Now I’m actually using the theme framework known as Thematic. It’s got a nice minimalist default stylesheet, with great support for extensions and customisations through the use of child themes. One day I’m hoping to implement something similar to the format of Dan Gruber’s daringfireball.net, with very short soundbyte-style posts being the most common, each one linked to a web page (i.e. Dan’s “Linked List”), and then less frequent but more involved article-style pieces, when something warrants more comment.

This should be doable once I dig into the code of Thematic a little. From now on I’ll be partially implementing the Linked List, and you’ll see that the title of each post doesn’t link to its own page, but rather to some other web site. (This article links to Thematic’s home page, for example. Just click the title.)

Posted in Blogging, WordPress | Leave a comment

The purpose of serving in the church

By Sharpy | Published: February 4, 2010

So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. (Ephesians 4:11–13)

The thing that grabbed me when I read this was that the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers all have a single, greater purpose: to equip the people, so the body of Christ can be built up. What does that even mean? Think of building up a wall: it means making it bigger and stronger.

At the start of chapter 4 Paul talks about “living a life worthy of the calling.” It’s far too easy to forget that our ultimate goal is to tell people of the hope we have in Christ, who saved our lives from destruction. That’s what’s going to make the wall bigger and stronger.

Posted in Christianity, The Church | Leave a comment