a glob of nerdishness

Today was one of those days where I did a lot of errands, a few little tasks, and some communication, but not much actual programming progress. A little frustrating, but since I’m not in a mood to code anyway I might as well take this new non-monospaced font for a spin. I haven’t really followed up on what’s been happening since I quit my job at the end of last year.

I’ve been a bit hesitant to elaborate online exactly what I’m doing. Now that I realize how much work is actually involved, I feel a bit more comfortable sharing a little more! I said before, “my mission is simple: Create the best software for organising photos geographically.” The mission is still that simple, even if the work is not. While the past few weeks have taken me more into the photo and organizing side of things, the “geographically” part involves pushing my mapping skills way beyond where they were last year.

To me, that’s the most exciting part even though it does involve maths and algorithms and architectures that I really should have learned before I met the real world. (Pun intended?) Even the current progress — too lurid to flaunt in public right now — makes me glad I’m taking the hard road. I’d already come across EveryBlock and noted their similar feelings on cartography, and today one of their co-founders posted an article about creating custom maps. The beginning of the article is a nice confirmation that my work is worthwhile.

Nervous joking about famous last words aside, things are more or less progressing well. Many days can still be a struggle to think clearly, yet I’ve been able to keep course despite many new product ideas and a few new platforms. (The Software Developer’s Kit for the iPhone and cousins being quite high on that latter list!) As far as the startup process goes, I think I am somewhere near the “Crash of Ineptitude”, but Hoping that I am already past that and into the Wriggles of False…Hope. Oh.

So what’s the plan from here? For me, it’s mostly keeping my head in the game and continuing to do the best I can with the time and talents I’ve been given. In less than two months, one good friend is planning on moving out to the area to help part time, too. Hopefully around that time you’ll start seeing more activity on Calf Trail Software’s home page as a result of my work and his, with a light dose of some graphic design provided our artist comes back online.

After that the real work begins, I suppose. It’s likely that that startup diagram is actually fractaline in nature. What are the chances it will be worth it? There’s a lot of potential out there; that makes me eager to get back to work tomorrow.

There were about 5,042 critical security flaws patched between the blog software that was installed and the one I upgraded to this morning. Now that I’ve gotten around to it, the cynic in me expects that tomorrow morning a huge big messup will come to light and I’ll have to do it all again. Sigh…

Anyway, while I was mucking about with it, I also tried switching themes. I kind of liked the “Classic” theme that came with this and was tempted to keep it, until I noticed that the “older/newer” page links seemed to be swapped. If I were going to do any sort of troubleshooting on this blog engine, I would just roll my own for practice at this point. Since I have a life, I just tweaked the stylesheet a bit to at least lose the atrocious monospaced font in the main text. This still doesn’t seem to be a great font for setting extended text, but I’ve been trying to ramble less anyway. (Besides, it’s better than before. And if you don’t like this, you should see the *colors* in the new admin pages I write this with.) Someday when I have nothing to do, I will integrate this blog into the main site better. Uh-huh.

So anyway, I’ve got work to do. Later.

Below you will find the IRS’s Federal 1040 form in a completely unofficial, completely at your own risk spreadsheet template worksheet for iWork’s Numbers application. As you fill in each line, it updates an estimate that might be similar to what you might owe or be refunded from federal United States taxes. This year, only the main F1040 form is “complete” although there is a very simplified part of Schedule C that hooks in as well.

You can download the template and try it out. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Share Alike license so feel free to share any corrections or additions.

As I’ve posted before, I quit my job at the end of last year. In preparation, my wife and I were trying to estimate where we might be at financially this year. I love Numbers, so I put this together to help get a more solid estimate of our tax liability. While I was preparing this year, it also helped me see by how much deductions would affect the bottom line. Of course, this is no substitute for the official forms or the advice of a certified accountant. Don’t trust this form, but please do let us know if you find any errors. Either leave a comment for everyone, or if you want to send attachments my email account with yahoo.com is “natevw”.

Speaking of the official forms, another piece of advice: On both of my work computers, Preview.app has two frustrating, er…deficiencies I’ve encountered when filling out the PDF tax forms. First of all, if I use “Save as” to keep my work it instead *clears* my work and I end up with two blank PDFs. I think a hearty EPIC FAIL is in order here. When I try to work around that by printing to a PDF instead, it often crashes halfway through printing and I end up with one blank and one corrupted PDF. So the advice? Do all your official figuring on good old paper printouts and pencil. If you do want it in digital form, copy the values into the spiteful electronic nemesis when you’re all done. Then if (WHEN!) it tries to subvert you, you needn’t waste time recalculating.

I think I’ve figured out an easy way to keep track of my age through the coming journey. All I need to do is subtract year_born from year_current.

You’re smacking your forehead because they’ve been teaching this in school since way before year_born. Well, the school method of figuring age out involves annoying trifles like “have I had a birthday this year?”. I haven’t practiced answering that question enough to be very good at it; growing up, I just knew how old I was because it was somehow important. Not anymore.

I think my simplification will serve me well in the coming years. Since I don’t usually mentally increment year_current until about February anyway, my method has a good chance of being right without needing any conditional branches.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but I just registered at del.icio.us, the socially/taggy bookmarking site. Why it took so long, I don’t know. Years ago I heard about it but wrote it off as some fad. Why would I want all my bookmarks online anyway?

Since then I’ve switched operating systems (which to my mind happened in the distant past!) and switched browsers and gotten my first modern laptop. I’ve also begun to realize what information overload means, but still don’t want to lose recollection of great sites that might have taken a bit of serendipity to notice in all the noise.

I had already given up using the built in browser bookmark folders. (I do use the bookmarks *toolbar* for more frequent destinations.) I’ve got no idea how to categorize something as chaotic as my web surfing in the first place, and any method I pick just gets so messy. The static nature means that things stay in place long past relevancy, and I’m bad at knowing when that time has come. Now that I’m using both a laptop and a desktop they would never be on the right machine anyway. Not to mention the quandary that came about when I started this blog: “Do I have anything worthwhile to say about this link, or must I keep it to myself?”

Del.icio.us seems to tackle all those problems. When I bookmark a link, I’m also sharing it. By nature of their centralization, I can access them from any machine I’m on. (As a friend pointed out, “the cloud” is a great place for bookmarks since you need web access to use them anyway.) Like a blog, there is a timeline element so that recent bookmarks are up top while older ones can fade away. To top it off, the semi-habitual yet often-random nature of web safari trophies is an excellent application for tagging.

I hope to eventually make this blog format less disgusting. When I find the time to take the ugly out, integrate with the rest of the site and organize to suit my personality — someday, someday — I hope to include this new discovery into the mix. Until then, feel free to follow my bookmarks as I settle in to a new groove.

In an article encouraging a balance between action and talk, Jeff Atwood (intentionally overstating a bit, perhaps) said that “Pundits only add ephemeral commentary to the world…”.

This morning I considered finishing one article or another to post here. Writing is a worthwhile use of my time, as is at least a good fraction of the reading I keep up with. Yet, I also have some small personal projects that can’t ship until more time is invested in them. Sometimes code doesn’t need to be “inspired” so much as typed.

Just found out that Will Thimbleby has a blog. No deluge of posts there yet, but it’s in my feed reader.

Will has created all sorts of neat apps like Lineform, RecDit and, my personal favorite, MacSword. While I’ve been using the latter since I got my Mac mini in the spring of 2005, I didn’t know much about Will’s other work until I read an article about Lineform’s development on Apple.com. He seems like an all-around brilliant chap who I’d love to meet, should I ever make it to the UK.

I haven’t gotten into the GTD®™*†(1) methodology yet. I’m not the Oprah, Cliff Notes for Dummies, and Fix Your Life in Five Minutes type. Yet I’ve been watching the method get good reviews among various computer communities for a while now, surrounded by tips that seem like they could help someone with a solid case of AD/HD packrat procrastomania(2).

Reading through a Mac-related e-zine article this morning, I found another GTD-connected quote that sounded like good advice: “As hard as the discipline may be, you must develop the habit of throwing away unnecessary stuff across the board.” Heh, yep!

My interest piqued, I decided to see what Google came up with for “GTD ADHD“. This brought me to the 43folders wiki, which looks like a fun hang-out. The community there is all about sharing good methods and little tricks (”life hacks”) that help them keep post-modern life from becoming one big backlogged, over-comitted, hyperlinked frustration. I think some life hacks and organization methods could help me work around some AD/HD issues—although this morning I ended up cruising the life hacker sections instead of actually getting things done…

Did you know that “with closed captions or subtitles, watching a video stream at up to 5x normal speed is easily possible with a little practice”?

1. The ‘GTD’ acronym is a registered trademark of Consultant–Author with a PointyHairedBoss-magnet website.
2. (me)

Though it’s really not an interest, I’ve been thinking about our response to spam a lot lately ever since I started seeing it as sin in the raw form of the word. It shouldn’t be a surprise, as even many who might laugh at the concept of “sin” describe spam as evil. (The author of SpamKarma, the tool I am currently using to shield you from endless pharmaceuticals, has laughed such laughs.) Thinking of spam as a sinful-human problem instead of a rogue-machine problem can change the way we approach the solution. I have a few more posts prepared related to this particular topic, which in the interest of not overwhelming you with my prolixity, I plan to spread out over the next week or so. Hopefully, talking about spam doesn’t bore you as much as it does me.

I spent the day writing up a solution that I think addresses some of these concerns. Why? I understand computer-based spam filtering has made definite progress. Yet I think AI-based technology will continue to be a battle we can only half win, analogous to many wars the United States has taken on in the last half of a century(1). Guns and computers are both highly inadequate tools when it comes to solving human problems. Yes, we have defended life with weaponry and we have facilitated community with machinery. But it’s not ideal. To think we can discourage spammers with computers is a man-versus-nature story to which most authors(2) would write a different ending.

To believe that technology can save us from spam is just as idolatrous as believing technology can save us from any other consequence of our sinfulness. We’ve relied on technology to do what we can’t for so long that now we are beginning to rely on it to do what we won’t. Our world would rather research and develop a cute and cuddly “Mental Commitment Robot”s than spend time with the sick and the elderly. If the pictures at the bottom of that linked page don’t break our heart as Christians who are supposed to be the power of Christ and the love of God, I don’t know what it will take to wake us from our technicism.

1. It is not my intent to make light of the current, or any previous, war. I am primarily a programmer. I am not a historian, not a strategist, not God. For the sake of those in the Middle East and for the sake of our troops, I hope and pray that Operation Iraqi Freedom will turn out as just that: political, economic and spiritual freedom. Sadly, I’ve been feeling more and more like one side has gotten us sorely off on the wrong foot, and the other side is intent on not letting any mistakes get fixed regardless of cost. All for what? [Very naughty word] politics. Please consider reminding a soldier of the joyful, wondrous and beautiful sides of the life they fight for, even if you must set aside some cynicism to do so.
2. Yet it would be a disservice to you as a reader to pretend that everyone accepts the man/nature or the man/machine dichotomy. Much to the contrary. Perhaps this is why technologists get so excited about robots. Feeling they have breathed life into a machine gives them hope that computers can not only solve our homework problems, but also the problems we have on the playground.

An electrical engineer and professor writes

I’m concluding that there are some limits to the amount of detail that we should computerize.

in response to changes in the real world that affect existing programs. While the example he started with (Daylight Savings) is a change that good system designers have anticipated, he reflected on some issues that I have been conscious of myself this week.

In the past couple of days I’ve had the opportunity [and the burden!] to redesign a map-drawing architecture while converting it from one programming language to another. I’ve been thinking about all the “real world” details that need representation in code, looking at things like Dates, Colors, Map Projections, Shapes, Pictures, Labels, Weather Data…. The many sciences lend insights which change the way things are best codified, and the state of my art is growing as well through time. For every one I need to consider: in which aspects should I follow/trust another’s design, which can I approach better myself (and still have time to squash enough bugs), what should I leave up to the human user to do on their own, and what should I leave until later!

Computing seems to force its binary nature out through the cracks of even a well-designed program or device. Don’t we often have to make a “take it” or “leave it” choice whether or not to invest time storing bits of life in a particular format or form factor? When taking a particular tool to use, it’s nice to know there’s potential for leaving somewhat gracefully later. (For example, iTunes stores a copy of its library data in XML for re-import or use by other programs. Then again, for the time being at least, if you forget your music store password you could be restricted from your encrypted purchases.)