Delete this

I can only guess that the reason Google did not make a delete button (you had to go to the dropdown menu) was that they didn't really want you to delete anything. Now... why wouldn't they want you to delete anything? I have no freaking clue and I have no intention of digging through their literature in an effort to understand such an inane idea. There are just emails that are not worth saving. Maybe they figured so long as it was archived and out of the way then it wouldn't matter if it was there or not. That's kind of how I (used to) treat all of the accumulated items I have at home. File it and forget about it. The only advantage Gmail has is that the search is very good, whereas with my files, it is not. Still... clutter is clutter. The lack of a delete button was a big complaint by nearly every Gmail user I imagine and for such a simple thing to fix I'm astounded at their lack of response to it. But now it's there thankfully.

In slightly related news, I've finally started getting spam on my Gmail account. It took more than half a year for the spam to start and for that I'm both thankful and impressed. Well there was some spam there already but that was my fault due to some web purchases and signups but those were sensible, controlable, identifiable, and filterable. Now the typical maddening garbage is starting to trickle in. There's no escape.

Meta meta

I feel like I'm getting bogged down with layers and layers of meta programming. I have programs that do things. Then I have scripts that run the programs that do things. Then I have scripts that run the scripts that run the programs that do things with different options. Then there are scripts to manage the myriad options and parameters. And just as that gets complicated I have to work with yet another wrapping of the scripts to manage the plethora of things to make sure the stuff has what it needs and runs correctly because by this layer it gets really confusing for all involved. But this new layer is every bit as confusing as every other layer.

I guess that's the history of programming.

So programs started out with machine code, 1's and 0's. Then came assembly which replaced the 1's and 0's with mnemonics for the instructions. Then came the mid and higher level languages which replaced the mnemonics with nicer and cleaner and more readable and one needn't know all of the individual steps to do some task. Then came the even higher level scripting languages to manage and glue together all of the various programs written in the higher level languages. And with it came systems of keeping tracks of arguments and parameters. Command line options and GUI's were made. And still more. Another layer after another to abstract and abstract until noone knows what goes on underneath. It's a bit of a maintainability nightmare all for the sake of making things more accessible. Ah well, there's a certain pleasure to it that goes with the pain.

Loading please wait...

There are a couple of sites that I find I would probably use more, but dang they're slow. MySpace and Friendster are a couple of places that I have accounts. Once in a while the fit strikes me to do some people browsing, mostly through link following of friend's friends and such. Those fits get cut short frequently because the bloody pages are so polluted with cruft and busy with ads and markers and such that it gives me a headache. I think the data lookup is slow to begin with but when you top it off with all the flash and wierdness it grinds to a crawl. I applaud their popularity and am impressed with the whole social networking concept but I wish they had more elegant page designs, including layout and content, not just loading efficiency. Another offender in my book was Ain't It Cool News but at least they got rid of that infernal font-size system, where more popular stories were displayed in increasing font sizes. Was an eyesore.

That's something I grew to appreciate the likes of Google which since its inception has generally had minimalist and cleanly layed out pages. The simple and efficient text-only adds are also a breath of fresh air compared to the days when most pages had rows and rows of huge long banner adds and one had to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to see the content, or worse, a link to the real content. But it seems to me that they also cared about speed. Their web-mail client is remarkable in not only its concept and user interface but sheer usability due to its speed. Until recently Yahoo mail was more of a burden to use for email, something I would only use in emergencies. I guess I've grown much more appreciative of the user viewing experience: elegant and attractive pages that load quickly.

Another page that I frequent but find frustrating is Lifehacker. It does have a simple and clean presentation. But for the life of me when it loads I get an eye-ache. I'm not sure if it's just my Firefox installations or not but it loads slow and with the few ads popping around the screen as things get filled in, and even afterwards. It's the page instability upon loading that is more the issue. They also keep relatively few posts on the same page and furthermore when you click next and previous links, a third of the posts or more are often the same posts as the original page, causing me to have to click next/prev more often and thus experiencing the loading page instability all the more. I hope someone there fixes that eventually, I do like that site a lot.

Wish it away

I love those little clever pop-culture references, when I get them which I like to think I usually do. Some clever game designers put in a feature where misbehaving avatars are "wished into the cornfield" in reference to the Twilight Zone ep.

Zeitgeist

The axiom of the age: If it's not on the internet then it doesn't exist.
The problem of the age: How to search and find what you are looking for when it does exist.

Yahoo, I just left but I may be back

I remember the days when Yahoo! was basically a public bookmark list by some clever fellows at Stanford. They'd come a long way quickly, even when portals were en vogue and everyone's least favorite uncle was creating their own portals, I still managed to stay fairly faithful to Yahoo. That of course changed in recent years, most recently with the rise of Google and the plethora of social networking sites. I'll be honest and say that in my opinion Yahoo remained kind of bloated and stagnant from a user experience point of view most of that time; though during a lot of that time they were still on top in my book, but more in the "lesser amongst the evils" kind of way. They've been on the prowl this year. Acquiring Flickr and now del.icio.us almost seems like an act of desparation. Something like "we need to be cool fast, let's buy the cool stuff and claim it as our own." I guess that's common and fortunately they're nowhere near as atrocious about it as... some other big monopolistic companies.

My take is that it took some serious ingenuity and competition to get them off their arses. That's a good thing. Whereas before they were not happy with their place but still didn't truly experiment and encourage imagination, now they see that that is the key: making stuff that's cool and works good. So I finally move my email over to their new beta email client and I have to say I'm impressed. It looks and works pretty much like what most email clients (e.g. Thunderbird) have evolved into, except through a web interface. I like it. Good for them. I hated having to page through my emails 26 at a time, and with abysmal threading and search features. They even upped their storage quota to 2Gig (direct response to Gmail) which was something I used to have to pay for. Actually I'm still annoyed that I still have to pay for POP3 access, spam filtering, etc... something that's free on at least one other free amazingly popular email service. If this had come along, oh, about half a year or a year ago, I would have been even more pleased. Sadly, it's just a liiiiiittle bit too late. I really dig the Googlemail interface. Yes it has bugs and all the features I want aren't there but I consider the basic label+conversation+search paradigm the wave of the future and the way I want to handle my email from now on. Sadly, their interface is also just a web interface and not the way my normal machine clients work so I'm kind of stuck doing things the old way with my work email and such. Ah well, maybe someday.

I'm glad to see Yahoo getting aggressive. Although I may not fully embrace their new direction, especially in the presense of some serious competition, it's still good for Joe Consumer.

A Ruby in the rough

I've noticed in the past few months more articles in the nerd channels about Ruby (mostly in regards to RAILS which I don't use). I'm sure it's simply selective attention on my part because I really love Ruby, more fervently than I did Perl when I first started using it some 10 years ago.

Ruby is a scripting language and I've been using it nigh unto a year now. It is currently my favorite scripting language and it was so practically from the first day I started playing with it. You can find plenty of advocacy, zealotry, demogoguery, and fanatacism in the usual places online; I'm sure even more if you can read and understand Japanese. Fortunately for me I did not see or read any of that online bantering about how "my scripting language can beat up yours" when I decided to play with it, only enough about it to give it a try.

Two things sold me on it immediately:

• Nice data structures
• The presense of "=~"

I'd been a Perl die-hard for years, was forced to use Python for work reasons, learned to really appreciate Python for what it was, and then cursed both for not having what I liked and needed to have in each. Perl makes for great quick-and-dirty guerrilla-warfare scripting but became clumsy for larger projects. Python was systematic, clean, and good for such larger projects, mostly due to its data structures, but it really dropped the ball when it chose not to add that little simple piece of syntactic sugar ("=~") to handle regular expressions. I deal with lots of text data but even if I didn't I do consider regular expression tools a basic necessity to life on the command line. And using regular expressions in Python just blows! There are other annoyances in each but those are currently of primary importance to me and my trade.

Enter Ruby, which upon first encounter appears to have the best of both worlds. Oh joy! I got busy with it immediately. It also had an interactive mode like Python, something Perl really needed. With a bit more experience, I discovered and began to appreciate some of its other and even novel features:

• Truly object oriented in presentation (even the number 1 acts like an object) which adds a kind of consistency.
• Interesting use of code blocks (I didn't like lambda's in Python, does anyone?).
• Ease with which to extend even basic classes and objects.

With more use I found myself rethinking my former ways of coding a task (e.g. I found myself considering even simple things more often in terms of iterators). There are also things I find truly elegent (e.g. using code blocks for initializing).

The unfortunate aspects:

• It's still rather new (outside Japan) and so the community and support is rather smaller than Perl and Python.
• The syntax and keyword naming is a mite unfortunate and takes some getting used to. But at least it doesn't strongly rely on syntactically significant white spaces like Python.
  
• It has automatic variables. You don't have to use them, and I don't mind them, but it freaks some people out. It does mean you can run cool stuff on the command line like Perl though.
• It's yet another scripting language, and there will be some inertia to overcome, especially in the staunch work environment.
• I miss Python's use of named and initialized arguments. This is almost a deal-breaker. Grrr... nothing's perfect it seems. Fortunately, that might change in the future for Ruby, and there are hacks to simulate it now but they are just hacks. I don't like the hacks though.
  
• At present there only a relative few books on Ruby in English. Fortunately the first one out is a great one, on par with the Camel book in my opinion.

Currently I'm the only one at my office that uses Ruby. It will probably stay that way due to the inertia problem. But I decided to continue writing and infesting the company research code with it until someday they all seccumb to my will and see the light.

Comment first, code second

Read this article on commenting. Kind of skimmed it actually. It did make me think about it though. I was going to post a comment on how I do it but I saw a comment from someone else that does it like I do.

Basically, I try and comment BEFORE I code. It solidifies what I'm about to code, its purpose and method. If implementing an algorithm it often helps to explain the steps in words, or even in pseudocode. I've seen people site papers or web resources as well which is acceptable. It also helps to note the limitations, what needs to happen before and after, the overall use of the code snippet and what-not. I find that doing this also helps me to code better. The steps are more clear and potential problems and bugs tend to get avoided when you see a description of the algorithm layed out in laymans terms.

Like most people I often work with other people's code. I get frustrated a lot at the lack of comments or the poor description. I've also done evil in the past, writing code myself that was uncommented, I try not to do that anymore. The bigger the system, the more the need for good comments. I understand that often in the throws of coding marathons, such sensibilities fall to the way-side. This is probably why there are auto-documentation systems out there. I'm convinced that there are people out there who think that this is actual documentation and they don't need to enter their own. In my experience, these do almost nothing to help me understand what I'm looking at. I would not miss it if they disappeared. Granted, sometimes it does help to automatically insert comments in places that need it (functions and such) as mere placeholders and to take stock of higher level stuff. But all in all, comments should be made as the code is written if at all possible.

The infamous Python indentation

I don't care how good it looks, how clean it appears, how visually aesthetic to the reader it becomes... having the proper indentation as part of the Python syntax is just an annoyingly bad idea. I use emacs for most coding but occasionally use vi(m) for quick fixes, especially when I'm running from another terminal or someone else's machine. They are not always configured equally so that they produce different indentation lengths. It's just an annoyance but it occurs often enough to make me groan. I've read people defending this type of syntactically significant white space by claiming that all editors worth their weight can be configured to do the right thing and the clean listing is worth the "slight" inconvenience. I think it's wrong to dictate a certain level of editor in order to properly and easily edit code. I should be able to use whatever I want without having to configure it, even a DOS editor. But here's a short list of how it inconveniences my edits:

• When developing, I often disable chunks of code with an "if (0)" or "if (false)". Because there's no end-of-block keyword (indentations mark it) I can't do this in Python. I have to resort to highlighting the entire section and re-indenting it en masse. Or i have to highlight it all and comment it out. Again, this requires an editor with the correct macros. But it is still more work than the simple if(true|false) I can use with most other languages.
• Python's lack of block end keywords makes it easy to unintentionally nest blocks. Ever have consecutive if-statements and the second if auto-indents under the first one instead of at the same level? This is a common gotcha when I'm editting and replacing a line of code.
  
• In emacs I often use tab to auto-indent/clean-up code. Lack of block end keywords means the indentation is not unique. It also means that you cannot have a beautifier program.
• It's dangerous to cut and paste code from one section to the other, or off of web pages or other programs because the indent may be different (and difficult to clean up) or it may be at the wrong level.
• Using Python interactively from the command line becomes a pain too since you have to keep track of indents for every line.
  

I sympathise with the desire to produce consistent, pleasant, and hence more maintainable code. I think enforcing it this way created more annoyances than it meant to solve. A simple beautify program often does the trick when you want the script cleaned up after a lot of cut/paste/reorganization.

YAML

YAML once meant "Yet Another Markup Language" and now means "YAML Aint Markup Language" but I would prefer it to mean "What do you get when you breed a Yack and a Camel". It's a data serialization format that (and this is the important part) is human readable text. It was brought to my attention a year ago by a coworker and I had since hacked it in to our system to better handle log file parsing. I completely agreed it to be the right idea. It has made my log file parsing much less stressful and more consistent. It just sucks that the online community for it is still... lacking. Some of the main YAML sites seem grossly out of date and nearly empty.

My recent frustration is dealing with incomplete implementations in the different scripting languages. I'm currently parsing Python generated YAML streams with Ruby. They seem to conform to different versions of the specification; most notoriously for me right now is how they each treat boolean values. My Python implementation wants to turn "+" and "-" into true/false (I had since hacked that out). Ruby wants to turn strings like "true/false", "yes/no", "Y/N", and even "on/off" into boolean true/false. This is causing all sorts of minor annoyances since I'm dealing with text that will have this as literal strings and not as code for boolean values. I in fact think that having the YAML spec interpreting strings as booleans is just a bad idea with perhaps some exception. Auto-interpretation of data is a touchy subject and you're bound to upset someone no matter which way you go. I'd prefer the "everything's a string" method, since that would at least guarantee consistency. But for now I just hack in fixes for my own purposes. I may submit a patch someday. I'd feel safer using the format if I had a sense of more active development however.

Ruby seems to be the only safe-haven for YAML at the moment. They seem to be trying to turn it into a Pickling or Marshalling replacement though. That's not really what I want out of YAML. It's just a really good way to display nested list and hash structures in a clean, pleasant, and consistent way. Anything more may make it too complicated to be portable and general purpose. I'd still rather use it than write my own though, since I don't really have the time.

Simp[l]y Delicious

I like using the social bookmarking system. It allows me to easily access boomarks from anywhere. More importantly it's a more powerful and flexible system than the bookmarks built into my browser because labels are more versatile than folders (Google knows this) and with most browsers you can only organize by folders. It also allows me to be more shameless about the number of things I can bookmark without becoming overburdened with organizing the links. It also lets me search through topics other people have marked with the same kinds of labels. There are other features related to this of course.

I started off with del.icio.us which is still the most popular. Then a number of other ones popped up. I started using simpy because it had some more features. Then I ended up coming back to del.icio.us, and for nearly the same reason people stuck with VHS over Betamax, Atari 2600 over Intellivision, and to some degree Microsoft over Apple. There are plenty of examples of sad cases where the superior bows to the popular. With del.icio.us however, it made more sense to favor the popular because it's a social web concept whereby the better service was the one with the most participants.

Why again?

I'm not a hardcore programmer and only a mild computing aficionado but it is part of my trade. As I sit at my desk I often stumble across or realize things that wrinkle my brow and are sometimes worth a quick note. I mean, as long as I'm not working I might as well look like I'm doing something by writing on things I use in relation to work. Right? So why not meta-tab over to my browser, log in, and make a quick blurb about it?