feed on feeds - 2012/09/03 - items 0 to 15

En större brand totalförstörde hyvleridelen av ett sågverk vid Roasjön nordväst om Svenljunga i kväll.

eldavojohn writes "For quite some time humans have struggled to answer the question why there is anything rather than nothing. Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist? tackles such questions in the form of a journey. After laying a brief groundwork, Holt travels from leading prominent philosopher to curmudgeonly physicist to reserved theologian, visiting each and relaying the juiciest parts of his transcripts to the reader. In doing so, this book takes on an interesting form with a meaty dense center to each chapter (the actual dialogues) surrounded by the light and fluffy bread of Holt's expert writing about the settings, weather and food of his travels. While this consequently lacks the characteristics of a heady hard hitting original philosophical work, these sandwiches should prove quite palatable for most readers. Why Does the World Exist? criss-crosses the etymological, epistemological, theological and philosophical aspects of its title while remaining a fairly easy read." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday at a party I was talking with a guy who works for IBM doing "agile" development. It was the first time I had a chance to talk with someone who actually does this, for a length of time, so I could play Q&A to figure out how it maps onto how I do software development. I was pretty sure it did.

I think what I called We Make Shitty Software is in other words the same thing as the agile process. Whatever it's called, we all acknowledge that our software is imperfect, it's a process, but we're working to make it better, and more responsive to users. Other creative arts aren't as iterative as software.

I may have other concepts to contribute, such as Narrate Your Work, and Instant Outlining, which have made big differences in the development process for me and the people I have worked with. We developed Radio UserLand in 2001 and 2002 with instant outlining. And I've been doing Narrate Your Work, which is an individual thing, for well over a year. It gets better all the time. I can't do any development work these days without telling the story in my worknotes site.

For me, the development process is really the work I do. Because that's where it has the greatest impact, not just for software development imho, but in other project-oriented activities. I think all kinds of production are better managed with NYW and I/O. And someday there may be movies or paintings that are iterative, so will benefit from the agile process. Perhaps there already are?

Another thing that works is the idea of code as a weblog. At the top of each part there's a section where each change is explained. The important thing is that with elision (expand/collapse) comments don't take up visual space so there's no penalty for fully explaining the work. Without this ability there's an impossible tradeoff between comments and the clarity of comment-free code. No manager wants to penalize developers for commenting their work. With this change, with outlining, that now works.

We did this at UserLand, starting in the early 90s. There's code in our system with over 15 years of mods to it made by different developers, and you can, if they were careful about it, know what they were thinking as they changed the code. The code tells its story. I have never seen any other devteam do this. If there are other examples, I'd love to compare experiences.

These days I include links to my worknotes in my code, because there is a level of detail I will go into on the website that I won't go into in the code. One of the reasons is that the project is not the same thing as the code modifications. The reasons for making the changes may apply to several objects in the code. So it makes more sense to explain it outside the code. In other words there's a level above the code. That's where my worknotes tie things together.

Here's an example of a piece of code that's been developed iteratively over a couple of years. Look in the Changes section near the top, you'll see that it tells a story. This is real code that's very much deployed, in fact the text you're reading now was rendered with it (as was the code listing).

And an example of day's work in the worknotes site.

At least 14 killed in Bayda province after fighter pilots mistake two cars carrying civilians for al-Qaida members.

John Burton, ledare för Demokraterna i Kalifornien, väckte ramaskri när han på måndagen jämförde Republikanerna med nazisternas propagandaminister Joseph Goebbels.

Brittiske utrikesministern vill ha snabb lösning.

Lokko om var man hittar ideologerna.

Argentina slår tillbaka mot amerikansk kritik mot landets importrestriktioner.

cylonlover writes "Three-dimensional printers are popping up everywhere these days. Some are small enough to fit in a briefcase and others are large enough to print houses, but scientists at the Vienna University of Technology are going for the microscopic. Earlier this year, the university built a 3D printer that uses lasers to operate on a tiny scale. Now they're refining the technique to enable precise placement a selected molecule in a three-dimensional material. This process, called '3D-photografting,' can potentially be used to create a 'lab on a chip' or artificially grow living tissue."