blog (category: software)
quotes: db dabbling; meta-work
Like cleaning the house when there's a more important task to be done.
I'm moving my many masses of quotations into a database I used Dabble DB to create.
I like to capture and stash away quotes from books, blogs, essays, lectures -- to enjoy, refer to, and write about later. My old, long-growing quotes page currently stores the majority, .txt-style, on this server. Many more are on strewn about: in other files, on various pages on my personal wiki, in Google Notebook, elsewhere.
A few years ago I began blueprinting plans for a Mac software app called iQuote, (clever, eh?) outlining how it would begin as a personal, searchable quote catalog, and eventually grow into a net-aware, community-oriented (del.icio.us-like) quote-sharing system. My revenue stream would be in Amazon referral dough from click-throughs on sources.
I never got around to it. I give it to you, lazyweb... go for it. Open-source it, and I promise to maybe help out, (or at least report bugs and criticize your implementation.)
So, though a cosmic-sized, crowd-wise, social-ized, (lowercase-i'd,) quote-sharing system hasn't proved a pressing need for me -- Perfect is the enemy of good enough -- a bit more organization and efficiency has.
"Dabble DB helps you build an online database on the web." The interface is quick and slick, and it's free if you agree to share all of the data you stuff into it. Adding and editing entries, playing with columns, and creating views... all cake. It's responsive and so-far solid. I haven't played with relating tables yet, or querying from externally.
Here's the public page for my new Quotes database. I've already fed it a bunch of blog fodder (that I've been not blogging about.) Next up is my quotes page, for which I'll try out Dabble's Import functionality. Then, to make that page db-driven and searchable.
At a Christmas party, my mom was relating to someone the traits I earned from her and my father. She neglected to mention that I, too, am constantly "trying to get organized." I tend not to use her phrase, or I'd have to choke on all of the times I've buddhisty-boasted ~ emptier-than-thou ~ that it can't be achieved; her seeking precludes its own satisfaction.
We both know that sometimes it's just fun to sort stuff out.
multitasking developers write maintainable code
Maybe... a developer with a full life outside her software work is prone to write understandable and maintainable code:
With more other business to keep in head-RAM, there's not sufficient room (MAX_HEADROOM? ;) to maintain her full software stack. She'll have to revisit code when returning to old projects (or jumping between multiple,) and therefore force herself to write code she can easily grok on re-read.
data services: from ownership to facilitation
At the moment, proprietary data-sources own the space, [...] They're starting to license their data, selectively, and I think, over the next few years, we'll see them turning to increasingly fluid and commoditized services...
But, [...] perhaps the future -- perhaps the game-changer -- is to be the business or organization that throws all this model away; who says that the future is not in owning data, but in creating an ecosystem filled with data that's bubbled up from the people, in which you can offer new services that come from being the main facilitator of this new kind of web, and a new kind of relationship; a more collaborative relationship between company and consumer.
-- Tom Coates, Greater than the sum of its parts, speech at The Future of Web Apps Summit 2006 : audio, slides
software engineering unlike other engineering
software engineering is not like other engineering
the only kind of software we ever build is unproven, experimental software
When you build a bridge, road, or house, for example, you can safely study hundreds of very similar examples.
The only new software development projects undertaken are those that havent been done before or those whose predecessors are not publicly available. This business reality, more than any other factor, is what makes software development so hard and risky, which makes attention to process so important.
-- Jeff Atwood, It's Never Been Built Before (Coding Horror)
Friend of a Friend
A brave, almost presumptuous world stood before me. I kicked it square and sent it flying, face-first in the dust.
This weekend was a blast. Friday night in Buffalo with my cousin, Mark, and Saturday the Alexander Street Fest back here in Rochester. Old friends were by my sideways and new encounters set me spinning. Good to climb out of some of the stagnant water I've been wading in for the last few weeks. Opposite of way-nonplussed.
Before the eatdrinkdance festivities began, I sent my computer ninjas to work Thursday night on catching me up in social software trendiness. I've avoided the whole Friendster bit, (and am determined to continue so,) but the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project interests me and merits mention. From their page:
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.
My ninjas speak RDF, so they suited up and hacked out my FOAF file. A helpful resource was Getting Started With FOAF, along with the current FOAF spec. And if your ninjas aren't so skill'd, FOAF-a-Matic will sort of automate the process.
FOAF Explorer turns the RDF into a nice viewable format, (example: mine.) And foafnaut starts heaping FOAF's meat and potatoes onto the plate, graphically mapping relationships between people.
My ninjas haven't yet begun listing folks I know in my FOAF file. I gave them the weekend off so they could have a beer and meet some people.