- Coding is suffering.
- Suffering is embodied in the endless wheel of the product life-cycle.
- You cannot escape the wheel of the product life-cycle, because your mind is clouded by desire for a better framework.
- Users cannot escape the wheel of the product life-cycle, because their minds are clouded by desire for features.
- To be free of suffering, one must first understand boolean non-duality: The bit is not one, and the bit is not not-one.
- The spec is forever like sand between your fingers. Yet each grain of it is a precious gift, inviting you to develop compassion for designers and managers.
- Debugging is negative, and unnecessary. Bugs are precious gifts, inviting the QA team and the users to develop compassion for programmers.
- It’s fun to set an array of flags, and let them flap like prayers in the wind.
- If you comment your code, it will bring good karma to you in your next release.
- To reach enlightenment, pipe your mental I/O to /dev/null
Monthly Archives: March 2009
Public eyes
Picture this: Mobile phones with cameras serving as the public eye.
Visualize free and abundant bandwidth and storage, allowing most camera phones to be constantly turned on, recording whatever surrounds them. Uploading it to a large scale distributed database of images. This database constantly churns the flow of images, matching their features, averaging out the momentary (people, cars) and retaining the permanent (structures). You can explore any place in the world where someone has carried a cell phone, and get a sense of the place.
These cell phones can also record audio, which can be processed to produce the basic “sound” of a place. By using judicious criteria to filter out some unique sounds and retain some more common ones, this “sound” can be more than white noise. Different sound signatures can also be achieved for different times of the day, different seasons of the year. So you can log in, and visit a mountain river, and see how it looked last winter, frozen under a quiet blanket of snow. Then look at it this spring, rushing and rumbling.
You’ll definitely be able to see the tower of Pisa in great detail, inside and out, at all times of the year. There will be no lack of pictures and sounds for that one. The soundtrack will probably retain a lot of crying babies, tour guides, and crowd noises, so I recommend pulling the clock back to the early morning.
Ten Buddhist Tales is open!
Behold: Sausage!
Wow. We’ve done it. We’ve opened our show. What a rush!
After a hell week that went surprisingly well, we had energy aplenty for opening. The cast was on fire, lots of friends and family in the audience, and the show rocked! It’s 90 minutes of pure seat-of-your-pants craziness, both on-stage and off. I screwed up a couple of sound cues, but the actors kept right on going.
We’re all exhausted. It will take me a few days to process the feeling. This is a big achievement for me, and for all of us.