the corner office

Vista. It's about 13 years late and has about a tenth of the features it was supposed to have, but it's here. I visit Dell's website every few days to see their specials, and I noticed that many of their machines are now Vistafied. I know XP will be around for a while, especially for the eleventy billion PCs that aren't specced out to run Vista, but this marks the start of a new era. What sort of era, is the question?

I haven't paid too much attention to Vista, but everything I hear is about DRM and screw-the-customery and insane hardware requirements. Right now I'm comfortable switching between Linux and XP as a desktop, both have their strengths and irritations. I'm not one for taking principled stands when it comes to choosing what software to use, but I'm just not keen to ever have to move to Vista.

This morning on the bus, I finished reading Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos. I was in a sciencey mood after finishing The God Delusion, and this had been at the bottom of a pile of books Ronwen bought last year.

The book could be subtitled 'Physics They Didn't Teach Us In High School'. What's the universe made of, how did it come to be, and how does it all work? It starts out with Newtonian physics, and then works its way through Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, and the concept of spacetime, entropy and the direction of time, to quantum physics, neuron-popping concepts like entanglement and uncertainty, and thence to the Universe: the big bang, inflationary cosmology, dark matter and energy, string and M-theory.

My head exploded on about every second page, but the book is well-written and lays out concepts using accessible analogies. The book left me in awe of two things: first, the physicists who've grappled with these fundamental questions of how our universe came to be and how it hangs together. What manner of genius did people like Einstein possess, to explore hunches and intuition, and to develop theories about the world we live in, in some cases theories that were only proven years or decades later?

Secondly, as with the God Delusion, the book left me with a renewed sense of amazement at the strangeness and beauty of the universe we live in, the reality that hums along just beyond our simple senses and constrained concepts of three-dimensional space, and time. For that, the book is well worth reading.

I should have been studying, but spent most of the weekend working on the blog app(s) instead. The blog is broken into two parts - a small front-end webapp, and then a larger struts-based beastie for all admin tasks. The front-end is basically done (and has been for ages), but the admin app, which isn't world-facing, is less pretty, and less feature-complete. That worked fine for me, because things didn't need to be too user-friendly, and I could often just run the occasional SQL query to tweak some data, rather than going through a CRUDdy page flow to accomplish the same thing.

Knowing that someone else, even if it's just a bored poker-and-prodder, might try to give the thing a spin some day, changes things slightly. The app doesn't have to be full featured, just respectably functional and bug-free enough for me to not be embarassed about it.

Most of the work left is on the admin app, and a lot of it is boooring. I made a rule that I'm not working on anything else until this is done, and the rule is Good. By yesterday I was tempted to just bang my half-done changes into CVS and move onto something more interesting. I stuck with it, and by tonight, I feel like I might actually finish this off, soon.

It's funny how different societies have different hot-button topics, and often they seem totally contradictory to each other. South Africans are touchy about all sorts of things given our past, but one thing which was in place before apartheid and never changed after was identity books and ID numbers. Credit card drivers' licences removed the schlep of having to carry a small book around with you, but nobody really resented the principle that for driving and all sorts of things, you had to be able to 'identify' yourself.

What's more, there's probably not a single business application in South Africa that doesn't associate human beings with an ID or passport number. Your ID number is who you are. No ID or passport number, no credit, no business, no job, no bank account, no health care, no gym membership, nothing.

In the UK, it's totally different. Companies don't ask for anything like an ID number, because there's no such thing. Name and proof of address, that's it. Brits seem to have a deep-seated distrust of being 'identified'. In the news today, is talk of ID cards for non-EU foreign nationals. I don't mind carrying an ID card, no biggie. Did it in South Africa all the time. There was mention that people will see this as a stealth step towards introducing ID cards for UK nationals. People aren't big on that.

Then on the other hand, you have Big Brother writ large in the trial of the failed suicide bombers from last year. The news showed footage of one of the bombers walking into a tube station, walking along the tracks, down the road, onto a bus, sitting on the bus, leaving the bus. They were able to go through CCTV footage and track this dude's every move.

That freaks me out a helluva lot more than having to carry a silly ID card.

I'm using a Thinkpad at work. I've always been a huge Thinkpad fan, and it's great to be using one again. The only problem is it has a trackpoint (Ronwen says I can't call it a nipple), and the Acer at home has a trackpad. The keyboards are also completely different, and I've just started getting used to the Acer's layout as it is. Now I'm constantly hitting the wrong keys on both laptops.

Exams will be over soon, and it'll be time to consider the next machine for home. Both of us sharing a single laptop is not, as they say, sustainable. I like the idea of computing on the sofa, as does the missus, so we're partial to both having laptops. I had been looking at an uber Dell, and almost bought one over Christmas, when they had some really decent specials, but decided to wait a bit longer. Now I'm pondering getting a Thinkpad for home instead. Then I look at Macbooks... and then I start thinking that I'm being silly, because I can still get a heap more hardware bang for my buck if I get a desktop. So I'm not sure.

I will say one thing - this Acer has, touch wood, thus far &c &c, served me really well.

We woke up to a blanket of snow this morning. How cool!

In the early 80's, there was some snow in the koppies near my home town, just a light layer that barely lent itself to snowballs. It snowed in Joburg back in '94, but so lightly it just melted as it landed. So this, basically, is my first real snow experience, and I could do with plenty more of it. A pox on global warming!

A week or two back I had a bit of an angsty ramble about choosing my pet projects for the year. I know that the main problem is that I often stuff around too much, and don't really feel like I'm getting anywhere with the things I do. So my plan is to pick a project, focus on it, finish it, and only then move on to something else.

At the same time, I've decided to try a little experiment and do things differently. The way I see it, talking more about what I'm doing, and making an effort to share things, code or even just notes and personal research, forces me to stay focused, stay tidy, and leaves me with a sense that there's a tangible outcome to whatever I'm busy with. On a selfish front, it's always good to build up an online portfolio, and on the altruistic front, it's always nice to know that you're the happy ending to the occasional person's Google search.

So with that in mind, the first project I'm going to start off with, is put up the code to my blog app. I don't expect anyone to want to use it, but maybe one or two people will find it useful. At the very least it won't just be a heap of code hidden on my hard drive. I've wanted to share it for ages, keep revisiting it and cleaning up bits and pieces, and then leave it again. So committing to getting it done, and actually wrapping it up, will be a good start to the year.

Phew. No more late nights for a while... my Honours Project module is DONE. It's late, so I hope they still accept it. It started out being quite exciting and ended up being more character-building than anything else. I chose to do a Linear Programming project, which was meant to be 25% theory and 75% programming - just up my alley. The theory bit turned out to be a bloomin' nightmare, especially for someone who hadn't done any real maths for over 5 years. Then, late in December, as I was putting the final bits together, I realised that my proposed solution, which had been through a draft review, the lot, had some flawed logic. So I had to ditch a chunk of diligently tested 'engine' and re-do things using a different algorithm. As I said, character building.

On the plus side, the programming was fun. I started out building the back-end stuff using Eclipse's CDT on Linux. I'd hoped to write the app in Linux, but left it too late to get the OK from my lecturer, so decided to just do it on Windows. At first I thought wrapping my head around MFC would be fun, even though MS seems intent on shoo-shooing VC++ developers to Windows Forms, but soon came to the realisation that MFC ain't just some Swing without the garbage collection. When I couldn't find a decent built-in grid component, I knew it was time to re-evaluate my GUI toolkit choice, stat. I settled on wxWidgets, which I've grown rather partial to. It's small, simple, and well-documented. Lots of open-source apps don't play nice with VC++, but it worked like a charm.

Now, sleep.

The story of the cargo ship which ran aground off Devon feels a bit more pertinent to us, because we saw all the containers on board the ship and remembered that our stuff is currently in a container, on a ship, owned by the same shipping line, and making its way to us as I type. I think our ship is still south of the equator, but you still have an 'um, what's our ship's name?' moment.

When we were getting packed up in September, and looking at insurance options, I remember thinking that the handsome sum of money we would spend on shipping insurance seemed like a waste. Heh.

... and there's me, still without a brolly. Although I suppose if my few-block trek to the bus stop is going to be in 120km/h winds, a brolly isn't going to be much help anyway.

Update: the wind wasn't too bad compared to other parts of the country, but it was still pretty mean.