Going Paperless: Day 4

I have a habit of jotting notes to myself. These notes are usually list of items (sometimes related items, sometimes not) that are just reminders. Each item is usually only a few words, but just enough to put me on the path to the full idea.

The second part of this "paperless" test was to determine if I could use the laptop for that purpose. Most of the notes that I jot to myself end up in electronic form anyway (usually expanded with more context). Wouldn't it be good to avoid that intermediate step?

I don't think this is going to work. It's like the time you realize (when trying to write a networked application) that bandwidth is not enough, you also need low latency. Laptops (and TVs and cellphones) are getting slower to "boot up," not faster.

I don't consider this test a failure. Learning something always counts, so I don't consider the experiment a waste of time. Perhaps if I ever find a cellphone I like and can afford, that will replace pen-and-paper.

Going Paperless: Day 3

This morning I read the whole front page of the New York Times paper edition while my laptop was installing the latest Windows updates.

I also realized that the primary reason I don't like the NYT web site is that it is too hard to quickly scan the headlines, unlike the paper edition. Hello, Google News?

Thirdly, while making cheese & tortillas for breakfast (I'm a FIFO kinda guy when it comes to the refrigerator), I realized that getting cheese grease on the keyboard was probably not a good idea. (Also, I can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on a Toughbook.)

It looks like the laptop is losing as far as reading the paper is concerned, at least for the way that I like to absorb the news.

Going Paperless: Day 2

Today I read some of the paper edition of the local freebie weekly while waiting for my laptop to reboot after a failed shutdown. After the laptop came back up, I went from the main NYT page to "Today's Paper" and read some articles from there. I also tried to get to the New York Times "Reader" (which looks like it shows images of the paper edition) but couldn't find a version that I didn't have to pay for. I already pay for the paper edition. I'll give the Reader another try tomorrow.

Last night I plugged the headphones in and watched some TV on Hulu. Enjoyable, but I wonder how Hulu is going to stay in business with only public service announcements for "advertising?"

Going Paperless: Day 1

As an experiment I've decided to try to reduce the amount of paper that I consume. As with all experiments, it may or may not work. But what does "work" mean here? I may, for example, be able to read the New York Times on-line. Will that experience allow me to read more, or to understand more of what I read?

It's not like I use a lot of paper, and my family is conscientious about recycling. I'm not, therefore, expecting to save a lot of paper.

Today I read a few articles using NYT on-line. I feel like I read less than I do from the paper, but I liked the fact that (with my ageing eyes) I didn't need an extra light source to read the articles. It also seems like the font size in the browser is slightly larger than the font size in the paper edition.

My issue today is that I like the NYT editors making choices for me. I find the web page has a lot on it, and I have to "think more" about what I really care about. With the paper edition, I sort it as follows:

• main section
• arts
• business
• sports (which I never read anyway)
  

Now I have to look at each individual article title to figure out if I want to read it or not. I feel that slows me down, and I read less of each actual article.

We'll see what happens tomorrow.

Beward of tilde characters in file and directory names

I work on an application that occasionally goes across the network to look for files. I had written some code that used the GetFiles and GetDirectories calls from My.Computer.FileSystem. One of our test-beds was a remote computer (going across the public internet, rather than within a company intranet). The calls to GetFiles and GetDirectories using the SearchAllSubDirectories option were agonizingly slow on some networks, but not all.

I tried many different workarounds (including writing my own recursive GetDirectories on the theory that something was wrong in the Microsoft implementation). None of them worked until I took a deep breath and made a long list of things to try (many of them actually just data-gathering under different configurations).

Luckily, the first item on my list fixed the problem. I had been using a tilde character ('~') to help directories and files sort in a certain order. I remembered that the "shortened file name" workaround in Windows used a tilde to generate "intermediate" filenames for older applications that used fixed size buffers for 8.3 filenames.

I changed the tilde to an equal sign and the problem went away.

VBScript vs the Rest of the World

I tried using VBScript since I was tired of the lack of control structures, functions, etc, in the CMD language. I spent a few hours rewriting (or trying to rewrite) a couple of CMD scripts.

I ended up going back to CMD. My reasons (in no particular order) are:

• VBScript is different enough from Visual Basic that it really qualifies as a different language. Very few of my VB habits worked for VBScript.
• I hit a security issue when I was trying to copy files. I had written a CMD script, a Cygwin shell script and a Python script that all worked, but VBScript refused to do the copy. It wasn't worth the time to figure out which security setting to tweak.

Also, I don't really want to learn yet another language that locks me into Windows. So I get to live with CMD (whose behavior I do understand) until I can convince myself that my team can deal with Python.

Simple Software Scheduling

How about scheduling this way? When you're in the SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess) stage (or even later), just pick one of the following for each task:

1 day
1 week
1 month
1 quarter
forever

Note that there is no "year" category. If you think something is going to take a year you're not scheduling at the right granularity (and maybe even a quarter is too much).