Josh Sklar's Simplywondering

Why November is the Worst Month #2: Projects, Projects, Projects

There are two rules of work. Number 1: The amount of energy required to move an object is work. Number 2: If time is an object then there is always enough energy to insure there is enough work to take up all the time available. This means that during months like November, where the only holiday aside from Thanksgiving is Veterans day teachers decide the only way to use students energy to create work is to assign big projects. Really big projects.

It was last year I realized that this was in fact a conspiracy of teachers everywhere. I was talking to a CS TA in her office and was eavesdropping on a conversation between two of the faculty members. The first teacher asked the second if her students would be ready for the “November crunch”. They both laughed and said they were thankful there was a place late in Fall term where they could assign the big projects and actually expect the students to finish them. Being in one of those teachers classes, all I could do at the time was shiver.

Sadly I ended up in the other teacher's class this year helping to lead to another November crunch. God, do I dislike November.

Why November is the Worst Month Point #1: No Baseball

As a fourth generation Red Sox fan (The first in three generations to see a world series victory before age 50), I was overjoyed to see a sweep of the Cardinals in 2004. However in my heart I wanted a seven series game. Not just because I like drama, angst and good baseball, but also because I just wanted more baseball.

To me the end of baseball symbolizes the inevitability of winter. Early October is one of the last points in the Portland year one can expect warm, clear days at all. When the date hits November 1st I know I'm going to be greeted by ever darkening days, more rain, and such interesting baseball news as, “When the free agent negotiating period begins eventually teams are going to sign people... Really.”

Hearing that Manny is, as his annual tradition requires, requesting a trade from the Red Sox is just boring. Unless I frequent a Red Sox fan forum this news will distract me from the oncoming cold and wet November existence for barely five minutes. A Red Sox game on the other hand lasts at least two hours. During November I would love a two hour distraction from the darkening skies.

Instead of come from behind victories in the last strike of the last out in the ninth I can look forward to coaches making calls to get replays while they run out the clock and there players get pounded into pulp. And its getting dark at 4:30 too...

Thankfully there's only... five... months...

Categories: Attempt #n+1 to post more regularly

I found my little black book under a cushion of one of the chairs in my apartment. Before misplacing this small pocket notebook I hadn't realized just how critical it is to my life. Without it I've: missed appointments, forgotten important things people have told me, confused addresses, lost phone numbers, and generally felt very misguided.

Anyways, I open up the book this evening and my last entry (dated three weeks ago) said, “Write an entry on your blog before Halloween.” That kind of passed, so this is my next best attempt, a belated birthday card of a post.

So I've admitted to being unable to categorize anything, so I've gotten rid of all the old categories and decided to start anew. Somehow the seven post drafts where I couldn't decide if the category was 'programming:school' or 'programming:work' tipped me off to a road block in my posting attempts. So, I'll attempt to avoid adding too many top categories and only do so when its something very very obvious.

I finished a six month agreement of a sort today, so I'll also make one for this blog. In the next six months I'll make at least six posts. Everything else is gravy. I'll also make the colors all blue!!!!*!*!

Colophon: Josh Sklar's Simplywondering.com

Simplywondering.com is the musings of Josh Sklar. Not this Josh Sklar or this Josh Sklar. I'm younger then the first and older then the second :P.

For the various parts of this site I use the following software on my mac:

Simplywondering.com is hosted by the excellent people at Dreamhost and runs on the equally excellent Movable Type 3.x blogging software.

Once on a train ride to Seattle I had the gaul to write a “mission statement” for simplywondering.com. Thankfully the first person that read it laughed until I had to pat her on the back. So, instead of some teary eyed idealism, I just hope this site keeps me from looking too scary when someone looks me up on Google. :-D

About Josh Sklar

So, I've spent a while trying to decide exactly what I wanted to disclose on my 'about me' page. Way back when I registered this domain I was big on disclosing those little details about myself. However having come across people who've had annoying identity theft issues I've decided to tone down the accuracy :P. Instead I'll just get off my 'serious horse'. I certainly get more out of 'about me' pages when the person isn't deadly serious.

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Name: Josh Sklar

Age: Twenty going on either fourteen or thirty

Height:Shorter then I want, taller than 'average' women

Location:Portland, OR

School:Portland State University

Occupation: Technology Therapist

Marital status: Too young for that. Thanks for asking :).

Obsession of the moment: Calligraphy

Obsession of the last moment: Baseball

Obsession at the core of my being: The cooking and eating of food

Favorite Audrey Hepburn movie: Roman Holiday

Pen of choice: Waterman Phileas

A Little Cat Girl and Other Formating Tests

Isn't it cute? I'm certainly a fan. I tried making ears that looked like that but to be honest, it just doesn't look good on me at all. I think I'd have to be a cute girl with long hair to pull it off. I found that for me I do well with the shonen-ai'ish look from Loveless. Those kind of ears just fit somehow :).

Now to look at an unordered list. Here are a couple obscure goals of mine.

Be interviewed on Fresh Air
Be mentioned on the daily show in a cool way
Master the act of deciding a dish needs cold-pressed peanut oil or standard

Did I mention I have an LJ? I really do enjoy it for some reason :).

Ok, this should be enough to play with for a bit.

-Josh

Redecoration to represent a redecoration of my life

So, I haven't updated this site since sometime during march. During this time most of my writing has been occurring at my other site located at livejournal. However I've gotten into a new relationship and this has caused me to get through so many of my projects that I'm finally getting to projects like this site. Since its been dormant since January I feel its time for me to actually do the design I've been wanting to do for so long. The blog fashion's template wasn't the best in the world at rendering in different browsers so I'm going to let it die.

Since developing anything for movable type depends so much on the movable type tags I'm actually going to do most of the development live on this site. Since I reason no one but comment spam robots currently read anything I've posted I imagine this shouldn't inconvenience anyone.

Here's to my productivity continuing.

-Josh

fare: Parsing Considered Harmful

I don't “agree” with the following livejournal post. It contains far too many arguments for its size and a distinct lack of context. However, one thing I agree with is his complaints about Computer science being a faux science. Francious-René Rideau says, “it is an Art, or an Engineering Enterprise, which is one and the same”. I'd agree if you're referring to the programming aspect of computer science. Look at the lack of theory and experiments related to the program design aspect. The formal validation qualities of CS don't seem as anything more then a specific branch of math which is hardly worthy of the the title “Computer Science”. Here's the link, fare: Parsing Considered Harmful

-Josh

Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing

I was linked to this excellent article, Vim: Seven habits of effective text editing. It has enough excellent points it needs to be posted. Check it out regardless of what editor you use.

-Josh Sklar

iGTD progress update #3: Coping with options

Despite finals for this term taking most of my energy and time I have still been moving forward on iGTD. I have the first part of the interface (adding and removing next actions) completed and I'm writing how to deal with projects.

One issue I have is how to deal with the rule that every project must have a next action. My initial thought was to allow people to select a completed action and just hit delete or a 'finished' button. When a next action has been cleared and the project still exists iGTD would pop up a panel for the user to enter a new action. However this presented two problems: if the panel automatically appears should this panel have an undo button on it in case of making an error? Should the panel also have some way of indicating the project's completion? Is this too busy?

Should I instead have a warning panel/sheet appear when you complete a task to insure that you wish to delete the action? Or is that too much user bothering? At the moment I'm thinking of doing an iTunes trick and have that be the default behavior with a switch available to turn it off. Still I'm beginning to see how complecated the user interface can get very quickly. The actually programming of the model is very easy in comparison.:P.

-Josh

Xcode, CVS 1.12.9, cvswrappers, Portland State University, and how to get things to work

Today for the first time I attempted to get xcode and CVS to play nice with the cocoa project iGTD that I'm working on. I recalled that cvs traditionally had issues with .nib bundles and that in order to use CVS correctly with Xcode one has to use a trick involving cvs wrappers. My main tutorial came from Maczealots and is one of a series Justin Williams did.

His tutorial confirmed that I needed to use cvswrappers in order to properly work with .nib file. However, after configuring for remote access, doing the step to pull from the CVS repository and uploading the apple-configured cvswrapper file I recieved the following warning.

-t/-f wrappers not supported by this version of CVS

The version on the PSU servers is 1.12.9. Upon further investigation I found that a decent sample of people call cvswrappers a hack which no one wants to support. So I found this Xcode and CVS page on cocoadev. It pretty much states how you have to do it. I ended up just doing everything from the command line because the PSU odin server has issues with authentication. Still I did get it to work.

Then of course I found out they installed subversion...

-Josh

iGTD progress update #2: The desire to design is pulling at me

I've finished the chapter in Hillegass' book dealing with notifications and I'm starting to salivate over starting to code. The next chapter deals with localization and then everything moves into custom views and work like that. I fear for making major design mistakes but it feels to me like I can start. I woke up this morning thinking about array controllers and how to implement task grouping. The mutable dictionary calls....

On a sepearate note it introduces to me yet another way to iterate through a series of items. I still think my favorite way is the python, for element in set... style. The dictionaries in Cocoa have a method you call to get a type called an enumerator ([myDictionary keyEnumerator]). This enumerator has its own methods, one of which is nextObject which essentially cycles through pointers to the objects in the dictionary. It feels very object-orienty to me and as it fits with the rest of cocoa I enjoy it.

What I think this means is I'm becoming a Cocoa Otaku just like I'm a Manga Otaku, a Mac Otaku, and a Cooking Otaku. Oh well, one more obsession won't kill me. Well, an obsession about Cocoa won't kill me at least....

-Josh Sklar

iGTD progress update #1: Cocoa is an Awesome Framework!

I've always had an interest in seriously learning cocoa since I assumed it would enable me to put my desires into practice in a stylish fashion with less effort then any other system. So far everything is playing straight into this dream.

I've always found that jumping into a project and hitting the ground fast is only a good idea when you have a good idea what ground you're jumping onto. Before this last week I only knew that people were raving about cocoa and that Mac Addict had shown me how to “write my own web browser” using web-kit and almost no code. Now I've started to learn about key-value coding, the binding/cocoa-binding system, reference counts and memory management and the awesome manor in which cocoa handles serializing/archiving information.

The hotness of protocols and object serialization!

Learning how cocoa handles saving data actually made me smile and swear it's just that elegant. First, You implement a “protocol” called NSCoding for all the objects in your program. Following a protocal means you include specified methods/functions in your class that the protocol dictates the names and arguments of. This means the cocoa frameworks can expect your objects of that class to handle requests for these methods and not have to know a single thing about your class. Truly this is what my professors must be dreaming about when they inform us about the usefulness of objects. Anyways, When you save, your application sends calls to all the objects telling them to encode themselves into bits. These objects in turn, ask the objects they contain to encode themselves into bits. Such a gorgeous chain which means that all each object has to know is how to encode itself and when to recursively request its smaller parts to encode themselves. It's so much more awesome then writing bits to an fstream it makes me giggle with glee.

This is all either making me hot or it's making me hopeful :P

The more I learn about cocoa, the more I'm believing I can actually do my project. If I had to write all this functionality I'm getting “for free” I don't think I could do this project by myself. Heck, I don't think I'll do it all myself anyways (Like I could make an icon...) but I should be able to do most of the programming all by myself.

This may be premature before I get any further I just want to thank those NeXT/Apple engineers who have done all this work to bring this Cocoa programming infrastructure into the world for people like me to use.

-Josh Sklar

I'm Hungry to Grow

For months I've been floating through life searching for reasons to act. The rarity of posting to the blog is a testament to my uncertainty of purpose. I couldn't find anything to write about since I couldn't find anything I wanted to do.

Then my long time girlfriend and I broke up and I'm finding myself very uncomfortable with life. I don't feel safe floating anymore. Oddly this discomfort is starting to fuel my hunger to succeed. I haven't felt this much energy to 'do' since I was wooing my girlfriend Junior year of High School.

When my girlfriend and I broke up she reminded me of the quote, “You can either live as an example or as a horrible warning.” She wasn't sure which she was doing but I know I'm done being a horrible warning. Now it's time to live as an example.

-Josh Sklar

The first step for iGTD

As far as I have noticed, if I follow a good Model-View-Controller method of setting up this program I should be able to develop the backend(model) before I deal with the user interface. I do however like both iterated design and functional software so I think every time I implement a part of the model I'll then do the interface and the controller elements before moving on to the next stage.

My first goal point is simple, To have the ability to add projects and add the next action to each project, and for the actions to be doable and stored in the projects. That's the plan.

-Josh Sklar