Geekpost

Gordon has become my new role model of change-driven design. Or design-driven change. Or something. Here's his latest brilliant statement:

"If there is a change to be made in the system and the system has failed, we will change the system."

Let's just see that again in code:

if (
  calculateAllPossibleChanges( system ).getSize() > 0
  &&
  system.getErrors().getSize() > 0
) {
  change( system )
}

protected void change( MutableSystem system ) {
  // TODO
}

Woo-hoo - my first app is now up on iTunes. The imaginatively-named "Gold Price" app lets you track the price of gold bullion live:

If you've got an iPhone or an iPod touch you can download it now for free.

At least, that's the plan[1].

fn1. The queen of evil Evian made me post it.

Idea for a TV show: Britain's Got Torrent! - In which ordinary people up & down the country download something more interesting than a variety show.

"The University of Nottingham is delighted to invite you and fellow alumni to an evening with Sir Richard Hadlee, one of the greatest all round cricketers in the history of the game."

Oh, good-oh. Terrific. Tell you what - you let me know when there's an evening with the inventor of the BBC Model B microcomputer, and I'll buy some tickets.

There are eight people in our office, so yesterday I played this game: "If everyone in the office was one of the incarnations of The Doctor, which one would they be?"

Now you don't know the people in my office, so there's no point me telling you the results, except to say that if we want to complete the set, the next two people we hire have to be either Colin Baker or Patrick Troughton.

Supplemental bonus game you can play at home: Which assistant is my partner?

I think we're all agreed - scanning for things is fun.

But at the moment, there's simply not enough stuff you can scan for. At the best, you can wander down the High Street and scan for wireless networks and Bluetooth-enabled devices, but it's simply not enough. I want to be able to scan for beta particles. I want to be able to scan for abnormally-high tachyon emmissions. I want to be able to scan for lifeforms, even if it's faster just to count the things that are wearing flip-flops.

I want to be able to choose between 'active' and 'passive' scanning, even if active scanning runs a risk of rendering the populous of Hammersmith infertile. I'm willing to take that chance if it means we get better data.

I want more data. I need more data. And I need it in a pocket-size device that goes 'bloop'.

If you thought that by looking really closely at your mortgage deal for a few days, you could find a way to reduce your payments by 90%, I think that'd be a pretty exciting prospect.

If you knew that with a bit of time and effort, you could make your car run on ten times less petrol, or get it to move ten times faster, that'd be worth doing.

If took the books you write, or the songs you produce, or the paintings or the whatever, and found a way to be ten times more productive - at the same quality - it'd be enormously artistically rewarding.

This, ladies and gentlebens, is the reason that as a geek, I find performance-tuning about the most exciting part of the art. It's actually possible. Look at a system closely enough, think clearly enough, and you can often find a way to make things run an order of magnitude faster, at no extra cost. I'm not talking the dumb route of "Buy a faster machine". Any idiot can suggest that, and it's usually not half as spectacular as you hope. I'm talking the same system, 10 times more efficient. I'm talking ingenuity. And when you nail it, it's about the most fucking satisfying thing there is.

But if you reduced your mortgage by 90%, you'd be called a financial genius. At least by your partner. If your car ran ten times longer or ten times faster, you'd be hailed as the engineer of our age. And even if your art wasn't the best in the world, you would at least be go down in history as one of the most prolific creators of our time.

But you make a computer system run ten times faster, or even a hundred times after a particularly fine think, and sometimes the best you get is that people stop complaining. Somebody will say something along the lines of, "About time. Why wasn't it this fast in the first place? Are you lazy? I would have typed FAST ages ago."

And that's why performance-tuning is the least fucking satisfying thing there is.

Says the BBC. Well, yes, I suppose they would really. NES sales aren't going to be a big contributor to their bottom-line, are they?

...and I know there are a few of you out there.

Will you do me a favour, please? Will you try out The Widget Wot I wrote? It's a little gold price tracker for work that I dashcoded together over Christmas. I want to release it, but I need some beta-testers.

If you'd install this widget, try it out for me and leave a comment or two, I'd be most gratitudinal.

If it works correctly, you should see something like this, auto-updating the price every 10 seconds:

Unlike Operation: Whispering Panda and Operation: Lowing Dove, Operation: Replace The Hi-Fi is fairly well-named, so I'll skip the tactical overview and go straight to the battle plan.

It's fairly simple - half a dozen well-placed speakers, spread around the living room to create a Soup Of Sound, and an iPod as the brain of the beast. Mainly because it'll save space and time. The reason we're getting rid of the current hi-fi is that it's HUGE, and every time you change the CD you have to shake the box while it goes in or it will refuse to play. I want something small, and preferrably something where you don't have to change the CD at all.

Anyway, that's sortof by-the-by. My reason for dragging y'all into this mission is this: An 80G iPod currently costs £160. Fine. A bit steep methinks, but I've found a bargain on the speaker front and the whole mission will cost less than invading Iraq. No, what bothers me is that I went to the online Apple store to buy said iPod, and it offerred me the "iPod Protection Care Plan" at an additional £40. Essentially insurance at a 25% premium.

Now I appreciate I'm doing the maths a bit fast and loose here, but doesn't that mean they think it's got a roughly 1-in-4 chance of going wrong? Am I making a mistake here? Am I about to step into a quagmire of techhurt?

...to the folks at Google. Have you seen Google Maps' new draggable route planner? Amazing...

Tech Republic are running an article on old computers from the 80's. It really brings back some fond (geeky) memories. I used to own one of these, and I haven't seen it in about 15 years:

It was very cool. It had something like 176×16 display, and if memory serves I wrote a few games on it when I should have been doing history lessons.

I'm not sure I'm happy with "bacn" as a word, but nevertheless, this is a really handy tip for people that use gmail.

There's something about last.fm that I really don't get.

If you don't know about it, the idea's simple: It takes note of what music you're playing in iTunes (or similar), tries to figure a pattern to what you're into, and creates a personalised internet radio station containing similar stuff.

It actually works really well - every time I switch on the Kris channel I hear loads of new stuff I really dig. It's particularly good at serving up songs I've never heard by bands I've always liked.

But - and this is the thing I don't get - not if I log in.

If I'm logged into their site, it tells me I can't hear my own radio station until I pay a subscription fee. If I log out, it'll let me hear it for free. You can listen to the music I'm into as long as you're not me. Or if you are me¹ you have to keep quiet about it.

Is that not bloody weird?

¹ And let's face it, I am.