All posts made the week commencing Sunday 6 Aug., 2000:

16:28, Friday 11 Aug., 2000 Link

And I've been thinking about life, and death (and how not-life != death), and all the things that are said about them -- and I feel that previously I've been thinking in the wrong direction. There's nothing in the universe that labels this volume here, typing at you, 'alive'. It's just a human taxonomy. So it doesn't really make any sense to talk about life in anything other than human terms. We can't reduce it any further than that, because it just doesn't make sense. And since human terms keep changing, well, that means we just have to decide for ourselves what it all means and what it's all about.

Anyway. So the ashes are being scattered and I was just expecting a symbolic handful or two and they keep on coming, more and more from this urn, and you forget how big we are really and the wind picks a few up and I have to stop myself from coughing, so even now, hours later, my throat's still dry. And they say every breath you take has an atom of Julius Caesar in it, but you never think that cycle really exists, I mean really happens, and definitely not as quickly as this, but here we are and it's only taken a week to go round and my throat's dry and the universe is one person emptier and doesn't even care, but that's okay because it's my terms that matter, when it comes down to it: So it's not the universe that's one person emptier, it's me, and I can feel that gap right here.

09:05, Thursday 10 Aug. Link

Right then, it's just getting a little bit weird. Shopping for dinner last night, looking at the neck pillows (as you do), and what do I see but only my mate Andrew McCargow on the front of the executive travel bag box. And the rucksack box. I haven't seen Andrew for months (he's in .au), so not only is it good to see him, but I'm proud, like he's somehow subverted the hierarchy, and by proxy (because I know him) so have I. The other shoppers in Tesco were this close to knowing too, but Es wouldn't let me tell them.

And then, on my way back this morning, I drove for 15 minutes behind a van for DPR Windows, with the url displayed prominently on the back. The site being, of course, my first commercial one ever, and unbelievably ugly. So I just kept my head right down, so no one would recognise me, and tried not to crash into the back of it.

11:05, Wednesday 9 Aug. Link

This objects/methods things is a bloody pain. Web application design is a bloody pain. UI -- that's a bloody pain too. Steps, or, a web application howto:

1. User interface
   Think about what the user wants to be able to do. Make it really simple. Don't even consider what programming the bastard thing will then entail.
2. Front end scripts
   The code on the front end should be barely more than augmented html. At this point you consider where your loops are and decide on your method calls for your back end. Do not at any point think about the programming. No referencing of data-structures; no subroutines. Simple simple simple.
3. Database
   Now shift your attention to the database. Think about what data you have, where the relations are, and design tables which will minimise accesses, remove any replication of data, and inevitably bear no resemblence at all to the user interface. Still: Don't think about the programming.
4. SQL
   You have to pull and update database data with elegant SQL that, again, minimises database accesses. Good database accesses are very important: There are risks here in data integrity so look out. The importance of it means you can't distract yourself by thinking about the back end yet.
5. Back end
   Finally! On one side you have a user-interface designed for the user, and therefore the object methods you're going to use are already defined, with no thought to how you're going to program the damn thing. On the other side, your database structure is already decided. Your job is to tie the two together, making best use of abstraction and inheritance to allow easy extensibility. You may now begin thinking about the programming.

Apparently the payoff is magnificent, but to be honest I can think of things I'd prefer to be doing.

10:42 Link

perltoot is the Perl object-oriented tutorial, part of the Perl documentation. I'm currently hunting for object and method calls design philosophy. Nothing too deep, but something useful. Looking...

21:14, Tuesday 8 Aug. Link

Q: I think a third party has been activating my ribcage.
A: Try bothering it with a Toyota. You might find it'll draw a diagram of it.

17:38, Monday 7 Aug. Link

Random Word 97 bug:

This problem occurs when the grammar checker attempts to evaluate a long, complex sentence that includes several conjunctions such as "or" and "and" along with at least one preposition such as "of," "to," "by," or "from."

And a Word 6.x grammar bug that hangs on a certain sentence. Why? I'd love to know how these sort of things come about.

16:46 Link

Wow: The largest living organism on Earth. How do such large organisms evolve? Where's the mechanism? Surely there's not enough intra-species competition for natural selection. Hm.

11:53 Link

What's the biggest thing you can think of? At the limits of my imagination, really pushing my understanding, I can get as far as a large village or a small town.

I mean, really feel the size. I figure my local village is about 100,000 times larger than me in each direction. Visualising myself in that kind of space; really feeling that kind of size, it certainly seems like the maximum size I can sensibly conceive of is about a million times the size of myself.

1mm in 1km kind of makes sense (I can see them on the same scale). 1mm in 1000 km, not a chance. There's a limit of understanding there. 1:1000,000 roughly. So what I want to know is:

1. Is this true?
   Do you have a scale limit of 1 in a million?
2. Is it physical?
   Imagine something that is a million times longer than it is wide. Is that the limit you can actually see? Any longer, would it be invisible at the ends? Any narrower, would it be too thin to see? Is the limit of our understanding the same as the diffraction limit at our eye? If our eye were different, could we then perceive larger scales? If our eye were different, would it in fact see larger scales (perhaps it couldn't)?
3. Is it lack of experience?
   Perhaps it's because if things differ in size that much, we've never needed to interact with them concurrently. You don't regard a grain of sand when building a pyramid; you interact with a mass of sand.
4. Nature or nurture?
   If it is|was just experience, has that now become part of us? Is our brain incapable of regarding larger scales now? Has our eye not needed to become capable because we've never needed it to? Or is it just us, and we can train ourselves to understand?

So many questions. Enlighten me, or just tell me what the biggest thing you can think of is.

11:04 Link

Fresh into my inbox, the most audacious spam ever sent. I feel honoured.

10:26 Link

Monday means new Upsideclown.

Years ago (and I mean years), when this was still all fields and I was doing Nucleus, the person I'd always want to write for me was my friend Neil. He only wrote twice, but as far as I'm concerned it was some of the best material that ever appeared in the magazine. He has a style that just resonates with me. Which all just makes it so much better that Neil is writing Upsideclown this week, and his writing gets me right there as much as ever. Love Letter: Excellent.