June 2008 Archives
Having apparently mislaid my print copy, I was surprised and delighted to just now find that Google Books has Those who have worked with me over the last couple of years have been subjected to my occasionally holding up this book as improving the way I wrote software faster and more profoundly than any other single influence. It not only made me a better Perl hacker, but changed the way I approach any software project, regardless of the programming languages it may happen to use. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough to my fellow professional Perl people, and suggest that even those who primarily work in other languages have a look. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some well-documented and robustly tested exception objects to throw... Following my previous post, another consultant I work with mailed me to reveal himself as another FreshBooks fan, and pointed me to a free Mac OS X dashboard widget the service offers that obviates the need to use their web-based timer. My goodness! That's quite cool. This may be the first dashboard widget (beyond Apple's own orange calculator) I actually make regular use of. I just sent out my first invoice via FreshBooks, an online time tracking and billing tool that a colleague recommended to me earlier. So far, I really like it! I'm impressed that it's an ad-free service that seems to make all its money by selling you things around the fringes, like the ability to accept online payments or send out invoice hardcopies via postal mail, while keeping all its core features free of charge. Same colleague suggested that it starts charging when you add a number of active clients beyond a certain limit, but if so, I haven't hit that yet. [Update: OK, I found it. It's free so long as you manage three or fewer clients with it, and then they require you buy into a monthly subscription.] When I first went independent last year, my time-tracking system involved the clock on the wall and a text file full of date-grouped clusters of stop/start times, and my billing system was just rote re-use of the invoice template that ships with the Pages word processor. After a few months, I switched to using SlimTimer, a minimal-but-functional AJAX-based time tracker, which served me well for about half a year. The monthly, manual translations of lists of labeled time chunks into invoice tables was still a pain, though. FreshBooks's timer, I have discovered, is at least as nice as SlimTimer's, and it's very easy to dump the information that it collects into nice-looking invoices, which it can then go ahead and mail to your clients for you. I am likely to stick with FreshBooks for a while. I finally saw Iron Man yesterday. As you may have already heard, it really is a paramount example of its explosion-heavy class of movie, and I recommend it to all. I note this here to comment on the inevitable and frequent collisions between events in adventure films and any real-world expert knowledge that might be possessed by members of its audience. During the film's obligatory "computer hacking" scene, I reflected on how much mellower I had become about Hollywood depictions of computer use, compared to myself of a decade ago. Back then I would have made a show of squirming, sighing, and gesticulating helplessly as the hero used her magic hack-u-matic USB dongle to access the bad guy's secret files in under a minute. (And was able to get a live and fluently accurate word-by-word translation of a foreign-speech audio file by typing in "TRANSLATE" while it played.) But now I just let it go, accepting that the reality in which comic-book action movies take place is not this reality. It's one in which nothing really complicated can happen; anything worth doing can be done in a few minutes, especially if it looks cool or blows up at the end. And that's OK. As a bonus, I got to vicariously experience another movie-logic-versus-actual-expertise collision outside of my own field. My moviegoing party involved a couple of folks involved in defense (working for the DoD and a name-brand contractor, respectively), and it was interesting to get their reaction to the film while we had dinner afterwards. One of them remarked at how a lot of movies like this use defense contractors as a plot device that allows a character to equip themselves overnight with fantastic and deadly toys (naming the Green Goblin from Spider-Man as another example), and how this movie furthermore depicted the US military as buying new weapons systems after a brief demonstration, as if they were buying a new washing machine. None of this, he said, accurately depicted the utterly glacial and bureaucracy-clogged pace at which anything actually happens within the real-life Mil-Ind Complex! I thought that was great. In its defense, I think that Iron Man handled this OK by implying that, upon his return, Tony retreated to the basement to work on his pet mad-science project for an unspecified period of time, while the rest of his company was like "Whatever, dude" and kept on chugging without him. To me it's not important whether or not this makes the situation any more realistic, so much as it was nice they acknowledged the conflict with reality and threw the audience a bone to gnaw on. I am quite willing to gnaw so long as the story's smartly told otherwise, and this one really is. |
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