Author: cdwan

This is a climbing “simulator” which I received in honor of my birthday. It is used to do various forms of pull-up and finger strengthening exercises (like dead hangs and L-hangs. It causes me much pain. I love it.

An article from the New Yorker seems sad but true to me.

I’m about to recycle about 6 years worth of “Science” magazine. Given that they’re all online, and that my house is smaller than it was…plus the fact that they do nothing but gather dust…out they go.

Anyone want them? If you cover shipping, they’re yours.

Just by accident, I seem to have hit a big productivity enhancer.

I was tinkering with my desktop settings (on ye ‘olde Mac) and decided to make the toolbar hide itself. Some people like this feature, some people don’t. I’m getting more and more like my friend Alan in that I want every single one of the available pixels to be available to me. I’m not as freako as he is. He turns off the borders and control buttons in his window environment and does almost everything with chords on the keyboard.

Anyway, along with my usual policy of no-sound unless I’ve got the headphones in…this removed all of the stimuli associated with a new email message.

Suddenly, I find myself having these 20, 30 minute…even hour long stretches of focus…and code is getting written. I feel smarter..better looking…okay, not better looking, but it’s helped that feeling of helpless ADHD I usually have when I try to concentrate for longer than a few minutes.

So: Remove the clanging bells, the jumping fish, the Drew Barrymore shriek…whatever you’ve got to announce new mail. It just might make you smarter.

Today I’m writing an autogenerator for a pile of WSDL. It’s a program that writes another program. Nothing new there. I’ve been writing programs to create scripts for a while now. The new part is that this autogenerated code defines a set of generic interfaces, which will themselves be used to autogenerate code.

So it’s code that writes code that allows other code to write its code.

But wait, there’s more.

The autogenerated interface code that my WSDL enables will be accessing perl modules which are themselves autogenerated by another pile of scripts. This is the reason I’m making my WSDL dynamically rather than writing it once and being done with it. So this is a dynamic interface to a dynamically generated set of modules, all of which are specified (under the hood) in XML. WSDL is also XML, but don’t be fooled into thinking that they’ll play nicely just because of that. These are two very distinct document types within XML.

It goes something like this:

Me:  XML --> WSDL <---> HTTP <----------> WSDL-parser  
      |                                        |
      +----> Perl <---> SOAP <---> HTTP <---> SOAP <----> Client, in the language of your choice : User

Yes, was there a question in the back?

Another trade rag article: In which I rant about the evil overhyped-ness of grid computing.

Wow.

Jen’s parents were just in town for a weekend visit. They brought along a few birthday presents, among them a red swingline stapler (a la Office Space). They had no idea that Jen had been serious when she kept saying “just bring him a red swingline stapler! Seriously!”

Nobody touches the precious. Nobody.

Climbed with a toprope for the first time in almost two months today. The one other person in the gym was a girl (13? 14?) who wanted to try a 5.12+ route, and I was the only person around. For reference, the “5” means “you’re going to have to use your hands to get up this trail” and the “12” is a difficulty rating. I’ve been climbing for over a year now, and I’ve climbed 5.10’s once or twice. It’s some sort of log scale: 12 is way out of my league. There is currently debate about whether 5.15 is a meaningful rating. Said debate is limited to the couple of dozen people in the world who can climb 5.14’s. Anyway, she was nice enough to give me some pointers on the 5.8 that I almost fell off of.

Going to be a busy week.