Stuff and nonsense

Here’s an interesting observation I’ve made as a result of reading (over the last 10 years) the pros and cons of test driven development (TDD). The discussion seems to eventually get this point:

• “TTD is a crock. I just don’t see the need to fully test everything. It’s a waste of time.”
• “TDD is awesome. We found TDD really helped speed up our development and ship better product.”

Feel encouraged to draw your own conclusions.

Ok.

I get it.

The more people interested in a topic, the worse the search results.

Try it. Search for cars, sex, money, movies or music. You’ll see.

Entropy, as I understand it, is that natural tendency for things to go from bad to worse.

I keep a small number of semi-exotic succulents on an outdoor staircase and landing at my apartment in the East Bay. In the spring, I do a massive cleanup of sweeping, pruning and replanting, once the winter is past.

This spring, I no longer finished when as many as four squirrels moved in to the neighborhood.

Now, when I step outside every day, I see squirrel damage. I repot today, tomorrow, that pot might well be dug up. If not tomorrow, then within a week or so.

There is new damage Every. Single. Day.

Because, someone close by is feeding these squirrels peanuts.

So the squirrels have taken to burying the surplus peanuts in my pots. The irony of this is that I’m allergic to peanuts.

I spend 30 minutes cleaning up; a squirrel spends 5 minutes digging it all back up.

The entropy of the situation: whoever is feeding these squirrels is doing it at relatively speaking, zero cost. Just a few bucks for a bag of peanuts snatched from the aisle in passing at the grocery store. Then getting lots of jollies as the squirrels “visit” for their feeding. Poor squirrels. So hungry.

I could spend hours every week dealing with someone else’s single moment of peanut purchase.

It’s a game I don’t think I can win. Whoever is feeding these varmints, and certainly the varmints, have more time than I do. They can spend a little time to cost me a lot of time. Entropy is on their side.

The upshot: someone else’s few moments of jolliness is likely to cost me my stairscape. Something I have taken a lot of pleasure in, and cultivated over the last many years.

In another part of the country, this would not be an issue. It would be Mulligan stew. But this is California.

I do a bit of blogging here and there. One of the more recent, and more interesting, features of WordPress is its capability for defining custom taxonomies. A taxonomy, of course, being a collection of like items called taxa (sing. taxon), arranged in some sensible order.

However, trouble is brewing in paradise…

Taxonomy from Wikipedia:

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification. The word finds its roots in the Greek τάξις, taxis (meaning ‘order’ or ‘arrangement’) and νόμος, nomos (meaning ‘law’ or ‘science’). Taxonomy uses taxonomic units, known as taxa (singular taxon).

So, what?

So, watch for this:

• “taxonomy” will be used for synonymously for taxon
• “taxonomies” will be in lieu of taxa as the plural form

What this means is that when someone says “taxonomy” you are going to have to infer its meaning as an element in a collection of like elements collectively referred to as a taxonomy, or as the collection itself.

Frankly, stupid, pedantic words like “taxon” and “taxa” exist for a reason. Using the correct form of such words eliminates confusion.

Unfortunately, this requires people learning what such words actually mean. Which means either 1. reading, or 2. being instructed.

Which flies in the face of how the vast majority learn anything, which is to copy the accepted usage from peers, and not bother with the difficult details of real meaning.

Consequently, within WordPress, “taxonomy” is going to remain a slippery, confusing topic. If you don’t understand taxonomies, rest assured, that’s not entirely your fault.

…and it shows!

A fair number of articles here are my response to inanities and absurdities found in the news. But when the Chronicle slipped advertising onto the front page, I lost interest in reading.

Nothing personal against SFGate.com. I do hope they survive, I’m just no longer in their target audience.

Which leaves me hanging: what to write about?

…something like this pops up:

“If an American GI wanted to take home a souvenir, I’d say there was nothing reprehensible about that, it’s an act you can easily understand,” said Levisse-Touze, director of a Paris museum with exhibits on the city’s liberation.

and…

French officials have no intention of scolding him: They have only thanks and kind words for him, pointing out that he once risked his life for France.

Yes. Thank you. We would do it again if necessary.

(Read more at SFGate.)

Mitterand or DeGaulle or someone once stated that the US and the French were like an old married couple, always squabbling, in public. But in the end pulling together. Much truth to that.

Toulon is my favorite city in France. What’s yours?

There’s a guy hijacking the comments section at a popular WordPress plugin site to promote his opinion on code formatting.

Sets my teeth on edge it does!

Here’s some basic rules:

• He or she who writes the code calls the formatting. Unless…
• Code contributed to a larger project should adhere to the project’s formatting, and …
• If you’re writing the checks, you get to specify the formatting system.

Super easy!

I had to let a coder go once because that person insisted on using an outre formatting system (for c++), and the code wasn’t good enough for me to deal with it. That is, I needed to rewrite and reorganize the code after delivery. Extensive discussion resulted in more extensive discussion… waste of time.

Note: Whenever possible, I site read code, so I depend on the geometric shape of code blocks to give me information. That’s me, that’s what I do. You can do whatever you want.

Just spent most of Friday April 9, 2010 upgrading about half the blogs I operate.

What a pain!

It’s a about half done now.

The good thing is that when you have to deal with more than a dozen blogs, it’s worth taking the time to batch everything up and do them all at once.

From SF Gate article on Federally funded workers:

He’s happy with the quality of workers, who range from scanners to engineers. “It’s like hiring First World workers at Third World wages,” he says.

Nice!

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/31/BUHQ1BPK1G.DTL#ixzz0eFwCeTpq