Disqus - Latest Comments for Alex

Re: Life in the Bullpen

Alex — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 08:54:12 -0000

4-bull pen is good if the pens nearby are occupied by the people doing similar stuff. Our team next door is not software developers, and they have to chat on the phone. A lot. Yes, and joke and laugh out loud.

But other poor souls have it even worse, having to sit next to some kind of secretarial or legal team, who have much more to chat about.

Re: Are You a Keyboard Wizard?

Alex — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:00:12 -0000

I would like to disagree about "learning the concepts faster". Perhaps, it is more of being able to use the concepts without learning them.

GUI is good when you don't know how to get what you want, you can stick more controls and emphasize them differently using GUI, unlike when using a text terminal. You can use the mouse to tell "I want *that*" without knowing the concept. (But you still need to learn the concepts of click, double-click and drag-and-drop, the concepts of button, menu, drop-down list boxes and text scroll area, and loads of other concepts which seem to us, GUI users, natural)

I think that GUI comes easier to the people because the developers of the interface silently came to a standard of what interface concepts mean what. (Go standardize shell commands!.. But buttons come across as activators of an action across all GUI)

A keyboard has 101 dimensions of freedom, whereas a mouse has 4 or slightly more, if you have three buttons or a wheel.

However, in the dev world, what do you need a GUI editor of the source code for? The project is built using ant, there is a lot of disk navigation and file inspection, when debugging a problem. Code highlighting is available in non-GUI editors too.

I have tried GUI editors, where they attempt to tell me what the method name is. I am sorry, if it didn't stop to think about the method name, I would have typed it long ago.

I have seen developers using XTerm to navigate somewhere, and trying to copy-paste a path from a different XTerm windows. Poor soul struggled to select the right part of the string with the mouse. This is an example of GUI getting in the way. Tab-completion of the path would have worked faster to type the whole path from scratch.

Oh yes, I do have the Internet browser window open to read javadocs. :-)

Re: Are You a Keyboard Wizard?

Alex — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 11:41:52 -0000

I think it is not GUI as such, but the agreement on what the visual concepts mean. This is different to text terminals, because you need to remember what that command was called.

Have you tried using voice commands on Vista? I did. What threw me was that I do not think in terms of "switch to notepad", as the tutorial suggests. I think in terms of "click that over there" or "alt-tab, watch with alt pressed, then press tab a few times to select the mozilla icon". That is why I cannot use the voice commands very well.

The point I am making is that with GUI people start using things without having common understanding of how it works, so it can be used in cases when this understanding is not important. Try to share knowledge like that.

Re: Making Your Blog Faster and Greener

Alex — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:15:20 -0000

Hold on a second. Where are you saving the energy: on the client, or on the server side? Now, if you don't go to the web-site, does this mean your computer will be switched off? If not, it will still consume as much power as it says on the power supply unit, won't it? Maybe I am out of touch with the power saving technology, or I don't understand how the power supply works.

Suppose the server is not serving the pages anymore, "saving the environment". Isn't it still up and running? Only instead of being busy, it is doing idle loops. BTW, there is an opinion that the current data centres aren't loaded even 10% of their capacity, and the problem is not the lack of the job to do, it is the lack of progress on all of the fronts, meaning IO wait and idle loops waiting to sync up with the other components of the distributed system. (See AMD's guy talk on TheRegister)

Let's take the efficiency into account, i.e. how many Watts were spent on a single CPU cycle doing useful job. You can reduce the amount of job to do (rewrite the code to reduce the complexity of the problem), you can reduce the number of the wasted CPU cycles (rewrite the code to optimise synchronisation), and not only reducing the Watts spent by a single CPU. Otherwise, perhaps, 80386 would be the better option than Opterons and Xeons, because 80386 spends so much less energy per hour!..

Just my 2p, which under current market conditions are the same as your 3.9 cent. ;-)

Re: Making Your Blog Faster and Greener

Alex — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:19:00 -0000

Ah, doh, not the Watts, but Joules, of course!