metalinguistic musings and other related ramblings

Did a new release of My Media System today. There are changes all over the place, but the things I personally care most about is the new zoom interface that makes it easier to find out what you are looking at, the multiple input so that I can use my nokia n800 with mms over vnc without shutting down mms, and finally switch resolution so that I can change from 720p projector size to 800×480 (the size of the n800 screen) also without shutting down mms or having multiple instances running.

This makes it very easy to use the nokia as a remote control for music playback. I often listen to music at night and like that I have my whole collection available, connected to my stereo & headphones. When I want to watch a movie I just switch back to “fullscreen” and I can easily navigate to the movie using remote control.

Writing beautiful code is such an elusive subject. I’ve never been able to put into words what makes code great, it’s sort of these things that just is. I even read a book on it once, and while it had some quite tricks and hacks along the way, I never really thought I got closer to a definition of what beautiful code is.

I saw this talk about beautiful code yesterday. The talk is from a ruby conference and starts a little slow, but around 18 minutes in, it gets really interested. His main thesis of the talk is that beautiful code can be defined using only three measuring sticks: proportional – 200 lines to read a simple file (Hello C)?, integrity – does it actually do what it’s supposed to do and in a reasonable fashion (speed, memory usage etc.) and finally clarity – can you grok the code again quickly 2 years after you wrote it in the first place (Hello Perl). Each one of these must be balanced.

Can beautiful code really be captured by three such simple rules? Rules that individually seems to be far from beautiful, instead much more functional in nature.

If you, like me, is sick and tired of sites that lure innocent googlers into registering on their site just to view content that is should be freely available. The worst of those sites is probably experts exchange with their stupid blurring technique. Luckily I’m not the only one sick and tired of this. The following greasemonkey script silently removes all links to experts-exchange.com from google results.