I’m having really trouble sleeping tonight. I guess I didn’t do enough this weekend to feel sleepy. Worked on some programming challenges on Saturday. Mucked about with various programs on my PowerBook on Sunday while watching the NFC Championships (Go Hawks!).

Me and RL were coding solutions to some programming challenges. Though we didn’t pair program, we reviewed our solutions via the collaborative features of SubEthaEdit. I’ve never had an opportunity to use this definitive feature. I think it is an enabling technology, allowing people over geographically distant places to work together on code and documents. Pretty darn cool if you ask me.

I’ve been playing with PathFinder4 for the last couple of days. It’s slowly growing on me. I still got another 2 weeks of the free trial before I decide to pick it up. A couple of niggling faults bother me 1) Doesn’t allow me to authenticate myself with Administrator rights like the regular finder does when installing applications. 2) No progress bar when mounting drives. Other than that the improvements over the regular finder are pretty cool. I especially like being able to open up directories in my terminal window with a click of a mouse button.

Managed to attend a talk given by DHH this last week. I thought it was interesting. There is a lot of buzz surrounding Rails these days. Reading through all the numerous articles out there on the
web, sometimes I think people are missing the point. DHH made it clear in his presentation that Rails was a framework designed to solve his problems. It’s not a generic "solve all" framework. That focus helps Rails solve the problems it was designed to solve. It’s not going to solve every problem. The specific problem it tries to solve (I think) is creating a single database backed website that can scale by adding additional hardware. I don’t think it will solve the problems faced by a pathological website but it’ll will probably do an outstanding job on the other 80% of websites out there. The important things I took away from the talk were three points:
1) Motivation is a silver bullet
2) Optimize for happiness (which is similar to the pugs philosophy "optimize for fun")
3) Make the right thing easy to do
Of the three points, (3) struck me as perhaps the more profound point. Thinking about the languages and systems I’ve worked with, it’s always struck me as odd that most system designers make the wrong thing easy to do. Why is that? I’m as guilty as that as anyone. I’m just wondering why we do that. It reminds me of the Einstein attributed quote "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction."

I’ve been suffering a malaise of sorts the last week and I hope to be able to shake it off this week.