The DaVinci Coder (or Thoughts on Leonardo's Laptop)

In Leonardo's Laptop, Ben Shneiderman writes about “old computing” and “new computing”. Old computing is actually current computing, where programs aren't always designed to be user-friendly. These “old” programs crash too often (and randomly), spitting back ugly and incomprehensible error messages.

On the other hand, there is new computing, the knight in shining armor to save us from old computing. New computing is the way of the future, where programs are aestethically pleasing and easy to use. They are stable, but when necessary they give the user helpful information about errors.

In Mac OS X, when a program crashes, there is the option to send an error report to Apple. I almost always send the report, because as a programmer I know the value of knowing exactly went wrong with my program. Knowing what the user saw happen is one thing, but being able to see the state of memory and the error returned by the system is much more useful. The more error reports Apple gets, the better and more stable they can make their OS. As Eric S. Raymond said in what has become known as Linus's Law, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

I consider Mac OS X and the iLife suite to be a big step toward new computing. While errors still occur in the OS — and I think they always will &mdash I rarely, if ever, have problems with iPhoto, iTunes, or any of the other iLife programs. They are easy to use, and I think the Aqua theme looks pretty good.

Another interesting question is: “How would you envision the environment of the photographic hobbyist 15 years from now?” I am actually surprised that film cameras have stayed alive this long. While in the short-run it may be cheaper to buy a film camera than a digital camera ($100 ~ $150 for a film camera, compared to $150 ~ $300 for digital according to CameraWorld), it is certainly cheaper in the long run to go digital, as film is only getting more expensive. I imagine that the number one factor stopping people from buying digital cameras is a fear of computers, which is due to the problems of old computing. If in the future we head toward new computing, people might be more likely to buy a digital camera. The only people still using film cameras will be those who simply enjoy the darkroom experience.

Works Cited

"Programming". Wikiquote. 4 Mar 2007. 21 Mar 2007. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Programming

Shneiderman, Ben. "Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies". MA. MIT Press. 2002.

Here's what has happened.

Jeremy and I have been volunteering at the Capital City Rescue Mission for the past couple months now. They have asked us to do a few things:

• Import their website to Macromedia Dreamweaver
• Fix their layout issues
• Set up a blog and show them how to use it

These may not seem like particularly difficult tasks, but updating the website is turning out to be a real ordeal. The company that built the site used very poor techniques. The worst is the tag soup, a mess of HTML with no layout or formatting and overlapping, unclosed, and depreciated tags. Also, there is no CSS, so the layout is built right into the content. The website is so bad that Dreamweaver is unable to open it.

In order to open the website in Dreamweaver, we have had to rebuild the website from the ground up using XHTML (a stricter subset of HTML) and CSS. This allows us to build a Dreamweaver template, so new pages can easily be added with little effort. Also, this separates the page's content from its presentation, so changes can be made without worrying if it will break borders.

The blog is not as big an issue; we have set up a simple Blogger blog, and we plan to make it match the website's theme. The problem here is that we would like to set the blog up on the Rescue Mission server, but we are not sure if the Mission allows external FTP. If it does not, the website will have to link to the blog on Blogger.

For our last couple visits, we have been slowly integrating the new, template-driven web pages into the old site, but none have been published to the public website yet. We hope to get something up on our next visit.

Works Cited

"Capital City Rescue Misison". <http://www.capitalcityrescuemission.com>

The Onion - America's Finest News Source

The Onion is the internet's finest source for farce news. Here is today's headline story:

Unreleased Jimmy Page Guitar Riff To Be Retrieved From Secret Vault To Save Rock And Roll

GWYNEDD, WALES—Recent developments in the music world, such as the popularity of the Dixie Chicks and Sufjan Stevens, have created a "perfect storm of lameness."

The Onion has an RSS feed, or you may (as I do) receive daily e-mails with the day's headlines. The stories are generally funny, and sometimes absolutely hilarious.

Works Cited

Gwynedd, Wales. "Unreleased Jimmy Page Guitar Riff To Be Retrieved From Secret Vault To Save Rock And Roll". The Onion. 5 Mar 2007. 5 Mar 2007. <http://www.theonion.com/content/node/59249>

More Math-Related Humour

René Descartes was sitting at a bar. The bartender asked him, "Will you have another beer?". Descartes replied, "I think not" and promptly ceased to be.