Tony got a new scanner and now I want one too. I scanned one photograph and now I’m hooked. I still can’t see me moving to a digital camera though.

You have a piece of functionality that you need to add to your system. You see two ways to do it, one is quick to do but is messy – you are sure that it will make further changes harder in the future. The other results in a cleaner design, but will take longer to put in place.

Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice.

– Martin Fowler, Technical Debt

I really like this metaphor. I’ve spent hours debating over whether we should take the quick and nasty hack or write the code properly.

I have heard it said that bad code has a smell. Today I’m learning that some code also has a sound. Not a sound that I hear by looking at the code but a sound that is made by the programmers trying to use it. From across the desk I can tell that the CPAN module they are trying to use is badly written. Actually from the sounds drifting across the desk I would say it’s the worst piece of code they’ve had to deal with in weeks. It’s never good when the programmers say things like “What?”, “Yuck!” and “Eugh!” and then start to shudder at the horrors of what they are looking at. I don’t need to see this module to agree that we should spend the time refactoring it before using it. Based on their reaction I think I’ll hide on my side of the room until they’re finished.

Why when men win games is it considered skill but if a woman wins it’s witchcraft?.

I’m so behind on my reading that only now am I getting round to reading about things that happened at last year’s Emerging Technology conference.

The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.

If you want to make it better, there’s a list of things to do. It’s Open Source, right? Just fix it. “No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr …”, the froth would start coming out. The external enemy — nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.

So even if someone isn’t really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.

– Clay Shirky, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

It’s seems that computers can now play poker better than I can.

Using new abstraction techniques, we have produced viable “pseudo-optimal” strategies for the game of 2-player Texas Hold’em. The resulting poker-playing programs have demonstrated a tremendous improvement in performance. Whereas the previous best poker programs were easily beaten by any competent human player, the new programs are capable of defeating very strong players and can hold their own against world-class opposition.

– Billings et al, Approximating Game-Theoretic Optimal Strategies for Full-scale Poker [PDF]

Marc wants to live his life as an A5. I don’t. If getting an A requires no effort then I feel that I’ve achieved nothing. If I could do everything without effort I reckon I would do nothing.

I really enjoy landscape photography. I really don’t like taking pictures of adults as there is a 50/50 chance that I will make them look terrible. And I don’t mean the picture won’t be perfect I mean that it will be awful. So bad, that sometimes it is difficult to recognise the people in the pictures. Recently, I have taken about two hundred pictures. I got the colour ones developed today and some of them are not bad. The pictures were taken at three different events: a wedding, a day out at a museum, and a day out at the Northern Ireland School of Falconry. I tried to only take pictures of birds and children but not surprisingly at the wedding I was expected to take pictures of the bridal party. Yet again I have managed to make a perfectly lovely bridesmaid look like a hag. This terrible picture means that I can’t give the bride pictures of the bridal party as I had intended. It seems I only took one picture of this particular bridesmaid and I couldn’t let anyone see that.

I also ran into problems at the Falconry centre. The guy in charge asked me to take a picture of someone holding an owl. He, like many other people, had this idea that if I could take pictures of birds I must be able to take pictures of anything. I took the pictures for him but I was dreading how these would turn out. Thankfully it was a child holding the bird and not an adult but I was still concerned. It didn’t seem to be the right time to explain that I specialise in a different type of photography. Having a decent camera means I run into this problem quite often. But then this is a common problem. If I tell people I work in computers they start telling me about the problems they have with their printers and the like when I don’t really know anything useful about hardware.

I’ve finally got round to putting up the slides from my talk at YAPC::Europe this year. They are not very exciting, as most of the information wasn’t on the slides, but at least one person from the audience asked for these. Hopefully I will get round to writing this up properly.

We had two talks at the Belfast.pm meeting last night: Marty’s Kongoogo and Marc’s Fairy Tales . We didn’t get much technical content from these but they were both highly entertaining. Poor Marc finds it really difficult to talk at Belfast.pm because people make fun of him so much. One of last night’s points of ridicule was Marc removing one of the famous phrases from the story of the three little pigs. He decided that it shouldn’t have the line “Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin” because pigs didn’t have beards. It was pointed out to him that it doesn’t mention beards just hair and that pigs really do have hair. As Marc wasn’t convinced by this I have found him a picture of a nice hairy pig. In the digression that occurred after this Marc managed to say something along the lines of I can see nothing kinky about pre-pubescent pigs. After this scary comment we decided to let him finish his talk in peace. Well until he got to the part about Goldilocks and the sticky messes.