... they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.
The Queen propped her up against a tree and said kindly,
You may rest a little, now.Alice looked round her in great surprise.
Why, I do believe we've been here under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!
Of course it is,said the Queen.What whould you have it?
Well, in our country,said Alice, still panting a little,you'd generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing.
A slow sort of country!said the Queen.Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
I've had the good fortune to work for some software houses that are
systematic about verifying, recording and cataloguing bugs – all of which
makes it easier to find and fix them. Such software companies also recognise
the need to test thoroughly and treat changes in third-party
aspects
(whether version of the operating system our customer uses
or all
their text is in some foreign script
) as development, trying not to impinge
unduly on background maintenance effort which will have to mop up anything the
development team misses. So, where it comes to maintaining software, I've had
it about as good as it gets.
Even under optimal circumstances, maintaining software is just like The Queen describes it.
The world tried really hard to teach me that new stuff
is A Good
Thing. I earn my living maintaining large bodies of software: at least most of
which wasn't written by me and much wasn't new
when it was written. If
that seems like a drop from my younger ambition to chase the riddles left by
Einstein's legacy, I have a deep suspicion that new
isn't the guide I
should have followed if I'd stayed on it: I should attend first to a full
understanding of what is supposedly known
in the early stages of that
path, directing my search initially within that domain, guided by my intuitions
of where to go; my suspicion is that most
of the answer has been lying in
our hands, un-noticed (for half a century or more) because it is no longer
new
yet takes much understanding, so that whatever else there may be in
the answer
is unseen until this old
cranny is properly explored.
(The hunt for the right cranny
looks more like bug-hunting, interspersed
with occasional forrays of fixing, than like development – most of the
effort is devoted to groking what's already there, however good or bad it may
be.)
I digress, I use convoluted sentences and, even when I don't, I'm not famed
for my ability to say things clearly or tersely. It works better if I get
feed-back, best if the feed-back is information-rich. I have a steadily growing
body of web pages, devoting less time to rationalisation
and sub-editing
(I shall not pretend to warrant the title Editor
– that post is
vacant, where I merely fill several others imperfectly) than to writing
new
stuff. Meanwhile, the internet fills up with ... material is the
best word I can find for it: some rich in information for one audience, useless
to all others; some useful but dull to most audiences; and the whole panoply
beyond, including the tiny corners on which most old media
focus
attention. Finding anything gets harder. In principle, what gets found might
be expected to improve: but only in so far as the better
finds are
recognisable as such to the search engines.
Now, I'm more usually looking for somewhere to find information; but even if
I were writing software to search the internet
, I'd prefer
sites
which are well-organised, straightforward and information-rich – even when
answering a query in which two competing sites provide the same
information
(in so far as my software knows how to assess that) as regards
the user's query, I want the software to give the one which says most
simply
. As with Occam, one has to make one's own judgements as to what one
considers simpler
or, indeed, to answer how much does this say ?
– but reasonable folk may hope to agree enough of the time to make it
possible to write software which homes in
on what folk want.
So, I guess I should stop rambling and tidy up my site, migrating it all to
ISO HTML in the process.
However, I notice that there's a lot of that to be done and I'm definitely
not going to be doing it when I've got my head full of new
stuff
that I want to write down – though I try to tie it in with what's already
present when I can. It will be some time before this site is anywhere near
tidy, especially if I keep adding to the mess by writing new stuff. So finally,
in Autumn 1999, I realised I should have a page explaining how to cope with the
mess – which is clearly here for the foreseeable future.
It will be easier to make sense of my site for the visitor who bears in mind
my purposes in having the site. In particular, my primary purpose is
simply to record some of what I know in a more orderly memory (that of my
computer) than the one inside my head. Remembering things is something
computers do vastly better than I do. My writings took off with the advent of
HTML, which provided me with a suitable balance between ease of writing
and display issues. This fortuitously made it easy to allow other folk access
to what I write; in so far as such access is any use to other folk, this is a
delightful bonus, which has encouraged a secondary purpose – to make the
site intelligible to other folk too – which is, in any case, well aligned
with much of my primary purpose.
The alignment between getting it clear in my head
, albeit via my
head's computer extension, and making it useful to other folk
is worthy
of note. It is slightly inaccurate to assert that if I can't explain it to
other folk, then I don't undestand it
, yet this is near enough to the truth
to serve as a useful guide – I'll say what I intend as best I can, even if
this is hard for other folk to understand (it may be also for me), but given a
choice between two ways of describing a matter, all other matters being near
enough equal, I'll prefer the one I imagine other folk better able to
understand. It's usually a pretty good guide at a good way of saying the
matter.
One more small digression, and I'll have somewhere to stuff all those fragments that I need to clean out from other pages because I don't want to lose the little sense there is in them, yet don't have a Right Place to put them, or Right Way to say them.
This page is unfinished. Maybe I'll get back to it some time.
Meanwhile, check out Jamie Zawinsky's just tirade about the web
design
industry; or Tim Seifert's
advice against moronic web
design.
Written by Eddy.