08feb2003:
Scents and the City. Sometimes it's fun to wander the city aimlessly,
drinking in the architecture and mishmash of people. But what evokes London
for me is the smell of the place. Old cooking fat flecked with sweat and a
pinch of the kind of mustard that goes straight up your nose.
But back to business. I'm dealing with a lot of programmers these days,
and I think I've finally found a foolproof formula for finding good ones.
I've noticed over the last five years that all decent programmers are
tall.
Remember Monty Python? 'What was that tribe in Africa?
Ah yes, the Watsusi! Some of them were eight feet tall! Imagine that, eight
foot of Watsusi!'
There would seem to be no causal relationship between the heights of
programming achievement and physical height, yet tall computer types definitely
have the edge on shortasses. Paul's a great
programmer, and getting on for two metres. Met a guy in Waterstone's today
browsing the O'Reillys. I barely reached his shoulder, and I'm 190cm - that
means he's probably responsible for a sentient AI that fits on a floppy. Nearly
hired him on the spot. From now on, I'm making this my unofficial rule for
contracting coders.
06feb2003: A launch. It's always gratifying when a
piece of software does exactly what you want it to, and it's even better when
it's one you've designed yourself. I'm calling it janglegene.
It's a web application for building other web applications. At a stage that
couldn't even be called pre-alpha, it's already letting me click together
boxes and content types into semi-workable database-backed pages - a 'living
spec' ready for my coder to weld code to.
More interesting here, though, is the way we're developing it: as a
section of my teamwork app Corrobbo. The
idea is that by the time Corrobbo launches (planned for July) the tools we've
created to build it will have proved themselves to the point where I can paint
on a UI and launch them as a separate application. Something to do in 2004
anyway.
Babbling on to avoid the pain of other recent developments in my life...
the depth of potential in mod_perl
is truly amazing.
Yes, Perl! That slow pig geeks use for text processing! Or - these
days - a full-featured embedded interpreter that seals together operating
system and application server, removing the need for the J2EE rig I was expecting
to pay for. Some people in the Perl community call it 'P2EE'.
I winced when I saw the '.cgi' suffix appearing in my prototype's URLs;
too many memories of interminable waits for websites while interpreters started
up far across the Internet. But because the mod_perl variant's part of Apache,
it's a basic feature of your server operating system; the OS has learned to
do things itself instead of bringing in other applications to help. Which
means no waits, faster serves. (A hundred times faster, in fact.) The big
bottleneck of scripting is no longer an issue.
04feb2003: Cashflow is the only reality. I've
been playing Sim City 4 a lot recently. The level of detail in this game is
stunning: you can see little construction crews putting up buildings, different
types of vehicle on the roads. If you manage to build a successful city, you'll
see people sunning themselves in their back gardens while their servants fish
leaves out of their swimming pools.) But the real deal here is the way it
inserts a real economy into the game - and demonstrates the importance of
cashflow.
Building a new city, it makes far more sense - logically - to put in
proper roads instead of cheaper streets, to zone for big business straightaway,
and get your ports sorted early. But if you do it, you'll be bankrupt by the
end of your second year. (I've tried it: little striking firefighters come
out on the streets waving placards, buildings burn, and there are riots on
the pitted streets of downtown.)
To build a city, you have to start small - basic agricultural businesses
and cheap housing - and wait until they start producing a bit of income. Then
you can start investing. And bulldozing, and re-zoning, constantly massaging
your city upwards until shiny new office towers and swanky apartment blocks
start appearing.
(I dislike the UK's present government, but this is one of the
things it's OK at: it only borrows to invest in infrastructural improvements,
not to finance current spending.)
This is where businesses become successful: in the 'reality gap' between
your accounts and your bank statement. Sales ledger and profit margins may
be high, but they're not the same as cash; the only reality is cashflow, the
moment when pieces of paper you wrote several months ago turn into actual
money in your account. The Redpump business sideswiped $100K in its first
year yet I still carry a big credit card debt from month to month, think twice
about big ticket items, and have to beg the banks to clear my cheques.
What this is leading up to is that I wanted to spend part of March
in Venice, and can't afford the bloody apartment I know's available to rent!
Grrrr!
03feb2003: I want you to know I may have been dumped this
afternoon*. Got called at 3pm by an extremely drunk girlfriend who
complained loudly (and largely incoherently) that I wasn't paying enough attention
to her. (It wasn't 3pm for her; she's in a different time zone.) The GSM connection
wasn't an excuse for the stilted conversation; the six-hour meeting I'd just
finished was more to blame.
Anyway, will know tomorrow if I'm single again.
*(This is a bastardisation of the title of the first hyperlinked
novel, 'Afternoon,
a story', and a really poncy cultural reference.)
