http://www.lixo.org letting the problem solve itself Thu, 15 May 2008 23:44:52 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en So while I’m on what ThoughtWorks calls the beach, which is the really nice place to go when you’re not assigned to a project, I’ve been playing with OpenCV, a lovely opensource library originally developed by Intel. It’s got a gigantic set of really interesting features related to real-time ... http://www.lixo.org/archives/2008/05/15/making-opencv-prettier/ How many times have you had a conversation that started with “so while I was in the shower last night, I figured out how to…”, or something to that effect?I naturally set out some time to think and daydream a little – about 10 minutes every two hours or ... http://www.lixo.org/archives/2008/04/25/go-for-a-walk/ The Binary Guitar is a little experiment (took about a day or two to put together) I played with a couple of months ago, and I thought it was fun enough to share.Installation is seriously clunky – I have never tried it on anything but MacOS ... http://www.lixo.org/archives/2008/04/20/binary-guitar/ Yes, everything. Put it in a namespace. Everything. No exceptions and no excuses, unless yours is "I have just been thawed." In this case, I want to be the first to warmly welcome you to the 21st century. Here's a simple and reasonably OK way to do it and be ... http://www.lixo.org/archives/2007/09/14/javascript-put-everything-in-a-namespace/ After reading A Theory Of Fun, I started seeing projects (and many other human activities) modelled as a game. In the book, Raph Koster describes a series of game development rules, and I found that they can be mapped to the software development project domain with some interesting results:A ... http://www.lixo.org/archives/2007/06/13/the-project-game/ Developers in most projects I have seen try to establish some sort of convention around leaving TODOs in the code. The most common seems to be "if you see something funny, try to fix it immediately, but if it'd take too long and you've got something else to worry ... http://www.lixo.org/archives/2007/06/06/tip-get-your-todos-out-of-the-comments/ I've been hanging out with friends in São Paulo over the last few days, getting unreasonably drunk, eating too much and attending the Google Developer Day, not necessarily in that order, so I missed the announcements that Facebook had opened up their API. As a software developer with a healthy ... http://www.lixo.org/archives/2007/05/29/viral-software-and-in-a-good-way/ We're using Oracle at my current project. I wanted to run some reporting scripts on the database to do some nice graphs with Graphviz and yEd. "Well, that's been done before, should be pretty easy to hook up ActiveRecord to Oracle", I thought. It turns out that's nearly impossible to ... http://www.lixo.org/archives/2007/04/23/thanks-oracle/ Inspired by Nat Pryce's recent scrapheap challenge idea for a Name That Tune style game, and given I've been having so much fun with the Ruby OSA lately, I decided to implement my own solution using it to drive iTunes and I had a lot of fun in the ... http://www.lixo.org/archives/2007/04/05/i-love-the-osa/ On an application I've been working during my spare time, I had the need to ask my loyal friends and guinea pigs to give me some feedback, in order to help me fill in the gaps between what I think they want to do and what they really want ... http://www.lixo.org/archives/2007/02/08/how-would-you-improve-this-page/