the Design Experience Weblog Archive

To be productive a programmer needs to have the program in their head. This is why distractions of any length, require a 30 minute reload before a progrmamer can be productive again.

This is not exactly 100% true, but programmers like to exaggerate like it was. It is often true, and its certainly true a mind numbing meeting will cause a distruption for sure. Of course, email, news feeds, and looking out the window can do that too if you are not disciplined.

There are ways to work around this. I always take notes if I have to stop someting. Suspend to disk or "sleep" mode on your computer is also a wonderful thing. Keep all the tabs in firefox open, emacs, etc and your code is there waiting for you when you get back. I usually type in some comments to get me started when I get back. I also write everything down in a notebook. This has two purposes. I can always read the actual notebook if I need two, but more importantly, writing someting down stores it in a memory location that is easier to retrieve.

Of course, with most modern systems, its impossible to have the entire system in your head. Mostly you'll have a high level view of the major subsystems, plus a more detailed view of the particular code you are working on. This happene to me recently when I needed to explore the security code for OpenACS. It works fine but there are subtle things that can affect the user experience. It took about a day to poke around in the code, read it, read it again, add some debugging statements, change someting, break it, fix it, notice the fix actually broke someting else, and fix it again. Eventually these activities can help build a model of the code in your head.

Another more systematic way to do this is to write tests. If you write tests as you design an build a system, it will help you get a better, clearer picture of what you are building while you are builiding it. Of course, nothing is better than a test to gain understanding of a bug or unfamiliar code.

apt-get install libxine-extracodecs
rm -rf ~/.xine
rm -rf ~/.gxine

I am not sure of the ultimate consequences of deleting .xine and .gxine, but it worked for me.

To configure it first you have to disasble tdomalloc.

So go ahead and configure it:

cd ~/tDOM-0.8.2/unix

I used this configure line:

../configure --enable-threads --disable-tdomalloc --with-aolserver=/usr/lib/aolserver4 --prefix=/usr/lib/aolserver4 --with-tcl=/usr/lib/tcl8.4/

make install

It works!
That doesn't quite work because tDOM looks for ns.h under ${with_tcl}/include which doesn't exist.

I did
cd /usr/lib/aolserver4
sudo ln -s /usr/include/aolserver4 include

Then configure again.

This howto works great. Only trick is you must intsall ia32-libs package before it will work.

It seems the most popular page on the site is http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry_id=40672 which is pretty short and just links to an online mind mapping tool.

I don't really do much mind mapping, but since everyone who vists my site is interested in it, I looked around some more.

On the Mind Mapping Software Blog I found a post about a dashboard style of mind map for keeping track of everything.

I use Planner Mode for Emacs for this. It seems to flow alot better for me, its all text based, but since I do the majority of my work in emacs, it seems to fit better with my style of work and thinking.

I wish I could get into mind mapping more, so I am going to try to check out Idea Mapping a book that is said to be accessible to learn the ideas behind mind mapping.

So I hope if anyong is looking for mind mapping resources this post will help them, its not really my area of expertise and I hope at least one person can learn about using Planner Mode instead. Getting things done in emacs is a great post about implementing the popular organizational technique using planner mode.