I haven't died, it's just that my attentions have been turned elsewhere. Sometimes I would dearly love to be able to step outside of time, like Nicholson Baker's protagonist in The Fermata; there's just so much I'd love to do, lots of impulses to do all sorts of different stuff, and rarely enough time to dig into it. Besides some fairly significant life events, I've been flirting some with digital photography (researching cameras, reading up on photographic technique so that I can make some of the images I've been thinking about).

I would really like to incorporate photos into some processing sketches; it would be interesting to see if it's possible to add some sense of dynamics to what are essentially static images, whether by motion, juxtaposition, blending, whatever. There's also a poem by Wislawa Szymborska that I'm dying to illustrate (not the right word, but who cares) and the ideas I have about it so far really need photographic-quality textures.

Geekwise, I've been playing with Wikis, particularly JSPWiki. They're a great tool for groups, but I'm also discovering that they are also a really good tool for personal use, especially since it has a really kickass full-text indexer included (Jakarta's Lucene). I've been wanting to play with it more, adding some customizations and other ways to *easily* add information. For example, I'm a really prodigious surfer, and collect tons and tons of links; it would be wonderful to have them in one place, but accessible from the net. However, it's a minor pain in the arse to add a link to an existing page. It might be as simple as making a custom action to add a bit of text to a page (Wiki's notion of pages is that each page is a bunch of text. Though it sounds restricting, especially to people who are in love with relational databases, the flexibility it affords you is tremendous.)

I keep flirting with digging into Aspect-Oriented Programming. There are some ideas there that are really interesting ways of managing cross-cutting concerns. Now this is a huge thing to tackle, so I want to "cut my teeth" with AOP by coming up with some simple but useful utilities like performance metering, "smart" debugging aids, etc. I still haven't decided, though, which AOP toolkit to use yet. AspectJ is interesting, but it makes extensions to the Java language. There are others, like Nanning, that do their thing by bytecode munging. I haven't decided exactly what approach I think is best yet.

I've also been thinking about software understandability, simplicity, etc. I always do. An interesting phrase I read recently that captures my feelings about this is "Illuminate the main branch". More later.
posted on 5/31/2003 12:33:00 AM