In an article about mistakes a startup can make, Paul Graham writes:

Think about the overall goal, then start by writing the smallest subset of it that does anything useful. If it’s a subset, you’ll have to write it anyway, so in the worst case you won’t be wasting your time. But more likely you’ll find that implementing a working subset is both good for morale and helps you see more clearly what the rest should do.

I found this interesting simply because it has been my strategy for tackling our Realtime Operating Systems project this term. No individual piece of the project is particularly difficult, but it is a little tricky to map out a plan for incrementally developing it.

It’s obvious that certain auxiliary things can be bolted on later, but the majority of the assignment has to be in place before it does much of anything at all.

My approach? Get the major bits running in entirely separate, proof-of-concept programs. One group member is implementing a simple text parser, another the IRQ system, and I’m working with the final person on the switching stuff. There will still be an awkward moment when these parts have to be glued together, but at least each component will be known to function correctly on its own.

Some weeks ago, I randomly ran into an old acquaintance with whom I had a brief but extraordinarily profitable working relationship with during my last year of high school. As partners in Drunken Ogre Entertainment, we produced this little gem, over the course of a few shorts months of work:

Unfortunately, it won’t run playably under DOSBox on my Mac, but for PC readers interested in trying this out, all you need is a friend and the download here. You may need to turn off the audio (use the “nosound” command-line parameter) to get it to work, but it’s still a bucket of fun.

The thing I remember most about the game was not so much the fun we had making (and playing) it, but how much it taught me about geometry. It was in programming the particles and guided missiles that I finally gained a true understanding of how to apply basic trigonometry; until then, it had been a sort of voodoo-math that revolved around some strange acronym.

Recently, I was sort of hoping for some similarly practical exercise to teach me all about Laplace.

I’ve been a fairly consistent user of reddit almost since its inception. It’s elegant, simple, and the links are fairly good. What’s also good is the discussion. Reddit takes the unusual step of ignoring chronology when laying out comment pages: new comments start at the top, and high-quality comments stay there.

This fluidity means that reading the discussions is—on the whole—a positive experience. It also means, however, that the layout of the threads on a given article can greatly change from one visit to the next. They have several built-in features that help you find your old comments and their replies, but I wanted two additional features, so I made a quick Greasemonkey user script to add these. Read on…

I’ve been on Wordpress for just a month, but I’ve got a first plugin to release: WP-Cats, an elegant tool that adds Ajax category management to to the Manage Posts screen.

It looks like the Jello mold layout has made its way into an ASP.NET template set, so that’s pretty cool. There doesn’t seem to be a live demo anywhere, but I’d be curious to see an example of a site using the template.

Some folks have noticed that Google Maps has a swanky new zooming control. You can now roll the mousewheel to activate it, or just double-click to zoom in one level on a particular point. This feature isn’t in the API yet, but there’s another new zoom control that’s really fabulous as well.

Andre Lewis has cooked up a classy draggable-rectangle zoom widget. Check it out on his page.

A pretty girl told me recently that she found my writing here to be charmingly pedantic. You know, as opposed to pretentious, preposterous, or perhaps sophomoric. The warm fuzzies faded quickly, however, when she mentioned that the site was rather slow to load—a problem of which I’ve been aware for quite some time.

This problem is now solved. In between book-writing and work, I buckled down and finished up porting things over to Wordpress. So here we are.

Expect words.

In the process of upgrading Typo, I managed to accidentally publish a somewhat inflammatory partly-finished draft here. If it showed up in your RSS reader, you can send me inflammatory email or you can just ignore it until later.

But anyhow, it’s gone now, so here’s a funny picture instead:

I won’t be trying to update this site on a weekly basis until the book is finalized in July. Read on…

Email is my most important means of communication. My favourite is face-to-face; second to that, the telephone, followed by IM. I think I might even prefer the intimacy of a hand-written letter to most cold, unfeeling, poorly-punctuated, hastely-posted email.

But email really is the most important. It’s instant, convenient, concise, and reliable. Well, mostly reliable, as we’ll see.

Friends and family talk about personal matters; random people ask me CSS questions; I get stuff from classmates about whatever; and I’m on mailing lists for things like the WCF Exec.

So I was understandably upset to discover—a few weeks ago—that some unknown percentage of my outgoing mail was simply not getting through. Read on…

My room is a mess. It’s a disaster. Clothes on the chairs, on the shelves and on the floor; Lego on the floor and on the desk; papers piled up on the table, and even an ice cream dish perched on the monitor.

This, however, is atypical.

I’m not a neat freak, but it’s my pattern to be within 30-45 minutes of “very clean.”

So here’s my reasoning about the current state of affairs. Read on…