I got email from my girl friend today:
"i have a little problem :(((
with the laptop...

i put in a CD...
but there was a little piece of paper stick to it, at least it seemed so, and it sucked it in already when i noticed.

the CD came out, but the paper remained inside... i think..."

After I got home I took a look. It was pretty hard to see inside to the optical drive but I thought I saw a piece of paper. Unfortunately the hole of the optical drive is small and it is protected with some kind of fabric strips so I could not simply pull it out.

Disassembling 12" PowerBook is considered to be demanding and assembling is nearly impossible for mortals. And the optical drive requires almost every other component to be removed. Time to figure out something else.

The solution turned out to be the vacuum cleaner. In order to find out what it is sucking out from the laptop I put a thin sock around the end of the hose. And actually I managed to get only that piece of paper out and everything works again.

He said:

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection,which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest."

In my opinion this is so true also on software development. It is easy just copy some blocks of code without really understanding how it works. But unless it is perfect and works exactly as programmer had guessed he will end up in a trouble with it - sooner or later. If he has to modify such code he will end up creating all kind of tweaks and hacks because he has no clue how to modify the core functionality.

The bitter approach is the experience. After banging head against the wall with various code snippets programmer will decide to stick with his favorite code and techniques which he remembers to be working ones. When somebody comes and suggests new technology he becomes angry and rejects such nonsense. His code with all those hacks and tweaks is the only proper code. And still he has only faint clue of how it works.

The smart programmer observes how those two guys are doing, does his own studies and picks the best approach. He had to spent some time reading, thinking and chatting with senior people but after that he shines with his knowledge.

I had to turn comments off for a while as I got hundreds of spam messages suddenly. But old comments are saved, so when I add some nice system to prevent spam postings those will be back. There seems to be plenty of Nucleus plug-ins for this issue...

with software projects when time gets involved. Handling dates, durations, overlapping entries, inclusive and exclusive boundaries... Very interesting mix indeed.

Of course I am not the only one talking about this issue. I found a nice blog about ergonomics and especially related to IT-products.

Ergonomic Nightmare of the Week: Laptop Computers

It is very popular to own laptop and use it as the only computer. Benefits are obvious but I have the feeling that popularity of laptops will also increase neck and shoulder problems. That is because of the structure of the computer. The keyboard and the screen are attached together and usually the screen is rather small.

This then results working in awkward positions because user cannot move keyboard and move farther away from screen. For me laptop seemed to be a good solution as I travel sometimes with it. But something like 20" screen attached to silent CPU with wireless keyboard and mouse would be much better at the moment.

Holidays are past now and it is time to get back to work. But during my holiday I got a nice idea for an application. I will try to implement that idea at least to see whether it is anyhow feasible. In order to minimize the effort I decided to try Cocoa and Objective-C. So far I have only played a little bit with Interface builder and Xcode but I hope it shouldn't be impossible. We'll see...