Author: Kyle Cordes

Published in 1987

Rummaging through old books (giving many away, selling others, discarding others) in an attempt to lighten the load I carry through life, I came across a rather weak book from 1987:

… in which I appeared in print for the first time. One short (1.5 page) chapter therein is from a submission I wrote for a contest for Compute! magazine at the age of 13. I didn’t make it in to the magazine, but was included it in this compendium, for which I earned total royalties of around $1. Some editing error (on their end) caused a few lines of text to be dropped from the middle. Click on the book above, to enjoy my 1.5 pages of fame.

Disconnecting to Keep Distraction Away

I’m back from AYE. The last session I attended was Dwayne Phillips‘s on “Distraction”. Distraction is a recurring enemy here, always ready to strike, to divert me from the task at hand. I’ve recently been using “disconnection” to fight distraction and focus on an intense task for a few hours, and noticed the same notion on the 37 Signals’ blog, a post by Matt entitled “Get Off”.

There is an ongoing flow of incoming data in our online lives. Hundreds of emails per day. Hundreds of RSS feed items. Dozens of IM contacts. Phone calls. Voice mail. The “water cooler”, physical or virtual. The disconnection idea is simple: Go offline, physically and network-wise. Leave your office and go somewhere away from your normal environment, away from email, RSS, instant messaging, the web, etc. Reduce your inputs, to make room for more output.

My implementation is to go to restaurant or cafe, in the mid-morning or mid-afternoon (out of politeness, to avoid disrupting their business by using up a table during peak times); preferable one without “WiFi” to remove that temptation. Then I sit, sip, and Just Work on something important. I write code; I write text; I review documents; I brainstorm. I use my notebook PC with a 12” screen, a stark contrast to my 2560×1024 resolution desktop configuration. The latter is wonderful for many kinds of work; but it is also more distraction-prone.

If you find yourself struggling to task on large important tasks, instead distracted by a thousand smaller things, give disconnection a try.

Java Scripting Talk – Code, Notes, and Audio

Last night (9 Nov 2006) at the St. Louis Java User Group, I gave a talk on “Scripting Your Java Application”. As I mentioned, there were no slides, but rather a handout, the text of which is pasted below. You can download the handout (a tight, one page PDF), the code, audio of the talk (WMA), and audio of the talk (MP3, larger). The audio was recorded with my Olympus WS100 Digital Voice Recorder, so the quality is bearable but not great.

Update: As an experiment, I also had CastingWords prepare a transcript of the talk. It’s somewhat tedious to read (I didn’t edit it at all), but it is available as Google fodder rather than trapped only in audio.
Continue reading “Java Scripting Talk – Code, Notes, and Audio”

Overwhelming blog spam, and Thunderbird vs. POPFile

Kylecordes.com has become popular with blog comment spammers recently; though because I have moderation on, so far only I have seen the spam (in the WordPress admin interface), it hasn’t reached the public site.

In the last week, the quantity has grown enormously, to the extent no longer practical to moderate manually. I’ve installed Akismet, and am eager to see how well it works.

On a related (spam) note, I’ve been very disappointed with the spam filter built in to Thunderbird; it’s real-world performance for me has been awful compared to POPFile. With the latter, I get vanishingly few false positives, and only a small handful of spam messages reach my inbox each day, out of many hundreds that arrive. WIth Thunderbird, even after many, many clicks of training (dutifully identifying both Spam and Not-Spam), it still misclassifies far more often.

Update a few weeks later: Akismet works very well – the comment spam problem is, for the moment, completely solved.

Label Placement in Forms… I was wrong.

In the process of designing “forms” in applications (both web based and rich client), I’ve had several discussions about where field labels should be located on the screen relative to the labeled fields. I’ve usually pushed hard for left-aligned labels, to the left of the fields, because this looks most tidy to me; I assumed that usability would be good also.

Ooops, it turns out that I was wrong. Matteo Penzo found, in an eye-tracking usability study (at UXMatters), that the best arrangement is to put labels above the fields, second best is right-aligned labels to the left of the fields; and of the arrangements studied, my favorite left-aligned arrangement is worst. Bold labels should be avoided… at least I was already doing that right. In the future, I will favor labels-on-top or right-aligned also.

Java Scripting talk, Nov. 9 at the St. Louis Java User Group

This Thursday, I will give a talk at the St. Louis Java User Group on “Scripting your Java Application”, Thursday Nov. 9. Here is the blurb:

First, this talk will show how to plug in scripting capability to your application, using common scripting mechanisms, including those from the scripting related JSRs (223, 274, etc), and point out the tradeoffs in selecting a scripting mechanism and/or language. Then the bulk of the talk will focus on the questions of Why and Where: the motivations for scripting support, areas of an application that warrant such support, and placement of scripting plug-points across client/server application tiers. Lastly, it will address script/application API design and plugability, including the ideal of an end-to-end script plugin.

My current plan is to use no slides, only a 1-page handout and code on the screen. (Yes, I’ve been to an Edward Tufte class…)