As I drove into Yongsan, what did I chance to see?
Twelve driver TVs,
eleven required u-turns,
ten tiny on-ramps,
nine pushcarts inching,
eight excess stoplights,
seven scooters swerving,
six KM jammed,
bad driving,
four ignored lanes,
three construction men,
two double parked trucks,
and a car that just barely missed me!

It’s been a convenience, but like most things chosen for price alone, robustness was not one of its qualities. Last week its power jack died beyond my ability to wiggle the plug into a workable position, and last weekend the final dregs of battery gave out. Given that I had a Best Buy gift card from christmas, I took it in to see if they could do anything with it. They pointed out that shipping alone would cost a quarter of the price of a new computer, and that replacing the motherboard would eat the rest. Replacment was the more practical option.

I’m typing this on a new computer, whose numerical statistics are (with astonishing precision) precisely double those of the computer this is replacing. However, like any other brand new machine, it was practically uselses out of the box: it had a crappy OS (Vista Basic) and a hard drive full of adware and demos. The ideal scenario would be for me to just throw the old machine’s hard drive into an external enclosure and boot from that, but Microsoft in its infinite wisdom has installed logic to prevent that from happening. After all, if the boot disc for an XP license was portable, a user could just carry that disc around to whatever machine happened to be handy at the time, losing MS the OS sales for each of those machines.

Luckily for me, in software there is no such thing as having the last word. If there is incentive to do a thing, no force in the world will prevent someone on the internet from figuring out how to do it. Wait long enough, and the knowledge will even be refined into tutorial form.

The process isn’t perfect. I’ll have to back up everything of importance, then customize, format, and reinstall windows onto the portable drive. Then I get to reinstall all the applications. It’ll probably eat at least one weekend to get things running properly.

Still, the result is what matters: I’ll have a Windows installation in a wallet-sized drive that I can plug in whenever I need it, and whenever I don’t, there’ll be nothing preventing me from using this nice new ubuntu box as my general-purpose portable. It is hard not to see this result as being an upgrade in all respects.

I had been proceeding up until now with the expectation that I would join my class within a week or two of Christmas. That was fine, if annoyingly long; it allowed me to sign up for the JLPT on the assumption that with nothing better to do with my time, I could study Japanese.

I went today to see the cadre member in charge of scheduling; if my start date were a week or two earlier than I had expected, I wanted to see if I could delay it until after the test. Instead, I received a surprise: the unofficial estimate by the man who will eventually make the final decision is that I will class up on October 10. This means that I’m likely to finish flight training by the end of January, and graduate from flight school perhaps a month after that.

This is great news, in the sense that it means that I’ll probably be out of Fort Rucker months before I had expected. On the other hand, it makes it unlikely that I’ll be able to take the JLPT. The universal word is that you have to study harder for your advanced aircraft than you ever did in primary. Consequently, there will barely be time to sleep each night, let alone study up in a foreign language. I could possibly switch tests and take the level 4 after two weeks of not studying Japanese; I’d expect to pass, but it seems kind of pointless.

Until I actually get a finalized start date, I’ll keep studying. Even if nothing else, I do enjoy learning the Japanese language. Still, I can’t help but regret yet another missed opportunity to get some sort of formal qualification in it.

That code is organic code, in a nearly pure form. I sat down one day saying “I want to solve this problem, and as the sole owner responsible for this problem, I am willing to bear the risk that the resultant code will be oddly organized, difficult to expand, and probably incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t me right now.” Then I sat down and wrote, and knew it was time to stop when it stopped being easy to write.

If you look at the code as presented, I generate a complex, highly-interconnected data structure which perfectly represents the structure of my music library but is actually not so great for generating interesting statistics about it. I knew last night, once I had figured out how things worked but before I had actually started writing anything new, that I could probably have gotten the end results I wanted faster by scrapping everything. Throwing the data into an in-memory sqlite database, interfaced through SQLObject, would have made the problem of actually finding the relevant information trivial.

I chose not to do that, instead kludging a pruning system together that, though not particularly efficient, worked within the existing paradigm. Why’d I make that choice? I know full well what good software engineering is like, and how to do it. It must, therefore, have been a choice.

Engineered software is modular, expandable, full of interchangeable components which use well-defined interfaces. It’s not all that difficult: simply stating the problem properly implies the solution, which may be complex or broad, but is rarely actually difficult. For a problem like extracting statistics from my iTunes track ratings, it takes only seconds to see how to do it, but in order to see any results you have to put in an hour or two of implementation which is pure boredom.

Organic software, on the other hand, just sort of grows into place, channeled into a certain design more through the accidents of iterative bug fixing than through any sort of pattern. You get to skip all the planning and jump directly into implementation, which invariably leads to a long sequence of ever-less-plausible logic puzzles which must be solved. Eventually, everything is in place, and you have a Rube Goldbergian contraption in code which may or may not work properly. You flip the switch and see it chug along and it either explodes spectacularly or somehow produces the expected results. In the first, more common case, you are now faced with a new logic puzzle. In the latter, you’ve won, as the work is now complete.

That whole process is a surprising amount of fun. When it comes right down to it, I don’t need or really care about knowing these statistics. However, the process of discovering them was enjoyable. Like the guy who built a steam-powered walking robot, the point isn’t really to produce a viable mode of transportation. It’s to enjoy the building of the thing.

I know that part of this is just that I live in AL, which seems to have intentionally made itself distant from crazy Yankee tastes. However, gift cards also have the issue that they’re less flexible than cash and less interesting than a proper gift.

I do appreciate the sentiments which cause people to buy gifts for me. However, I ask that in the future, people choose either durable goods or simple cash.

Speaking of those photos, I’m not happy with LJ for their treatment of people who want to include photos. First they fail to provide upload space for the photos; then, they strip out CSS based on unarticulated rules which make it impossible to make the photos both links to the full version and positioned as they are. If you want to see a larger version of almost any of those photos, just go to the image source.

If you’re hunting for a Christmas or birthday present for me and you don’t know what to get, I just noticed that I’m running out of hard drive space again. A well-reviewed external HD of at least 150 gb would be truly appreciated.

In the course of the last book, I encountered the phrase ‘jikan no muda’ in the context of a numeric game found in a newspaper. Since my Japanese dictionary happened to be within arm’s reach, I looked up muda, and laughed, because Pratchett is a professional at writing humorous books. Then I realized that I had just put myself into a rather small category of people by getting the joke, and that the subcategory of people who got the joke and then intended to write about it online was even smaller.

Then I figured that since I was thinking recursively anyway, I might as well go for broke. Terry Pratchett is a very funny writer, but he has no idea how far some people go when they decide to waste time.

Also, merry christmas.

I have two part time jobs I acquired while filing the Army application. Both of them strike unexpectedly and require my full time, then leave off for a period giving me nothing to do. I am a small-bid freelance coder and substitute high-school teacher. These jobs aren’t the best, but I find that I’m not bad at keeping a schedule of frantic deadline rushes interspersed with complete R&R time. It meshes well with my sleep schedule, at least.

If for some reason you are tempted to send me Christmas presents, know that I love to read novels. Particularly really good ones. Everything else is pretty well taken care of for the moment.

I am thinking of convening a group of people for a holiday party of some sort. This is complicated by the fact that, with a very few exceptions, no two of the people I would invite live within an hour’s drive of each other, and the geographic center of our locations is out of driving range for everyone. I may have to just assume that everyone can get to Boston. Most likely, nothing will come of this unless I see interest. Consider this advance notice, at least.