[Tfug] RDBMS reprise

[Claude Rubinson]

On Sat, Feb 02, 2008 at 09:44:11AM -0800, Bexley Hall wrote:
> (By contrast, folks won't leave home without
> their cell phone!)

Which is why the cell phone is the perfect convergence device.
Granted, it doesn't do anything perfectly (and generally does many
things poorly) but since you always have it on you, many of us find it
useful.  E.g., I recently got a cell phone that plays mp3s and
supports SD cards == my ipod nano is superfluous.  Only other way that
that's going to happen is if they bolt a phone onto an iPod (oh,
wait... ;-)

> I've tried playing with several and find that I
> have to force myself to carry it -- and only at
> certain times (e.g., while I do my daily walk I
> carry one to log my time exercising and busy my
> mind -- Soduko -- while walking).  I.e. I am
> not *compelled* to carry it.

In my opinion, if you have to force yourself to use it, then it's not
for you.  When I was working in the private sector, I did use my Palm
throughout the day, for a variety of tasks.  Once I went back to
school, however, I found that it didn't work well with how I now had
to work (namely, thinking a "week-at-a-time" rather than a
"day-at-a-time."

Point being - just because it hasn't worked for you doesn't mean it
does work well.  Just not for you, not for this particular task.

> Yes, but *why* (not)??  :<  The idea seems *perfect*;
> keeping track of all this *cruft* that is just not
> worth remembering (appointments, phone numbers,
> addresses, etc.) -- yet is "inconvenient" to
> *forget*!

That statement is a classic example of a solution in search of a
problem.  What you (we, I, everybody) *should* be doing is asking
"What's the problem that I'm trying to solve?"  And then -- and only
then -- looking for the solution.  All too often, we pick the solution
first.  I don't know that programmers are more prone to this syndrome
than the rest of mankind but it frequently obvious when we do this.

Incidentally, this is part of my love affair with fvwm and emacs.
Whenever I find myself doing the same thing over and over again, I add
it to my to do list.  At some point in the future, I spend a little
bit of time hacking away at the relevant config so as to
simplify/eliminate the issue.  This is why I insist on tools that (a)
I expect to be around in the long term and (b) are *designed* to be
bent to my will.

Of course, the other problem that programmers frequently run into--or
cause, as the case may be--is over-analyzing the problem and solving
for contingencies that may or may not exist.  This, of course, is the
problem (partially) solved by the "release early, release often"
method and (more completely) by the Unix "worse-is-better" approach.

Back to the specific question of why PDAs aren't more prevalent: I
would suggest that it's because there are countless ways of doing this
very thing.  PDAs are one solution, addressbooks are another, BBDB for
Emacs is another, plain text files another, etc.  Myself, I find that
a combination of cell-phone and notebook-based solutions is ideal for
my needs as I pretty much always have my phone with me and, more
often, than not, have my notebook in front of me.  Therefore, no PDA.

But this is only because I do all of my work from my notebook and
always have it with me.  Sometimes I catch myself thinking or saying
"I'll never go back to a desktop, the flexibility that the notebook
offers is just too convenient."  In fact, that flexibility is only
useful because of how I work today.  People who find themselves
working on a variety of computers find webmail to be very convenient;
for me, all webmail implementations pale in comparison to my
mutt+emacs+postfix combination.  But that's only because I wouldn't
take advantage of webmail's distinctive characteristic--being
web-accessible.

My point being: today I can't see myself ever giving up my notebook.
But when my palm pilot was a central part of my day, I couldn't see
myself ever *it* up.  The challenge is to alway be open to where one
finds oneself currently and respond to that, rather than to the past
or to the (expected) future.

Claude

(That was a little more Zen than I intended.)