practising what exactly?

I was just reading another of steveyegge's blog posts from 5 or so years ago
http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/practicing-programming
and he's talking about practising-programming, in a similar way to many other blog posts have.

There's one point that is mentioned here, and other places too that I have to disagree with.

...merely doing your job every day doesn't qualify as real practice.

I think it actually depends on what exactly you're practising.
For example, are you practising programming in a language you already know?
If so, you could try different approaches, or libraries or something

One thing I try to 'practise'/study is learning new technologies (or languages).
I take different approaches to learning each new technology, and monitor how easy/hard it is.

I think that counts as practising as much as any deliberate exercise.

I guess it all depends on what your job actually is.
If your job is to pump out as much code as possible, then practising programming itself is probably a good idea.

But I view my job (as a software developer) differently.
For the most part, my job consists of learning a technology or language or program or system that I know nothing about, and configuring or programming or modifying in some way.

The key part is the learning.

I'm practising learning.

it's for reading text

I bought a kindle 2 a few months ago, and I've enjoyed reading books, papers, etc on it.
Almost everything has been in pdf form though,
and the pdf fonts are not always optimised for e-ink reading (actually never optimised).

Yesterday I wanted to read an interesting blog on it, so I dumped the text from the website into a text file and loaded it up on the kindle.

I'd forgotten how much better the built in fonts are on the kindle.

Since then I've been converting all my pdfs to mobi format using calibre.
It converts the text perfectly, and almost all the images. The formatting can be pretty skewed though, which sucks for long lines of code.

Still, it's a hell of a lot better than reading the pdfs directly.

the unreadable book?

According to steve yegge no one can finish Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

I have.


It's pretty heavy going, and I'm not really a fan of the Achilles and the Tortoise dialogues.
But I did finish reading it.

I particularly enjoyed the section which described the function of DNA as a self replicating program.

switching religions

Today, I switched religions.

I used to be a vim man, and now I use emacs.

That's right, I've changed my default text editor

pretty big news eh?

it is actually, as a basic text editor is something I use most of the day.
Which makes it one of my main tools.

At uni, everyone used vim.
And at work everyone used vi.
Then when we all started working on Java, we all started using eclipse, and defaulted to vi for basic duties.
These days, most people use either vim or notepad++, or something very close to notepad++.

In fact, I think I've only _met_ one person who used anything other than vi (or some basic windows text editor).

Yesterday I read a blog, and somehow it convinced me to change my default text editor, which has only happened once before (from vim to notepad++).

http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs

Already, (after half a day) I'm finding some basic tasks easier or quicker.

I'm converted!

internal error internal errors

java dead?

http://codemonkeyism.com/java-dead/

I don't think Java's dead


it's just dead boring

I can't not submit

There are times when I'm not allowed to submit.

I wish I'd made a branch to begin with

so I'm going to run my own subversion server on my local development machine.

visual SVN server

tortoise svn client