Xarg blog Archive

I found the article about the Win2K source at Kuro5hin.org pretty entertaining. The funny thing is the whole issue of innappropriate comments in code has come up a number of times with ACS and later OpenACS. It even inspired Philip to write an article about it and it came up more than once from clients who looked at the source. I am not at all surprised to find that comments like this exist in Microsoft's code since they are not at all visible to the end user, well not usually anyway :)

There are still a lot of "Hack" type comments in OpenACS but since the code is visible and people have complained, we have thought of the children and removed the "f word". I really like the pithy comments though, it does a far better job of conveying the history of the code and the personalities of the people who have worked on it that a grey uniform "professional" expunging of anything even remotely offensive ever could.

Code needs to work and be correct but the comments should convey the intent and the nuance of complicated ideas. And with large messy systems sometimes nuance is just not enough...

I finally made it to Shine Gallery to pick out my christmas present. A picture of a bug! But not just any picture, these are amazingly detailed photos constructed from a mosiac of hundreds of scans from an electron microscope. They capture the essence of bugness and are astonishingly detailed. The artist who makes them is Giles Revell and there are a couple nice articles at scicult and The Manchester Museum about his work.

I have always been fascinated by electron microscopy ever since I saw a real electron microscope at the exploratorium in San Francisco when I was a kid and it always seemed strange to me that you could not get more images like this. Going to Shine gallery, they showed me the works in progress and artists proofs and I now realize why there are not more images like this around. It's an incredible amount of work to create one. One thing they have is all the individual scans on one page as thumbnails and when you realize each one takes a while to do properly and the stitching of the images is time consuming and there really are hundreds in each image, it's amazing that Mr. Revell has had the patience and vision to create these.

I am excited to get my prints and I think it's about the best Christmas present I have ever gotten. The most amazing thing about all this (besides the prints themselves) is that Shine Gallery is about a block from my house. My only regret is that I don't have space for the large images which are typically a meter or two across, although maybe I could put one over the dining room table :)