Older blog entries for osullivj (starting at number 3)

Design aesthetics: we seem to have a thread going on design aesthetics, seeded by Raph's link to Paul Graham's essay. The Patterns movement in software was inspired by architect Christopher Alexander's work in this area. In software patterns Richard Gabriel and Jim Coplien are the guys who've done the most work on the philosophical aspects. Gabriel's site has some good materials on this. Is beauty in the eye of the beholder, or is it part of objective reality ?

OK, here's a good PDF on Gabriel's site. Covers the Quality without a Name and everything else you need to know about Alexander's work. A lot more depth than the Paul Graham article on the same topic that raph linked. I've got Alexander's Timeless Way and Pattern Language books, and they're fantastic. The books themselves exhibit the Quality they describe, which is delightfully self referential.

Life: Antonia's done her back again, so I did the school run this morning. Talk about stress and pressure ! Give me a coding deadline any day.

Coding: work on the template engine is coming along nicely. Hope to release the Python impl soon. Arrays are always tricky when expanding a template. One of my coding mantras is 'evenly distribute complexity', so I'm going to keep the array features minimal, and use pipelining to handle more complex rendering scenarios. Us XMLers need to take a leaf or two out of the graphics textbook; it's always good to learn from a more mature domain.

Real life: the IKEA furniture storm is starting to abate. The new swivelly chairs should make the home computing environment nicer. And the dining table looks good.

Surrounded by an IKEA furniture storm at home. Antonia spontaneously blew 1100 squid on tables, chairs and drawers on Sunday, and now we're swamped by flat packs.

I contributed to a project recently, so I thought I'd better create an account. I'd extended Les Smithson's pymqi to support some Zope/Python/MQ series stuff I'm doing here at work.