When the sun never sets

I have been hard at work, and one of the more exciting projects we have had, needed full attention. One sort of funny experience was at a conference in Kiruna located at the northern part of Sweden a couple of weeks before midsummer. I was constantly keeping one eye on the presenter and the other one on my computer screen, trying to be productive and solve those issues that has to take time and be mangled and digested in the brain. I was surprised that I could get so much out of the conference while doing so much work. After the first nights dinner, I socialized and when people started to go to bed I went straight to the room and hooked up the computer to fix one very interesting bug that I solved during the dinner. The sun was up, and I started hacking. The sun was up when I later looked at the watch, oh shit, 03:00, the bus to the conference took off at 08:00. I quickly went to bed only to discover that the curtains was way too small to keep the sunlight out. Well after a half an hour I managed to sleep only to wake up at 06:30. The sun shined straight onto my face and I could just not fall a sleep again, argh what to do, ... erg Hacking!!.

So to all you managers, If you have something that has to be done quickly before the vacations in the summer, send all of your staff to some nice resort close to the appropriate pole and make sure the curtains are small.

Anyway vacation is on and I got some spare time and then I think and play the keyboard

What strikes me is how clumsy we are using computers (I mean humans in general not hackers) It seems like a lot of people, spend time on manually looking through long lists in listboxes to figure out something. How many people in that immensely long email list are from company B. How many is from that department. I want to select all people from company C and email them specifically.

I experience these issues myself when constructing meshes for CFD. I have tons of faces and I have bothered to name them all. Then I would like to select a subset of the faces and when going to the listbox ... it is not sorted argh!!

What to do. Well I've been playing with pygtk and dbus to make a mock up. I can now send the data in the list (TreeView) to the shell, the shell can grep the subset and then pipe it back to a selection or do a wc for example. It's a hack but If all toolkits had this functionality we would see hackers showing off using these techniques and I believe that we would get ton's of input how to improve the actuall gui's. It would be a simple thing to actually hack a sellect home key, just bind a key to

gcat.py | grep "Sweden|Sverige" | gsel.py

It's late and I'm off to real vacation. Glad sommar and sleep well