Wednesday, February 12, 2014

A point

A point, says Euclid, is that which has no part. What is the analogous definition for a "point" made in an argument or a line of reasoning?

These thoughts crossed my mind while reading How to Read a Book on the airplane this afternoon and reading Euclid's definition for the first time. It's one of those books you read where you start to make connection after connection with the other unsettled stuff knocking around your skull until you realized you've been staring out the airplane window for the last 10 minutes.

When I think of a "point" in an argument, I think of an element of the structure of the discourse rather than a zero-dimensional something which has no part except when for two special "points:" the point where you start and the point you are trying reach.

Do these points exist without the line of reasoning that connects them?

Testing MathJax


Saturday, January 31, 2009

Where's my $HOME?

Once upon a time, life was simple. My progress could be measure by the state of my home directory. My work lived in folders that represented input or output data, program source code, and latex source code. Beyond that there were some odds and ends like gnuplot script files and the resulting postscript files, either to analyze or include in whatever paper I was writing. I also had a Mail directory that my email client (elm at first and then pine) access, but I didn't really use email that much. I would use emacs (or vi if it was a quick edit) to edit a file or run my programs to generate output data. That was pretty much it. I lived in the shell. I could telnet from wherever and have the same environment from wherever I was. As time went on, I found myself using emacs more and more as my shell, but the idea was basically the same.

Now... I usually have email, a web browser, and some office app or adobe open, usually to read, and sometimes to write. I'll be editing code sometimes (less often then I like) and have used pythonwin, but recently I've rediscovered emacs (now on windows). Instead of constantly having an awareness of my directory structure, because I'm cd'ing around it in the shell, it's mostly a place to store some program's files or downloads from my web browser. It ends up getting messy because I'm not as cognizant of where everything belongs. The file system is just a dumping ground.

To make matters worse, I have stuff on multiple computers (home, work, and laptop) and I have stuff that just lives on the web (delicious, twine, google docs, evernote, whatever I'm intrigued by this week). I'm homeless. Where's $HOME?

Holy cow. Where am I? How's my progress? What's my operating system doing for me? I used to live in the shell. Todo management? "grep -R 'TODO' ." I'd make up scripts to handle common tasks and throw them in ~/bin. A lot of that was made possible by the miracle of plain text. Unfortunately, I deal in binary files (.doc, .ppt, .pdf, .xls, etc.) these days and I have to open some separate window to look at them.

Saturday, January 03, 2009

50th time is the charm with GTD?

Well, it's a new year and I, like many, and making an effort to organize. I've read David Allen's Getting Things Done and been inspired, but have never quite got a system I'm terrifically happy with. Usually, I try something new, move all my lists, get a temporary boost (more from inspiration than efficiency) and then things end up about the same.

Well, this is another one of those times! This post from March sounds startling like this one, but I will press ahead. The idea of using google notebook didn't last long. I'm not sure why. I think part of it is the interface. It just has all these borders and stuff that get in the way of the lists. I fell in love again with emacs and after using org-mode for outlining, put my lists in there and used svn for versioning. I found myself reordering branches, indenting, and generally messing with my giant .org files (work and home). Worse, I found I was generally doing things that never made it on the list and not looking at the list to see what to do.

Next (yes, there's a next), I tried taskodone, which based on taskpaper. I was inspired by this review of taskpaper

"TaskPaper’s strength is that it lets you focus on crossing out those tasks instead of building a self-referential web of unfinished business which separates you from the cold, harsh reality of all the work you need to do."Scott McNulty,

Hey, that's me! OK, so I tried taskodone and I like it, and I really think it might be OK. It has a lot of charm in that it's pretty fiddle proof with only one level of indendation. It didn't quite stick with me though. I still wanted to reorganize my unfinished business. I also didn't like looking at it all all the time. I suppose some discipline, like just looking at the @na lines would work, but still when I opened it to delete a finished line or add a next task, I'm still looking at everything.

All of the above with tags and outlines actually has little to do with what's in David Allen's book. His lists are just lists. Many of us have this need to keep actions tied (electronically, preferably) to their projects. His project list though, is just a list of projects! You only consult it at the weekly review or when adding a new one. The other lists or lists contain your next actions.

Where does the planning happen? In the project plans, of course. These project plans are culled for actions in the weekly review. They go in folders in the book, I believe. You get out these manilla things, look and alter them, and then update your plain old flat GTD lists. I had never quite figured this out (and am still not sure I have).

Where are the project plans in my org-mode giant list? Well, they are *all* right in there. Yes you can collapse and expand and only look at what you need with some fancy emacs keystrokes, but still, they are *all* right there. Too much for me.

Where are the project plans with taskpaper? Well, umm, umm... There's a flat list of tasks under the project headings, but that's just not enough for a project of any complexity. You can break a project into separate project (which I did) and have something like "Build a house:", "Build a house - hire an architect," " Build a house - hire a contractor," etc. That's just cheating though, and your forced to look at all the sub-projects.

OK, so my projects don't really live in manilla folders too often. What could I use? Well, gee, how about those things on the filesystem we call "folders?" Wait, it's all coming back to me now. Back in grad school, I had a small set of folders that my life depended on. One folder would hold the .tex, .ps, and gnuplot script files that represent the paper (or my thesis) that I was working on. The other folder(s) would hold code and the output of that code. The state of those folder represented my progress in pretty absolute terms. When the paper was done, refereed, and published, I was pretty much done. I would put "TODO" or "FIXME" into code or tex files and have TODO files with lists of task. grep was my friend for finding where work was needed.

Much of that simplicity came from what I was doing and it was just natural. Now I'm more connected with other people and there's a lot of quick turnaround exchanges via email that can be confused with advancing the ball. Often there's not a product I'm actively working on that would naturally go in a folder. I might have one due in the distant future, but haven't actually got to the point of creating a folder and opening a word processor.

So here's the idea -- use project folders. Have a project? Make a folder. Put some stuff in there that represents what's been done and what has to be done. The state of these folders represent progress (or lack thereof). I'm thinking org-mode can help here with a with the tasks. Keep TODOs separate from notes, and references. Flag the next action with TODO and use org agenda to pull the master action list together. The project list is just "ls ~/projects."

Really the only revelation (to me) is that having all your project plans in one file can be terribly distracting. OK. I've wasted enough time not actually doing things while writing this, so back to work!

Thursday, October 30, 2008

proud papa

I installed python on my 10-year-old's computer a while ago and showed him a few things. He's really into football now and for some reason he wanted to calculate NFL passer ratings for some QBs. I helped him write a program in python that prompts the user for completions, attempts, etc. and then prints out the passer rating. This morning I found him on looking up stats and punching them into his new calculator. I think it's the first time he's created a tool. It feels a bit like watching him discover fire. I'm a proud papa.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

defaultdict and R

In answering a question on the python-tutor list, someone used collections.defaultdict. I didn't know about this. I guess it looks a little cleaner to say a = defaultdict(list) rather than use a.setdefault(key,[]).

Well, that isn't much learning for the day, but it's something.

I'm also trying to learn and use R, but fell back to python for my task today when I couldn't quickly figure out how to do what I wanted to in R. R is frustrating right now because it seems so insanely powerful, but at the same time foreign to how my python-oriented brain thinks.

I have "Modern Applied Statistics with S-PLUS" and learned to parrot the examples in order to do some cool stuff, but when I have to deviate much from the examples, I find myself a bit lost. I figure I don't understand the basics of the language well enough and now have "Programming with Data." Hopefully this will get me up to speed, so I can be one of those guys on the R-help list who can answer a question with six different one-liners to accomplish the same thing.

emacs org-mode

I tried org-mode a while ago, loved it, and then inexplicably stopped using it. I think I was trying to figure out how to integrate my entire workflow (calendar, task, notes, etc.) in emacs and it was too much at once. This time I was just using it for notes/outlining and it is quite amazing. The keys are very intuitive also. You use the Meta and Shift keys combined with the arrow keys to move sections up and down, indent, etc.

I also used the table mode to actually make a table I needed and it is, quite simply, incredible. It's amazingly intuitive to fill a table, move rows and columns, insert, and delete. The thing can even be used as a spreadsheet, but I haven't tried that yet.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

my fingers remember emacs

Long ago, I used to live in emacs. ctrl-x-`, etc. I've been playing with pydev and eclipse recently and got frustrated with trying to figure out how to add modules to the python path that are "egg-link"s. So, I fired up emacs to start editing my text and I can't believe how much my fingers remember. I did a ctrl-5 2 to open a new window without blinking an eye. Where did that come from?