| Now I'm 35; daydreams and plans for the future |
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Monday, July 4th, 2016 21:48:11 GMT |
| Software |
Yesterday (July 3rd) was my birthday. So now, I'm 35, and I still haven't really gotten my life together yet. :-)
But fortunately, I already mourned the possibly irretrievable loss of my youth a while back, so, the transition from 34 to 35 isn't a very big deal to me.
And who knows what science, technology and medicine might someday achieve?
Except actually, I think I'd rather reincarnate as a male supermodel than live forever in my current body. :-) So, even if future scientific advances can't save me from old age and death, fine with me, I guess. :-)
My Puppy Linux Setup Kit, Astroblahhh Desktop, the Eryss astrology software, and the WordsPlatz blogging software are definitely still pretty far from as refined and perfected as I hope they someday will be.
But, hopefully I'm well on my way to creating versions of them (and other things) which will be good enough that I'll hopefully be able to share them without having to feel so sheepish about how flawed they are. :-)
Roughly in order of priority, and the possible future chronological order I'm going to work on them:
Lately, I've been relying more on NoteCase and VUE instead of Astroblahhh Desktop, since Astroblahhh Desktop has been in partially-updated disarray ever since last September, and I've been reluctant to even use the VirtualBoxed Windows version of Astroblahhh Desktop anymore, and also have avoided even using the stable-enough Astroblahhh Desktop 2.4, mostly because it needs to run on a web server because I haven't added PHP-GTK and SQLite database capabilities to it yet.
Astroblahhh Desktop already had some NoteCase-related import capabilities since years ago, though maybe not in a released version until 2015. But nothing related to VUE, yet.
Though I still haven't done a huge amount of work on APSK ever since mid-April. In May and June, my temporary top priorities were to get a new (to me) used laptop on eBay with much more RAM than my former usual laptop, and good batteries, and get it working nicely. That's largely done now - but, that was done mostly by adding new installers to the old version of APSK, not by enhancing the new version of APSK.
The old APSK is way too cumbersome and annoying to add new stuff to, and it really needs to be redesigned. That was the best I could do at the time I wrote all that stuff (especially since I was in a hurry), but I think I learned a lot since then (Sept. 2014), and can do much better now.
Another problem is, since I was using a desktop computer instead of a laptop when I built the old APSK, I didn't give as much thought as I should have to making it efficient, instead of redundantly loading a lot of probably mostly unneeded stuff for every single different setup kit script that gets run.
For example, my Navig Perl script already can use my Fashionizer library written in Bash. (It can, even though maybe it shouldn't, for efficiency's sake. :-) Even the Fashionizer, which I made as recently as maybe January, February, and/or March of 2016, should probably be split into even smaller separate parts.)
Those Hjson text files will be converted to plain JSON, then the data from them will be read using the marvelous software jq, which is a command-line JSON processor.
I'm also trying make it far easier to add, relocate, or remove files and scripts in Puppy Setup Kit repos, and make it more easily possible to work with numerous different repos scattered across numerous different disks, without having to waste so much time and energy editing setup kit scripts just to change various things' filepaths simply so the setup kit can find them.
I accomplished a lot toward all these goals earlier this year, and it really seems like it's all going to work... someday. :-) And I learned a lot from forcing myself to write Bash scripts instead of Perl scripts.
Or, I guess I could use PHP to make some working prototypes more quickly and easily than I'm capable of doing with Bash, Perl, or anything else. Then, once I've figured out how to make things work with PHP, maybe I could translate everything into Bash and/or Perl? Or maybe I should just stick with PHP?
I don't know, but another thing I want is for it to be possible for anyone to use whatever languages they want with the setup kit.
So, if anyone (like me) wants to use an odd mixture of Bash, Perl, and PHP scripts, or even languages I usually try to avoid, like Python - I want it to be allowed. :-)
And I even want to keep all old-style Puppy Setup Kit scripts working, but at the very least copy them into the RAM disk and launch them from there instead of a physical disk, to avoid making physical disks do unnecessary work.
And, now that I finally arrived at the ideas of using Hjson and jq with my Puppy Setup Kit, I think they mght also be useful with Astroblahhh Desktop, and also with my notion of somehow making my Astroblahhh Desktop data compatible with graph databases such as OrientDB or Neo4j, which are far more flexible than MySQL and SQLite.
But, at the same time, I somehow want to avoid losing compatibility with MySQL and SQLite. If this is too difficult, though, I'll probably just make my graph DB stuff separate from Astroblahhh Desktop, and hopefully give Astroblahhh Desktop some excellent Hjson export capabilities.
But, I'm going to keep at it anyway. :-) I recently read an amusing blog post that basically said, programmers are the ultimate optimists.
Surprisingly, even for me, that seems true to a great extent, at least with programming. Not so much with anything else - which is why I was surprised to realize that, wow, despite my cynicism about many other things in life, I really have overall tended to be incredibly optimistic about my programming. :-D
Though far from 100% optimistic - which is actually good in various ways, since for one thing, it leaves room for some pleasant surprises when sometimes I get better results than my expectations. (Even though my expectations tend to be quite tentative.)
For example, my blogging software WordsPlatz has served me pretty well with hardly any changes since 2008 or 2009.
And sometimes I get lucky and actually manage to finish things much sooner than I not-altogether-optimistically feared. I feel like I got very lucky with my efforts to get cozy with the GNU Emacs editor, and my effort to modify the multifiles Emacs add-on, which resulted in multifiles-apmod.el. That all only took around two months, but I was bracing myself to spend even more time on them if I really had to.
And GNU Emacs, multifiles-apmod.el, and numerous other great Emacs add-ons have all turned out to be even more wonderful and helpful than I imagined before I started working with them. :-)
So, I now feel a lot more sure that regardless of my projects' difficulty, it's quite possibly just a matter of time and enough effort before I finally succeed at most or all of them.
In any case, I don't think I've achieved world-class talent (yet?). :-) But doubtless I'm a lot closer than I would be if my severe sleep issues hadn't stopped me from being capable of enduring a normal job (which probably wouldn't have been in the field of programming), and I've definitely improved a lot over all these years.
I shudder to think of how much worse my life might have turned out if I had been more capable of forcing myself to stick with my almost minimum-wage part-time job as a copy editor/typist at a small local newspaper (which I barely endured from Nov. 2002 to Jan. 2004), or any other time-wasting probably minimum wage job that would have gotten in the way of me cultivating more valuable skills.
It's so close to releaseable that sometime, I probably ought to just temporarily put everything else aside (despite the fact that all the other stuff seems probably more important), polish it up a little and finally release it.
Even more than the AHK version, I want a PHP-GTK version, too.
Or even a hybrid web app + command line app + PHP-GTK version. Actually, since Eryss will probably be a smaller, easier project than Astroblahhh Desktop, and I also want to make a web app + command line app + PHP-GTK version of Astroblahhh Desktop, I might be able to quickly get a better idea of how to build Astroblahhh Desktop by working on Eryss first.
Maybe that's sufficient justification for me to work on Eryss first?
That would make it much easier to update and improve all my websites. I could finally more easily make my websites nicer, more useful, more organized and easily searched, instead of messy, lazy, and cluttered.
And then, once I also hopefully get some truly great, useful, easy to install and use projects finally completed, perhaps freelance work and/or purchases (if/when I finally get around to creating some sort of products to sell) and/or donations and/or microdonations will just flow to me without me having to make any effort to somehow market myself or seek work?
Even just getting rid of the redundant-looking section of Blog Archive links at the upper right and lower right would probably be an improvement.
I'd also like to automate the addition of a comment section to the bottom of all of my blog posts - an iframe containing each blog post's official comment thread at the Eryss.Com Forum. But, on the other hand, I'm not sure doing anything to popularize either of my forums is the best idea at the moment, since even the nicest, politest forums I ever posted to always tended to stress me out due to my social anxiety.
I still intend to keep my forums around forever, but I probably am going to continue largely avoiding them (and any other forums I'm tempted to post to) until I finish more of my top projects.
Or, better yet would be for me to have such a good memory that I wouldn't need Astroblahhh Desktop or other things as much anymore. :-)
So, I'm definitely interested in trying to make more use of ideas I read about recently in the great book You Can Learn To Remember: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life by Dominic O'Brien, who won the World Memory Championships numerous times.
End of addition.)
The "journey" memory method described in the abovementioned book made me think maybe virtual worlds could be a useful mnemonic tool.
And, for a long time, I've been thinking it would probably be so cool to have a 3D version of the VUE concept mapping software. And the easiest-seeming way I can think of to possibly implement something like that hopefully quickly would be to somehow import VUE data into an OpenSim. :-)
Except I'm not sure the Android phone I have can run that.
Or maybe even to build my own edition(s) of Puppy Linux.
I also someday want to try a Devuan-based Puppy Linux.
So, I definitely have plenty to keep me busy. And who knows what random cool new (or new to me) things I'll hear about in the future which might inspire me to work on totally different things instead.
But, I hope somehow all of the above will somehow help with that too.
And music definitely usually helps my productivity and ability to concentrate.
And, as explained in this old blog post, astrology (among various other things) played a significant part in me becoming more agnostic and hopeful, and less depressed, close-minded and cynical. So, maybe that could help other people too, even though astrology is usually considered a frivolous subject.
And I'm still very curious about whether any part of astrology can be proven to have objective validity, so I'll be quite happy if my software will help scientists, skeptics, and any other curious people to investigate astrology.
I hope this blog post was interesting, thought-provoking, and educational, and that I can get at least some of the above done well in a reasonable amount of time, so hopefully I'll have many more (and hopefully increasingly high-quality) things to share with you all in the future.
Also, Happy Independence Day!
Even though I haven't accomplished as much as I would have liked to with my life thus far, I'm glad I at least managed to do as much as I did, despite all my limitations, such as my severe sleep issues, and the various forms of oppression I and my family have had to deal with, some of which I described back in Nov. 2015 on my Self-Help page.
Here's a summary of what I consider my most important not-yet-finished projects, most of which have taken much longer than expected.
I'm hoping to build the renovated APSK out of a lot more small, modular, replaceable, separable pieces which could also easily be used with unrelated things.
And I also want to make it possible to customize APSK's behavior by simply editing Hjson text files rather than scripts. (Of course, it will still be possible to edit scripts, but hopefully less necessary.)
But I'm actually pretty close to just giving in to the temptation to make PHP a required part of the Puppy Setup Kit, because no matter how much I've tried to force myself to get used to other languages, PHP is still easiest for me and still my favorite.
With all my past experience with how long my projects (except the tiniest ones) have tended to take, I'm definitely very aware that the above might take quite a bit longer to complete than I hope.
But I definitely have some logical reasons for optimism - since a lot of the stuff I've already made (both released or not) is remarkably useful, despite its lack of polish.
So, there's definitely not much chance I'm going to give up on my projects out of a sulky lack of confidence in my abilities. I'm well-aware my work hasn't been flawless, but, I've accomplished much more than I originally had any idea I was capable of.
I wish I knew how close I am to having spent at least 10,000 hours doing and studying programming (and related subjects). 10,000 hours is the number mentioned in the intriguing book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell as being the roughly estimated point at which people might have put in enough effort to finally achieve world-class talent.
And now, here's a list of some less highly-prioritized projects or daydreams of mine.
And here are some things I've scarcely even started working on yet, but which might become higher priorities at some point.
I could go on and on, but, that's already a ton of stuff. :-)
Since this blog post is mostly about software-related goals and daydreams, I didn't even mention any of my other even more huge goals, like "End world poverty".
Even the more frivolous-sounding projects like a streaming music interface and the Eryss astrology software would/will doubtless help me become a better programmer and make it possible for me to do a better job with all of my other projects too.
Thanks again to everyone for all your kind support of any kind!