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power of search
Tuesday, May 11 2010
I spent all day getting my brain around this web development job I am supposed to be doing. I spent hours gradual spiraling in on the task at hand. At some point something snapped and I got it. Eureka! If it wasn't for Homesite's global search tool, which allows me to list all mentions of a string throughout an entire website, the job I do would be impossible. Search makes any programming system decipherable, no matter how baroque and convoluted it happens to be. Seventeen years ago, I was using search in ResEdit to track down references in 680x0 machine code to the IDs of resources so I could find the instructions that was throwing up "you need to enter a registration code" dialog boxes. Once I could zero in on the few lines of machine code, I could disassemble it, and then change a few bytes to make a "branch if condition true" into a "branch always." I didn't even really understand 680x0 code in those days; I just knew enough to do what I wanted to do. And I only did it as an elaborate puzzle; I only ended up using about one percent of the applications I cracked.
The cold snap continued today as clouds gradually blotted out the sun and, late in the day, rain began to fall. But by then I'd managed to finish the overall structure of the second walled tomato patch. The soil inside that wall is still far beneath garden-grade. It's nothing more than rocky clay, some of it native and some of it brought it to make a smooth surface for a hoped-for suburban-style lawn.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?100511 feedback
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