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what I'd do to a calculator if I were a student
Sunday, December 3 2017
I obsessively worked on two server-related projects today: one was perfecting the automated creation of a file that would then be automatically emailed to an email address. You have to be careful when doing this with potentially-sensitive documents, especially when you leave the example email address of someone@example.com in your code. Sending a potentially private document to such an address could constitute privacy breach. It makes me wonder what the owners of example.com do with such emails. Fortunately, my code was still not working when I detected that the address of the recipient was still someone in the example.com domain.
The other project involved coming up with a pithy JSON spec to describe how to plot data from a dataset on a graph (in this case, a simple line graph with one or more plots). I cared more about the JSON spec and communicating it to the underlying systems than I did about how the plotting actually happened. For that, I used a very lightweight set of functions that will probably be replaced fairly soon. Getting this system working was highly satisfying; I'd been wanting to do it for months and hadn't realized until today that the key to doing it correctly was being able to come up with a data object to describe how the data was to be processed.
Later I installed several more floor joists in the screened-in-porch project. I didn't work long because I was eager to get back to my data graphing obsession. I suspect that part of my renewed interest in graphing is yet another consequence of buying a graphing calculator from the Tibetan Center thrift store. Later this evening in the bathtub, I actually tried to write a simple program on that thing, but I didn't manage to get anything working. Calculators are a mess with regard to their user experience. Are you supposed to type letters to enter commands (it turns out that, no, you're supposed to pick them from menus). I guess that's a good thing, because typing letters on a calculator's keyboard is no fun at all. The letters are secondary functions on their keys, and they're in alphabetical order. This makes typing anything an agony that also makes the person doing the typing feel incompetent. Supposedly graphing calculators can now be used when taking College Board tests, but only if they have non-QWERTY keyboards. If I were a teenager in today's society preparing to take a calculator into a SAT test, I'd find a way to hack a little cellphone unnoticed inside it, with an alternative QWERTY keyboard layout available when rotating the calculator 90 degrees. It would be like that scene in the second season of Halt & Catch Fire where our nerdy heroes hide a Commodore 64 inside a Unix workstation to avoid porting their code to it. (I rewatched that episode this evening.)
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