Hey, it only took three weeks this time! I’ve been working quite hard, mostly programming (oh hi there C++, I never really stopped loving you. I really like what you’ve done with the autos and the lambdas), taking care of some admin (freeagent is approximately an infinite times better for running your business in South Africa than Sage One Accounting / Pastel My Business Online, which is a textbook example of how to torture your users with an almost hilariously terrible user interface which would have been funny were it not for the fact that it is so excruciatingly painful), gearing up for open source activism (if you’re in SA and you’re into open source, please join!) and spending as much as possible free time in the beautiful surroundings.

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I’m still trying to find my way home out of wild deadline country (WDC), so I hope you don’t mind (again) that I crunch together two weeks of weekly head voices during these few days of recharging. Because the post ended up being quite long, I’ve inserted headings. Feel free to read any, all or none of the parts!

Software babies out in the real world

It’s great when that software system you’ve been designing gets used by real people in the real world. Check out this press release by the National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS): Together with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) they are building a national digital pathology database to improve pathology education nation-wide. Cool eh?!

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The reason I’m behind with blogging, is because I’m currently working on three products. One of these is already being used by real live people (!!!), and another will shortly be quite intensively interacted with by quite a large number of people, if it doesn’t melt under the load that is. The third will hopefully soon also go live in some form or another.

I might currently be at peak Django people. Peak Django!

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(Warning: This post has an extremely high backyard philosophy content. Will probably greatly offend any real philosophers, and a bunch of other people I probably have not even thought about.)

I recently became middle-aged. As part of the thank you I wrote for the many kind words people posted to my facebook wall, I made a short summary of the things I had learned over the past N years. I hope you don’t mind that I post them here as well:

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Week 31 of 2014, which was otherwise pretty uneventful except for bunches of hard work, ended with a trip up to the West Coast to go see the flowers.

YES PEOPLE SPRING IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER!

I made you a photo of this ominous looking Portal To Soooooomething:

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WELL HELLO EVERYONE!

I’m a few days late, but I did bring you this free mind trip:

On Tuesday, I had an unexpected (I somehow read over a critical paragraph in an email) but brilliant lunch at Rust en Vreede wine estate in the erudite company of three bubbly personalities. Having a bunch of vineyards like this within lunching distance is a perk of living in these parts; The superb company was just lovely serendipity.

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Up in the North, temperatures were in the mid to high twenties every day (yes, it’s the middle of Winter, and that’s how they roll in the North). Back home we had to deal with mid to high tens (sometimes in the twenties!), and then, because the houses are not built for winter and sport similar temperatures inside and outside, you resort to making a fire in yer office, because that’s how we roll!

I deliberately skipped a week, because it was one of those extremely taxing pre-vacation weeks during which I had several near-foetal-position-thumb-in-mouth-moments. Instead I’ll be writing about my vacation, with pictures, and a little bit of backyard philosophy.

This post is being written in a speeding Toyota Quantum 10-seater minibus (yes, it looks exactly like a taxi, we are currently the king of the road). Don’t worry, my co-driver has taken over. I’m not yet ready to attempt blogging whilst driving. (I do aspire.)

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I must be getting older.

During the past week, there were at least three or four occasions where someone was clearly wrong on the internet, and I dutifully started carefully crafting that brilliant corrective response which would inevitably spiral downward into the fiery depths of idiocy.

However, each time I stopped mid-answer, long before clicking the post button or sending the email, and switched to some other more valuable and less pointless activity. It was a strange feeling, but the eerie sense of having saved a bunch of time made up for it generously.

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This post is going to be really short, so I’m giving you this 80s theme song to compensate:

DON’T YOU FEEL LIKE DOING AWESOME 80s STUFF AFTER THAT?!

In week 25, I finally got around to writing that level sets blog post I’ve been warning everyone about. If you’re into that type of thing, the level set method is an interesting alternative way to represent N-dimensional surfaces evolving through space. Read all about it in Level sets: The practical 10 minute introduction.

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