Do, or do not.

Over time I've come to terms with the fact that I kind of don't look at the world the same way most people do. Back in grade school, there was a question on a test that asked "What do you need to bake a cake?", and I answered "A Birthday". The answer was sadly marked incorrect.

People make strange remarks towards me, from time to time. They're not strange in the sense that they're remarks normal people wouldn't ordinarily make, but more in the sense that they don't make any particular sense given the way my brain works.

Like, someone might say "You biked up a 4000 foot climb? That must have been very difficult." or "I don't get how you can understand all that math, it's really hard".

The fundamental problem is that I let go of the whole concept of "hard" or "difficult" a long time ago. When people say something is hard, all they're really doing is giving themselves an excuse to fail without feeling too bad about it. "It's OK if I give up, because it's hard".

That shit doesn't fly with me.

I don't put tasks into buckets labeled "hard" and "easy". For me, there is only "things I've already demonstrated, either directly or indirectly, that I'm capable of" and "things I have not yet successfully managed to do".

Much like what the title of this post alludes to, when Yoda told Luke "do, or do not, there is no try", he wasn't trying to be deep and metaphorical. He was trying to tell Luke that he was being a whiny shit and just making excuses for not wanting to succeed at doing what he was fully capable of doing.

I think it probably makes the most sense in hindsight. When you look back on a "hard" task, after having completed it, what are you left with? You are still intact as a person, essentially the same as before you started, and you have gained a completed task. What sense does it then make to categorize it as "hard"?

In short: stop giving yourself excuses to fail.

That not so fresh feeling

So last night I decided that I had enough of Safari crashing randomly, and dying completely when I tried to upgrade it. I knew that somewhere along the line something had gone wrong with my system, and it was time to admit that the prudent thing to do was to wipe the system and install a fresh copy of Lion.

Now I had basically been running the same OS install since 2007, which was originally a (short lived) install of Tiger, followed by Leopard once it was released that fall, then Snow Leopard and finally Lion this year. People will say "oh, well, you really should do a fresh install when a new OS comes out, so that..." and then their train of thought goes off into some cargo-cult chicken-bone-rune casting mumbo jumbo, or at least the technological equivalent thereof.

The thing is, so long as the filesystem itself isn't corrupted, there should be no difference between a freshly installed system and one that had been upgraded from a previous install, no matter how long ago that install was performed. Any deviation therein is nothing less than a failure on the part of the developers, in this case Apple's OS division. And so, to Apple's MacOS release packaging team, I have one thing to say: Son, I am disappoint.

But my disappointment runs deeper than that. You see, on windows there exists a little known utility called "SFC", which stands for "System File Checker". As the name implies, it runs a checksum over all (or most) of the important system files and can replace any that deviate from expectations. As far as I can tell, though, there's no equivalent to this on MacOS X.

The sad thing is it would be dead simple to integrate into Disk Utility. There's already a framework in place, the ever so lovely "repair permissions" routine that seems to be the first line of action in every OS X tech support script. It would, in theory, be quite simple to extend this to record and verify checksums on all the vital files, and then, at the very least, indicate which files are damaged if not replace them automatically.


In the mean time, though, I'm at least glad that nuking the drive from orbit, reinstalling, and migrating the data, apps and settings back from my time machine drive is at least a reasonably seamless process.

Jet Airliners, Tractor Pulls, and Math

Recently a friend of mine made a post about the AF-447 crash and some of the human factors involved. One of the things he noted was that the thrust levers were not designed to indicate, by their position, the current thrust setting of the engines they controlled. At first glance, this seems an odd decision, but there is indeed a method to the madness.

Before we dive into that method, we first need to take a little detour through the deliciously redneck world of competitive tractor pulling. Yes, you read that right, tractor pulling...

The failure of 3D

It seems like not a year can pass without half a dozen people trying to reinvent the failure of 3D computer interfaces, and it's the same story every time: Some sunless nerd watches a downloaded copy of Minority Report in their cavement, and as soon as they see the computers they jump up and shout "This is UNIX, I know this!" before rushing to their computer and loosing yet another half-baked UI abomination upon the world.

Tycho at Penny Arcade summed it up well at the end of this rant about Playstation Home:

This is the terrible secret that roils beneath their false universe: it is nothing more than a cumbersome menu, a rampart over which you must hoist yourself to accomplish the most basic tasks.

Next year I'm sure someone will do it all over again...