Book Reviews [2]

I’ve read some more since my last book-related post, though not as much as I’d have liked. First the ones without any redeemable quality. I’m not even going to upload cover pictures for these, try and avoid them if you can at all:

• Kathy Reichs; Flash and Bones (typical popular tripe, happens to be a No. 1 best seller)
• Jeff Abbott; Cut and Run (typical popular tripe, not a best seller per se, but certainly written by an author who wrote other best sellers)
• Michael Ridpath; 66° North (typical popular tripe feeding on wide-spread antipathy in the wake of the financial crisis, books fails miserably to deliver on tagline “In Iceland, revenge is best served at arctic temperatures…”)
• Ruth Rendell; Not in the Flesh (I’m increasingly annoyed by the tendency in modern detective stories and tv series to let the murderer kill everyone before the detective in charge finally arrests the one remaining suspect on account of all the others being dead, put some frikkin’ thought into it already and solve the case before 4 more people die).
• Robert Ludlum; Bourne Trilogy (typical popular tripe, highly repetitive writing. All of them international best sellers obviously) I’m amazed how the movies have absolutely nothing in common with the book apart from a few character names).
• Seth Godin; Linchpin (Self help bunkum, normally I quite like Godins books, but this one was hogwash).

Now for the middling to good stuff, in no particular order.

Feature creep and world flags

At this point I’m well overdue releasing the next version of Grasshopper. I’m replacing the code editors in the VB & C# components which is proving to be a much bigger job than expected. In the meantime —to stay sane— I’m doing small tangential projects. One of which is adding some basic level of cultural awareness to formatting.

Recently someone ran into the problem that Grasshopper displays all numbers using points as decimal symbols. In Holland commas are used to indicate the transition from the integer part of a number to the decimal part and points are used as thousand group separators, giving you numbers like 1.000,5, or one-thousand-and-one-half. In English locales of course it’s the other way around, resulting in 1,000.5

Dates are also formatted differently in different cultures, the Americans stupidly putting the month in front of the day rather than the correct way around. The upshot is that when you get 3/5/2013 you have no idea whether it’s supposed to be the third of May or the fifth of March.

Finally, since different languages use different alphabets, the sorting of text is also locale dependant.  Does A come before or after Ä, Ã and Å? Languages which use these exotic flavours of A probably have strong opinions on which one comes first, but a language which doesn’t might not care. A is considered lower than Æ in English, but higher than Æ in Danish.

So the obvious solution was to add an extra input to the String Format and String Sort components in Grasshopper that allows the user to specify a culture. The lazy approach would be to just use an integer input and require users enter the correct LCID, but that would be a very geeky and unfriendly thing to do. A somewhat better option would be to ask for a string which describes the culture people wish to use (i.e. “Dutch”, “Holland”, “Netherlands” or “Nederlands”). But I dislike using one type of data to represent another. There’s only a limited amount of predefined cultures in the .NET framework and there are many strings and integers which would not identify a valid culture.

So I decided to add a Culture data type to Grasshopper and then of course a Culture parameter. Two more hours of typing and icon  design. Then we had to consolidate the culture codes and any words people might reasonably use to describe them into a database. Luckily I was able to shift that work to K, but it adds up to another couple of hours. Next we’ll have to aggregate all the cultures into categories so that people can quickly find them in a menu-structure. So far we’re thinking of grouping them by language family (Germanic, Latin, Slavic etc.) and additionally by continent. That’ll take another 3 hours at least. Then of course when you display a couple of dozen languages in a menu dropdown it would help if they had a flag in front of them so it’s easier to find what you’re looking for. That’s another 5 hours of drawing 20×20 pixel abstractions of the flags of the world (note that some countries have been omitted as they do not have their own predefined formatting and sorting rules).

 

How many do you know?

I was shocked how many flags have patently offensive colour palettes. The sheer number of nations that thought it prudent to have adjacent areas of red and green is staggering. Also a sense of style seems to be utterly disassociated geographically and culturally. The best flags are clearly Switzerland , Trinidad , Albania  and Japan  while the worst ones are Sami  (which looks like the amateurish logo for a day-care centre) and Bosnia  (which looks like it should be the business card for the European Bank).

It seems like a lot of work for adding an input to two components, but I’d like to think Grasshopper is partly what it is today precisely because I’m the sort of person who doesn’t want his users to enter LCID codes.

My life from before the wave function collapse

Once upon a time I was an Architecture and Urbanism student at TUDelft. By the second year it was obvious I was never going to be a great architect so instead I started developing a parallel skill-set that at the time was rather new and exciting; programming. My third year was a disaster as all the time and effort that was supposed to be spend on reading books about globalization and monument and restoration law was instead spend on learning how to write RhinoScript. Nobody was teaching programming in 2003 at the Bouwkunde faculty, at least not in any meaningful fashion.

When it was time to pick a graduation topic I decided to try and combine programming with Urbanism, which was a bit of a tall order since both my programming and Urbanism skills were pretty much crap. Still, I found a teacher who was happy to supervise and spend the better part of two years locked in my room typing away on a thesis text + software. Eventually it all went sour when the faculty demanded I do a load of preliminary work as I had deviated from the standard track while I was almost ready with the thesis as a whole. Not having the stomach for this sort of bureaucratic arm-wrestling I decided to leave TUDelft and start working for Robert McNeel & Associates (initially in Andy leBihan’s Finland based office) instead. Thus began my career in software development and thus ended my career in Architecture.

Yesterday while trawling through an old backup folder I found the semi-finished thesis. It has managed to survive two laptop hard disc crashes and just in case it won’t survive the third, here it is.