Always looking for something to do which isn’t the thing I’m supposed to be doing, I drew a picture this morning, which I thought I might post here, since the original data is probably going to become unusable with the next change I make to JujuSketch. The picture is loosely based on the idea of a character called Jenny Everywhere, an "open source" character mentioned on Ben’s weblog. [my picture does not look anything like it should, but is at least wearing goggles for some reason - also I drew it before I saw the official imagery]. The closest I can come to preserving this image is to export it to SVG format, a one way and slightly lossy process. Click on the image to view the SVG file (about 150K).

This is a real pain about writing software… you are always tempted to try out the damn stuff, and when you do, you are probably using some flakey intermediate version with a barely defined file format. Actually this is probably a broad generalization, since I think I am the only person I know who both writes and uses his own software… so I’m talking about me, not you, and personally I do this kind of thing all the time. Poor old … I can’t count the number of promising universes that have disappeared without a trace as I ruthlessly modify file formats without bothering to add backwards compatibility (after all, since the thing isn’t yet public it’s only my own universes that die).

Furthermore, it’s not just data that suffers from [this] programmer[’s] neglect; code can vanish as well, although the exact process whereby this happens is hard to pin down. Alls I knows is: good features in software can actually disappear if you don’t pay attention to them. An example is a light sourcing technique I once created to simulate brushed metal. It worked pretty well, but that was years ago, and in the time intervening, it seems that the code just got squeezed out! I think I probably "temporarily" disabled it because of some new feature I was adding, which turned out to be incompatible with the way I was doing it, and then I just never got around to re-implementing it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2003 at 12:20 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.