Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"It's not often you get to play an entire planet as a percussion instrument." -- a character I've forgotten the name of, in the science fiction comic strip Freefall by Mark Stanley, 2005-11-16

Got my head quite thoroughly stuck in a computer problem/project and lost track of a) time, b) my own fatigue level, c) the temperature, d) my own hunger. Yah, the short translation is that I was "in hack mode", but the way my body is, that's gonna cost me later. And there was some place else I'd really intended to be today. Oops.

But I've got a spiffy new system for handling sheet music for pick-up bands in the future, I learned more about 'make' than I'd gotten around to before, and it's commented.

Uh huh, years and years of C programming, and I never bothered with more than the bare basics of 'make' (there was more that I needed to learn to understand what was going wrong with other folks' makefiles when I tried to port things, than I ever used in a makefile of my own), and it's managing sheet music that finally got me to go read the darned tutorial and find out what all else it could do for me. ohiblather recently asked who among her readers considers themselves "artsy/tech hybrids", and to which side of that we think we lean. ( Followup -- a whole lot of folks, of course.)) I've no clue which I'm more of, but today was about geek-in-service-to-art. Sort of. There was also that old gut-level pleasure at Building Tools, and Making Things Work, and Bending Computers To My Will. Now to resist creature feep and tear my head out of the code. (It's not quite drag-and-drop yet ... it can be even more convenient ... I could -- argh! No, no, no. Later.)

Of course, this system is a bit of art that I won't have much chance to show off. It's a little task-specialized, and I'll probably be the only one who ever uses it. But in the back of my brain, I'm already looking for ways to generalize this ...

(One of the things I said in my reply to Debbie was that I'd never really thought about how making art resembled programming, but I'd often noticed how programming felt like Making Art. Well, when you're doing it right, it's not so much "feels like" as "is". Hmm. That's for programmers in general, not just hackers, right? Or is it part of the defining character of hackerdom? My guess is that it's true for other programmers as well, but I don't actually know.)