A very dreary day here in Boston, and rather quiet. The local universities are closed because of the potential, largely unrealized, for heavy snow. But it makes for a welcome and unexpected holiday feeling.
Screen shot #2
To pass the time, I have been working with my friend on our as yet unnamed and undisclosed app. And he, I must say, is working from an undisclosed location. Better for concentration, he says. Anyway, we are supposed to meet with friends tonight at the local bar. It will be good to get out of the house after a day inside with the cat and the computer. And I must stay true to my vow: no coding after sundown!
Our aim with this app is (a) to have some fun, (b) to make beautiful images, (c) make a little money, in roughly that order. With (a) we have succeeded, and we think (b) is realistic. About (c) … well, um, if it pays for a few good books, that will be some satisfaction. A trip to warm place would be even better!
We will reveal the not so secret sauce that makes the app work at our forthcoming launch event. Suffice to say that an essential ingredient is a bit of mathematics. Rather simple mathematics, in fact. My friend and I argue about where the beauty in all this really lies. Let us stipulate, for the sake of argument, that this image, or some other image produced by the app, is a thing of beauty. Now the image depends on the code, and the code on the mathematics. So if beauty is in the image, is it not also in the code, and therefore also in the mathematics? This is clearly a deep philosophical question. Perhaps we can resolve it tonight at the bar in our weekly “symposium.” (Inside joke: my more learned friends tell me that a symposium is derived from Greek sym = together and pinein = to drink. Plato and his friends knew a good thing when they saw it!)
As for our product launch, I do hope that we manage to do it in the too far distant future. For me the perfect has always been the enemy of the good, or at least of the satisfactory. I am always driven to make the code as clean, elegant, even beautiful as I can, even though it will likely never be seen by more than two sets of eyes. Alas, I did spend a large part of today refactoring the code so as to achieve just these lofty aims. It makes no difference to the user, but somehow it makes me feel happier. I guess that is justification enough.
Well, I have produced more text than needed to frame the image, which was really the whole point. Time to do something different for a while!
HH
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