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Creativity, craftsmanship, and pixies (I)
Today I began Yet Another Pixie.
I'm not going to explain "pixies." I'm trying to train everyone to look at the Glossolalia when I use some peculiar personal reference like that. (And if you see one I've missed, let me know so I can add it.)
The thing is, there are a lot of pixies you don't ever see. Over on impudence.com, there's something called Allegory, which takes the same search and plugs it into various search engines - makes research handy. A little like Metacrawler but it has a different syntax for doing searches.
I'm working on something called Talisman which automatically checks a list of websites to see how fresh they are - whether they've been updated, whether they're still responding, et cetera. Again, there's already a service that does this, but it doesn't do it exactly the way I want.
Many of my pixies are born of that reason - I need to do something, and I want to do it exactly thus and so.
Others are born because we Programming Types like conservation of energy - we get bored with doing the same repetitive, tedious task more than five times, so we automate it. Hence Sfoglio and Colette, the journal-making pixies. No, keeping a journal isn't tedious; making the HTML changes on all the affected pages is.
And some are born to help me manage information glut. These pages got a search engine the other day, did you know that? You probably didn't notice. But you'll find it, when you need to look for it. Stay Tuned got one too. And Ivy got an upgrade, because actually all of these little search engines are the same pixie, working under multiple aliases, where it uses a different set of options depending on which name you call it by. Conservation of energy again.
I have a pixie to give me a list of email addresses and web pages for my Aether friends. I keep that one private, for obvious reasons. Every so often I dump the address book from my email program out into a file; the pixie knows how to read it.
And the current pixie is - well, it's sort of a web scratch pad. See, I fill pieces of paper with little jottings, notes, URLs, and other miscellany. The problem is, when I actually need one of those scribblings, it turns out to be at wherever I'm not. If I'm at home, it's on the pad at the office, and vice versa.
And I hate throwing out these jottings until I'm sure I won't need them anymore. So my desk is littered with pieces of old paper that I'm keeping around because of one crucial item somewhere on the page - assuming I can remember what that item was. I've lost a lot of phone numbers this way.
I tried carrying a little book with me to jot these things down. No dice. It's hard to write in, a pain to carry, you can't paste URLs and things into it directly, and I only need the information when I'm at the computer anyway.
No, a web solution is the way to go. So I'm writing a new pixie, to go with all the message boards and search engines I've cooked up over the last three years. I had never written a CGI before starting these web sites. In fact, I'd never used Perl before.
I mention this not to give you hope that you can learn this craft (although you can; it's easy), nor to convince you that there are people out there more insane than you are (although that's probably true as well) ... I mention it because of the way my co-workers think of me, and the ramifications of that for creativity and skill assessment in general.
You see, many of my co-workers are convinced that I can't write code worth a happy damn. They don't see my CGIs ... most of those I do on my own time ... and I don't think they'd be impressed if they did see them.
I don't really like working in C much (in a C-heavy shop) and I'm a relative newcomer to Unix work (in a Unix-heavy shop); I don't care for new development in protocol handling and Kerberos tickets and other arcana which fascinate them. I never took an algorythms class in my life. In fact, I've never completed a college-level computer science class in my life. I have no degree, and I definitely don't have a degree from the Institvte ... unlike most of them.
On the other hand, I can write a rudimentary search engine in Perl in an afternoon. And maybe they could too, but the point is, if I can do that, I'm not incompetent.
I'm just not competent in a way they have any respect for. And I suppose I can sympathize with that, because in the next entry I'm going to talk about art and commit the same sins myself.
© Columbine
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