The Next Step

I’ve been using Gmail Notifier for years to tell me when I have new mail. It’s nice and lightweight, and stays out of my way. A few months ago, it just stopped working and I couldn’t figure out why. I tried updating, read through a bunch of Google Support pages, and saw a couple of useless forum threads on the subject, to no avail. So I left it alone, hoping the problem would solve itself. It didn’t.

Just today, though, I stumbled on this little gem: A patch that allows the Notifier to work if you’ve checked the “Always use https” setting in Gmail (which, incidentally, you absolutely should). Just install the patch and your Gmail Notifier will work again. I don’t know why Google doesn’t mention this on the download page for Notifier or why they don’t just build this functionality into a new release. Anyway, I know I wasn’t the only one to have this problem so I thought I’d share my knowledge.

I lied. Sorry.

http://www.codershole.com/idump.php

A while back, I used ForecastFox in my browser so that I wouldn’t have to click a bookmark every time I wanted to know what the weather was going to be like tomorrow or what it was like outside at the time. And it was good. But then one day, ForecastFox switched to using Accuweather for its weather data instead of The Weather Channel. I can’t quite put a finger on it, but something about Accuweather just bugs me. Maybe it’s their hideous radar maps? In any case, I uninstalled it and have been living with a *shudder* bookmark to NOAA ever since. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that the folks over at The Weather Channel apparently released a Firefox plugin of their own three years ago or so. Why didn’t anyone tell me? It’s got all the options of ForecastFox, detailed point forecasts, and pretty radar maps. My browser is happy to finally know the weather again.

I’ve made a decision this semester that I want to try to keep all my notes in digital form, which has a number of advantages: I can search them much more easily, I don’t have to carry around a bunch of notebooks, and it makes it easy for me to keep a copy of my homework even after I pass it in. It also makes them easy to archive and back up.

This was working nicely for me until I went to do my first assignment for Network Fundamentals, my only class this semester with a fair amount of math in it. There isn’t any calculus, certainly nothing beyond some algebra, summations, and basic statistical method, at least so far. I sat down to take a crack at it and realized in about five seconds that my plain-text methods were not going to work nicely. It’s very hard to keep your thought process going without being able to see equations written out in familiar symbols and layouts. For summations especially, plain text fails miserably.

So I conceded that I would have to use something that could lay out problems in more readable formats. My first instinct was to reach for Microsoft Word, which I knew to have an equation editor that I had never used before. After installing it, I set about trying to set up my equation. After about twenty minutes of fooling with the toolbar (that conveniently has no words on it), I had managed to set up something resembling a fraction with summations on both the top and bottom. I was finally ready to begin to solve the problem, when I realized that I would have to go through that process again for each step through the solution. Not only that, but I had had to invest so much attention and energy into formatting the formula that I forgotten what the original problem even was!

The tool was getting in my way. How can I focus on the math problem when I have to spend so much of my energy just to write down one step? As it turns out, I gave up on Word and went back to good old pencil and paper. The number of digital advantages I lose by doing that pains me, but I just couldn’t see any other efficient way of solving the problems. The freedom and familiarity of the pencil (and eraser!) let me focus on the problem at hand, rather than the pencil itself.

This problem interests me particularly, as someone who has always been into math and who chose to go into programming. To write my homework on a sheet of paper means to have only one copy, which I have to pass in. Of course, I can photocopy it if I don’t mind spending a few cents or using the ink. But as a programmer, this strikes me as a violation of the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle. My data should be in one place and one place only so that if I change it once, all its representations change. This, to me, is one of the major disadvantages of paper.

This made me think about all the other computer programs I’ve ever tried to do math on. To me, all merely supplemented pencil and paper, never replaced it. Can we ever have a math program that allows that level of free thinking? I can imagine that tablet PCs may be able to reach that level, but they are a long way from general adoption. Data would be difficult to edit without that very specialized hardware and, in any case, your data would be no more than some kind of image file, gaining you none of the searching advantages of digital text, nor much (if anything) in the way of automated calculations.

The bottom line is that, while there are a lot of programs out there that are good for displaying finished calculations, I’ve yet to find one that is as good as pencil and paper for actually doing math.