My parents both work in advertising photography. My father is one of the most famous commercial photographers in the country. My mother manages the business. They started from practically nothing and built a very successful business. Their partnership works. My father is passionate about his work and enjoys creating beautiful images. My mother makes sure that the company runs smoothly.

My father will probably take pictures until it is physically impossible to do so. I don't think he'll willingly retire. My mother, on the other hand, does the behind-the-scenes work so that my father can pursue his dream. She looks forward to a quiet retirement and time to read, write, knit, think, dream... Still, as long as my father wants to shoot, she'll be there keeping the company running. I think that's really wonderful of her, although I wish she could pursue her dreams more often. I think she really enjoys travelling, reading poems, and seeing beautiful landscapes.

I am the youngest of three children. Our house has always been part of the office, so my sisters and I grew up watching them work. Our passions lie elsewhere. Ching used to be an IT manager at Proctor and Gamble before transferring to HP because of the company move. Kathy's interested in photography, but is thinking of being a flight attendant. I really love teaching.

Kathy is the most likely successor to the business, but she doesn't really see herself doing advertising photography right now. We'd rather see the employees inherit the business because great business requires great passion. G-nie looks like she'll do a great job, and she's learned a lot from my father. My mom will be hard to replace, though.

We never felt pressured to join the family business. Our parents are open about the different paths we want to take. Sometimes, though, I worry about what will happen when the torch must be passed. I don't want to see Adphoto dissolve because there are so many people who have worked there almost all their lives, and I just can't imagine them looking for work anywhere else. I know, however, that I'm ill-suited for the job - at least if I want to pursue my own dreams.

Stuff to think about.

Another major hack for this month would be the collection of at least 25 code-reading exercises covering basic Java syntax. This will help students practice their code reading abilities and test their understanding of Java syntax. These should be arranged by topic and should cover variables, expressions, conditionals, loops, and Boolean logic.

I will finish at least one major hack per month. This month's special is vc-arch.el, which for some reason does not seem available on the Net. I have sketches of it up at ../emacs/emacs-wiki/vc-arch.el. I feel that if nothing else, at least I'll have a mode that makes it easier for me to manage my planner work.

Getting a diff through C-x v = already works. I want to be able to commit my changes with a quick C-x v v. If more than one file has been modified, I want a dired-like buffer displayed so that I can select which files to commit.

../emacs/emacs-wiki/emacs-wiki-id.el contains a first attempt at an ID system for emacs-wiki and indeed is quite nice. Following IDs works. I'll figure out how to automatically add, create, remove, yadayada them soon.

Playing on my strengths as all-around puzzler-out of weird software, perhaps I should explore software archaeology and code reading a bit more. The http://www.spinellis.gr/codereading/index.html looks like exactly my kind of book, and I think it's worth getting. I will need to save up for it, though. Addison Wesley, 2003. ISBN 0-201-79940-5.

google:code+reading

{{1:2004.01.02,ComputerScienceEducationSites}}

In fit of insanity, searched for sites that used emacs-wiki. Quite a list.

- http://www.self-core.org/~kaoru-k/wiki/EmacsWiki.html - http://larve.net/people/hugo/2003/scratchpad/EmacsWiki.html (has RSS) - http://www.oranda.demon.co.uk/planner/EmacsWiki.html (uses planner) - http://members.iinet.net.au/~mtriggs/emacs-wiki.html (has a gallery) - http://gohome.org/teranisi/EmacsWiki.html (has recent changes) - http://www.gohome.org/teranisi/news/ (hey, nice linking) - http://www.naney.org/personal/diary/2002/04/c.html#200204224 (like planner, but several days on a page) - http://senzai07.poly.kit.jp/~iwata/EmacsWiki.html (uses the emacs-wiki-rss module, I think) - http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-SanJose/7474/EmacsWiki.html (nice index) - http://www.iris.dti.ne.jp/~yoshimik/EmacsWiki.html - http://homepage.mac.com/yenlung/WebWiki/EmacsWiki.html - http://www.apollostar.com/k-ishii/EmacsWiki.html - http://db.cs.hit.edu.cn/people/WangChunyu/wiki (zope, also) - http://verify.stanford.edu/satyaki/emacs/EmacsWikiTricks.html (fontlocking) - http://verify.stanford.edu/satyaki/backpacking/EmacsWikiAlbumCreation.html (album) - http://satosan.jp/EmacsWiki.html (looks like some planner, too, but very old version) - http://tkskkc.at.infoseek.co.jp/WebWiki/emacs-wiki.htm - http://senzai07.poly.kit.ac.jp/~iwata/ChalowForEmacsWiki.html (changelog on the web) - http://gnufans.net/~deego/DeegoWiki/WikiIndex.html (deego) - http://www.frankgerhardt.com/WikiIndex.html (indexed by date) - http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~baier/WebWiki/Public/WikiIndex.html - http://www.archi.is.tohoku.ac.jp/people/yusuke/Emacs-wiki.html (planner and remember, but some old workarounds) - http://mux03.tdiary.net/20031206.html (nonplanner diary with headlines on the side, but actually running on tdiary not emacs-wiki) - http://air.zive.net/emacs-wiki/EmacsWiki.html - http://www.biostat.umn.edu/~nali/AboutThisSite.html (source link, good idea) - http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home5/PG04878518/EmacsTools.html (grid computing) - http://www.self-core.org/~kaoru-k/wiki/EmacsWiki.html (planner, looks old style and custom) - http://www.teria.com/~koseki/emacswiki/EmacsWiki.html - http://www.xatax.de/phobos/WelcomePage.html - http://aadis.de/wiki/PageIndex (referers, index, search) - http://supermon.sourceforge.net/ (on sf for work) - http://www.tc.bham.ac.uk/~matt/WikiIndex.html - http://home.earthlink.net/~rdtietjen/Hypersphere/BackLinks.html#wikiweb (hmm, backlinks might be fun) - http://ne.cs.uec.ac.jp/~miya/WebWiki/WikiIndex.html (simple) - http://www.8ung.at/rotty/Software.html (planner) - http://www.ceres.dti.ne.jp/~george/jdiaryA21001.html#2002100701 (brief mention) - http://www.apollostar.com/k-ishii/TableOfContents.html (internationalized links, too) - http://saslab.is.titech.ac.jp/~nakaya/WikiIndex.html - http://tao.uab.es/jao/ - just one page - http://www.cs.unc.edu/~lastra/Courses/Verilog/talk/html/WebLinks.html (for courses) - http://kind.cs.kun.nl/~kiniry/Wiki/WikiIndex.html (planner custom) - http://www.contactor.se/~matsl/WikiIndex.html - http://viz.aset.psu.edu/ga5in/WikiIndex.html - http://www.nongnu.org/xmakemol/WikiIndex.html - http://dev.gentoo.org/~mkennedy/WikiIndex.html - http://www.ipd.bth.se/mhy/KB/WikiIndex.html - http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~bwaters/Wiki/WikiIndex.html (planner) - http://www.daimi.au.dk/~terryp/WikiIndex.html - http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/6422/WikiIndex.html - http://www.1729.com/wiki/WikiIndex.html (not sure) - http://elektrubadur.se/WikiIndex.html - http://home.t-online.de/home/c.ehbrecht/WebWiki/WikiIndex.html - http://alcor.concordia.ca/~peter/WikiIndex.html - http://www.ime.usp.br/~renato/WikiIndex.html - http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/roth/WikiIndex.html - http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-PaloAlto/7043/WikiIndex.html - http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/hllu/WikiIndex.html - http://www004.upp.so-net.ne.jp/nagae-r/WikiIndex.html (diary file)

Google for <nop>WikiIndex and find many, many more. <nop> Notes

- http://www.me.ics.saitama-u.ac.jp/~hira/emacs/howm/ has some ideas for guids and grep. - http://d.hatena.ne.jp/tengsama/20030704 mentioned emacs-wiki

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/SiteMap

Didn't know there was something like this - or that we now enjoy near links in oddmuse. What a cute feature!

in reaction to http://www.sfu.ca/~gswamina/BlogsAreDead.html

I've had a blog for roughly a year and a half now, and I think I'm pretty much settling into the routine. Reading Ganesh's BlogsAreDead post, I think about how I use Emacs to keep track of my notes.

<blockquote>Linearity - Blogs are linear, ie usually in chronological order. My knowledge/experience is non-linear (fortunately). There is an obvious mismatch here. I don't see how I can write coherently about recursive functions, pipelines, privacy and chicks in the same post.</blockquote>

I split this up into several remember-to-planner-plan-page-dwim posts, usually cross-linking them with a topic page.

<blockquote>Lack of time - Everybody seems to be bringing this up. I don't post very often, but when I do, they are long ones. If you've noticed, my titles are usually one or two words - "Skills", "04-1 Registered", "Talks", "Its Tuesday", $(rand dict). Not very descriptive. Often, I remember writing about something, but not able to track it down. Sad, really.</blockquote>

My titles aren't all that descriptive either, but that's what M-x planner-search-notes in planner-experimental.el is for. And yes, I really hate it if I know I blogged about something but I can't remember how to bring it up.

<blockquote>Non-conformance to standards - When you put together an entry, do you check if it confirms to W3C standards every time ? Honestly, that's insane. A standard transformation mapping will make life so much easier. I now face a problem, how do I convert my old entries ? I seem to have used three to four different ways to post my code, all of them every inelegant, except for the last.</blockquote>

I work with plain text.

<blockquote>Immature - Blogging software is not powerful enough. What if I want to quote an email message, or a news thread ? Or simple syntax highlighting ? Or even on the fly spell checking (known as flyspell-mode in emacs, BTW). Couple this with my non-descriptive titles, how do I cross reference things ?</blockquote>

Emacs is wonderful!

<blockquote>Not cool - Blogs aren't cool anymore, since every kid happens to have his own. When you come across somebody's blog which appears to be very interesting, do you take the time to read through his archives ? Ofcourse not. More bit bricks.</blockquote>

I often read through other people's archives. I hope that the cross-references with plan pages make it easier for people to see related stuff, but I plan to have some kind of search someday.

<blockquote>Stagnant - "The only thing that is constant is change." Spring->Summer->Fall, so many things change around you. About 28.5% (eh !) of your content is stale. Your views on life constantly change (you may deny it). Going back and changing stuff just doesn't make sense when your entries are chronological.</blockquote>

I frequently go back and post updates. I also tend to reorganize the plan pages fairly often, although that does mean semi-broken day links. (Must get those GUIDs up and running!)

Emacs is way cool.

http://www.sfu.ca/~gswamina/EmacsWikiPatches.html . Check this out sometime and steal all the cool ideas (with appropriate credit, of course). ;)

AU: Basser Department of Computer Science, The University of Sydney

- Problem-Based Learning for Foundation Computer Science Courses - Mike Barg, Alan Fekete, Tony Greening, Owen Hollands, Judy Kay, and Jeffrey H. Kingston - Kathryn Crawford, SMITE Research Unit, Faculty of Education