Tuesday, September 15, 2009
The predator is an optimist
Evolution almost requires that predators be optimists, and explorers. How else could they survive? This insight occurred to me after watching some nature show that had a lion of some sort chasing prey -- and failing in the attempt... only to try again, and again, until successful. The lion, by nature, must persevere or die. They must look forward to success and plan for success, even if they often fail.
This observation offers an explaination for human's possession of an optimistic nature. Often our optimism is completely unfounded, but it is our nature to be optimistic, because failure is an option, but continuous failure is not.... If at first you don't succeed, try, try again... look on the bright side.... etc.
Monday, September 14, 2009
QVCS-Enterprise 2.1.21 bug fix update now available
I just uploaded a maintenance release for QVCS-Enterprise. It fixes several problems that have turned up since the 2.1.20.2 release described here.
The one new feature in this release provides a rudimentary hilighting of the changes on a 'replacement' line in the built-in visual compare tool. I say rudimentary because the algorithm for finding the beginning and ending of the highlight region is as simple as it gets: it compares the two lines character by character and begins the highlighting at the first characters that differ. The end of the highlight region is determined in a similarly simple way -- it starts at the end of each respective replacement line and defines the end of the highlight region to be the last matching character of each respective line. The goal is to provide some simple visual queue so your eye is drawn to where on the replacement line the lines differ. It usually works in a useful way, but it's not bullet proof and seems to occasionally produce inaccurate highlighting.... but it's better than nothing.
On a separate note, I'm continuing to make slow progress on what I'm thinking will be either the 2.2 or 3.0 release of the Enterprise product. The end is still a number of months away -- as in, the end is not yet in sight.
