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Cottage Computer Programming

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111 pointsjustlearning35 comments

I've had the pleasure of meeting Paul a couple of times -- he gave a presentation to our local Linux User group and attended a few meetings. He's a very interesting guy, here is his main page: http://www.arachnoid.com/index.html check out his yearly boat trips to Alaska, and his Java based HTML editor.

Also note that the article is very old :)

Oh wow, thank you for pointing out the link. I used to use Arachnophilia and thought CareWare was a fantastic concept.

I can't help but feel a tinge of enlightenment from reading his articles. Maybe not enlightenment, maybe....reinforcement. Thank you so much for posting this link.

I've used Arachnophilia. Its a great editor. Was one of the first source code editors when I started moving away from the basic M$ editors :)

I always installed AboutTime sntp client on any Windows box. Even XP. http://www.arachnoid.com/abouttime/

You don't need to live out in the middle of nowhere by yourself to live a cheap lifestyle which affords lots of free time (to code, garden, design, etc). If you replace log cabin with Natural Building [1] and expensive air conditioning and heating with smart design [2], you can build a cheap, sustainable home for very cheap. A group of us is working on building a development of this style only a short bike ride away from Bloomington, IN - close enough to easily/cheaply get into town and alleviate boredom - all to the tune of less than $100/mo over 15-30 yrs or $10-20k down. btown cooperative living at gmail if you are interested.

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_building

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_cooling

I wanted to open some dialog with you about this, but I believe your email address might be incorrect or there was an issue with how I converted it that I can't find. Care to send me a message?

just sent you a message, and the correct email is: btown cooperative village at gmail, with dots between those words. Sorry about the typo above - it looks like I can't edit it any more.

Just letting you know, I don't think the dots in gmail addresses are required. You can place them anywhere in your address and it will still get to you. Handy way to sort your inbox bases on who used which version of your email address.

Hello dwiel, I did something sort-of like this about 12 years ago. My wife and I sold our house in San Diego and moved to the mountains in Central Arizona. Definitely lower cost of living. We bought a small, very well insulated house, and except for travel (for fun) and health insurance, our living expenses are very low. We find our fun in hanging with friends, cooking, hiking, etc.

Living away from large cities == great life style. Highly recommended.

Isn't the land bellow the expensive part of housing? Anything a short bicycle ride away from a major town is still in town.

The land below is the expensive part of housing in a city. Here in Bloomington, land just outside the city limits goes for around $10k/acre. Your traditional 2-3 bedroom family home will easily cost $100k.

As for a bike ride away being in town, that was my point. "You don't need to go to the middle of nowhere to live cheap." If you were referring to when I said a short ride into town, I meant going through the suburbs and into the downtown where people go and have fun here. Sorry for the confusion. Its interesting how different the definition of town/city change from place to place.

There's a lot of talk these days about how the individual cottage programmer is on the way out. I don't think so, even though a team of cooperating programmers is in principle a better arrangement. My doubt springs from the fact that the best of existing programs are the product of one, at most two individuals...

Does this mean that there's hope for those of us that hate programming with other people, despite pg's insistence that we need to have a cofounder?

Cofound with a suit. Don't let her look at your code. Don't look at her marketing.

It'd be pretty interesting to do this today. Internet access would negate a lot of the benefits of hermitage, in some respects. But it's a super romantic ideal - and one I [and it seems others] can definitely relate to. A big part of this story is that Lutus didn't go out to the wilderness to work on software, but rather, fell into it through curiosity and excitement over some novel new form of technology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lutus

Between 1988 and 1991 Lutus sailed solo around the world in a 31-foot sailboat. WOW!!

Nearly a decade ago, Arachnophilia 4.0 eased me into web design, which was my first stepping stone to web programming (good move on my part: I'm rubbish at design).

His CareWare philosophy introduced me to free software in a way that really resonated with me; and his well-argued antipathy toward Microsoft got me re-thinking what it means to use - and depend on - closed, proprietary technologies.

Finally, though I'm at best a mediocre, self-taught programmer, his sheer creativity and productiveness over the years has inspired me to create and produce in my own turn.

I have never met or even corresponded with him, but I owe him a large debt of gratitude for helping to shape the programmer I have become.

With the proliferation of wireless internet solutions(at least in Canada), working from some remote location never being easier than now. The land up north is cheap , wind turbine is less than 1000$ so enough to power light and computers.I keep coming to that idea over and over again :) The only thing that stops me are mosquitoes ....

Apparently you can build an immunity to mosquito bites over time. I have not confirmed this with my personal experience...

Well , based on research articles I've read , mosquitoes are attracted to more stressed people or more precisely to the chemicals that the stressed person produces. Living a calm life in the outdoors will definitely reduce the stress levels, so I guess it just takes some time to become invisible to mosquitos.

I'm struck by his mention of a middle ground, the idea of relative calm in a small town. This is a lot of what I'm trying to say with http://richmondhackers.drupalcafe.com (cf. my HNN post a week or two ago).

This isn't the first time I've read the argument for a computer being superior to a woman because of its exactitude and unforgiving nature, yet total acceptance of the correct. It is, however, one of the more eloquent (and concise!) versions of the argument.

This is so much what I want to do, but I don't yet have the... gumption... to actually do it.

I also code alone, and probably my income from investments from my lifestyle software product business (about $US 460 pcm) is enough to support it. According to Wolfram, $40 pcm in 1976 is $150 pcm today, http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=40+in+1976+USD

I don't really know how to start (or how to be sure if I'd really like the solitude that much after a few weeks/months...)

what is 'pcm'?

I guess "per calender month".

Yes, sorry; I thought it was a standard abbreviation. Or maybe I've looked at too many rental ads. Perhaps there's a better one?

I guess "per month", "/month" and "monthly" all work well, though I'd like a shorter one. Maybe "pm" or "/m". Or perhaps convert it to years, and use "pa". I'm fussing over this a bit, but I agree with pg that in some cases, conciseness helps readability.

Yes, though Paul Graham's notion of conciseness is not the number of characters, but more like the number of `symbols' or words. So `monthly' should be fine by this measure.

Cool! Wonder where he is in Oregon? I sometimes have dreams about moving somewhere remote, but to tell the truth I think I'd get bored pretty quickly.

Reminds me of an old Russian saying: It will still take 9 woman 9 months to give birth to one child.

What they should have said was, "Press down the key marked CTRL. While holding it down, press the B key. Now release these keys and press the key marked RETURN."

I understand the "where's the 'any key'?" argument, but we shouldn't all be designing for recluse luddites.

i'm not so sure lutus could be called a luddite. oh, and this is 1976...

Good point. Luddite is the wrong word. I meant to say that there should be some minimum assumed level of expertise of your target market. "Intuitive" is often synonymous with "familiar," and an interface should be able to make some assumptions about the experience and abilities of the user.

The computer in question was pretty much the first personal computer. The correct assumption about the amount of experience of the user with a personal computer was zero.

It's a case for better technical documentation, which was later fixed by putting a beveled rectangle around CONTROL and other modifier keys in written documentation. What he attempted to do was technically accurate given the instructions.

It's really hard to write technically accurate instructions, or at least it must be, because so many instructions are ambiguous. I followed a "friendship bread" recipe that said to, after making the batter, "put 1 cup of batter into four bags." What they meant was, "put 4 cups of batter into 4 separate bags."

After baking, I had a sloppy loaf, and got ribbed by my wife for, "not following the instructions." When I pointed out that what I did was technically accurate, she said I should have done what they "obviously" meant, not what they literally said.

Anyway, the bread was still good. :-)

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