tomhudson's Journal: Happy New Year. Same As The Old Year.

Last year started with my left retina bleeding, followed by a year of treatments to both eyes. By the last hospital visit (end of November), things were looking good. Not perfect, but "good enough".

But yesterday (this New Years) I noticed a small blotch. And this morning it took a while before either eye would focus all that well. And of course, after a while writing code, the left eye began to hurt ... and it then bled some more. So I took a break. 4 hours later, I'd say it's back to where it was about 4 months ago.

It's not my nature to give up, but this is cutting it too close for comfort. I already figured that nobody's going to hire a programmer who misses 30 days or more a year ... but this also puts in question whether I can even complete stuff on my own - it takes time to "get back into it" after taking a few days as a "break" as is, but if I have to limit it to an hour or two a day even when things are going relatively well ...

... if it were someone else in the same situation asking my advice, I'd tell them to stop banging their head against the wall, face the inevitable, and give up gracefully so that they can move on. Not that there's much to "move on" to, given how limited my options have now become.

what dpi are you programming at?

[Bill Dog]

I got a 27" at 1920x1200 for my current home PC, that's a relaxed .30 dot pitch [I really like this guy's calculator page [members.ping.de]], and comfort-wise there's a noticeable difference to me between this and the 24" at 1920x1080 at work, where with the latter I feel some eye muscle and/or blood vessel strain I guess and get some redness and dryness after reading code on it all day and with the former I have nada. I have subdued lighting in both places and the monitor brightness turned way down, so that shouldn't be a d

Re:

[tomhudson]

My screens are both Samsung T260 [samsung.com] 1920x1200, 25.5", which gives .286 dot pitch.

I'm running them at 120dpi instead of 96 dpi, which scales things up by 25%. That is simply nowhere near enough. Until tonight, I was zooming in web pages at ~150%. Now I'm trying 200%, which given the 25% boost from the higher DPI, really translates into someone viewing at 96DPI at 250% ... it seems to help ...

I was already using an 18 point monospace font for coding - I've just bumped it up to 24 point ... but that's like

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[Bill Dog]

My 2 cents, in no particular order:

1) Making js look like asm, or any language look like another language for that matter, is awful.

2) Using unnecessarily broad scopes, like globals, is sloppy.

3) For convenience functions I've recently learned the jQuery library, which has a large shared appeal vs. one's own personal library. I like the explicitness of

x =$('widget').left();
$('widget').width(400);

versus having to remember that different numbers of arguments set totally different properties.

[...]

Okay, scratch

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[tomhudson]

Pet peeves time :-)

The goal wasn't to "make it look like asm - however, asm IS noted for its' terseness of each instruction, as opposed to, for example.ThisIsAReallyLongNameOfSomeStupidThingInJava.getTheWorstWayToRedrawThisThingAndDoIt(); And there are some good programming idioms.

Globals are not necessarily a bad thing, and having a global stack comes in handy - esp. since you can't reference a local stack from another function unless you pass that as well, which defeats the point of having a stack.

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[Bill Dog]

I see your points to some extent. But then it's hard to be disagreeable when it's winter and yet where I'm at the sun's been shining and it's hitting the high 70's! :P

On jQuery, from the latest [aspnetcdn.com] it looks to me like the only place eval() is used is to run the return data of an ajax call if it's js. I haven't done any ajax with jQuery yet, but I would think there must be some way to disable that auto-execution feature, in case you're calling into a site and it's been hacked to return malicious js.

But on adding

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[tomhudson]

The high 70s, hmmm? Nice!

Thanks for the sentiments. I think the xx-large fonts are helping a bit, but it's still actively leaking into the eyeball ... maybe tomorrow will be better. :-(

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[joshuac]

My screens are both Samsung T260 [samsung.com] 1920x1200, 25.5", which gives .286 dot pitch.

I'm running them at 120dpi instead of 96 dpi, which scales things up by 25%. That is simply nowhere near enough. Until tonight, I was zooming in web pages at ~150%. Now I'm trying 200%, which given the 25% boost from the higher DPI, really translates into someone viewing at 96DPI at 250% ... it seems to help ...

I was already using an 18 point monospace font for coding - I've just bumped it up to 24 point ... but that's like using a 30pt font on a 96dpi rendering ... it's HUGE. BUT I can read it with noticeably less strain, so here's hoping ...

Your strategy seems to be to make things larger, as if you were trying to cope with a minification (as in optics, not programming) problem. Have you experimented with radical adjustments to the distance of the object your eyes are focusing on? Relaxed the human eye focus is at infinity; think scanning the horizon for threats, with occasional refocusing on a near object before going back to scanning for stuff moving in the distance. Focusing on something a meter away all day long for years on end isn't what

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[tomhudson]

I've got a "stalk" of blood vessels that burst right over my left fovea (the tiny part of the retina responsible for all your sharpest vision) - the problem isn't focusing so much as having "gunk" in the way. Making things much larger means the gunk doesn't block out as much information so I can still figure out what's on the screen.

The other problem is that vision problems in one eye ultimately affect both eyes - both in increased work-load, and in trying to figure out what is really there and should be

Damn.

[Doctor O]

Sucks to hear this. OTOH, I second the notion of becoming a teacher. I've learned more from tangents of your comments than I learned from my whole professional training. Even if I usually don't adapt your ways of doing things, they show me other perspective and help me grok the underlying principles. This, IMHO, is the most essential part of teaching.

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[tomhudson]

AB DEF .. AB DEF ... AB DEF ... AB DEF - long time, no C!

Thanks for the feedback. I'll keep it in mind if my current code idea doesn't work out. It's going slower than I'd want it to, obviously, because of all the problems, BUT I *am* still making progress - enough that, if things go okay, I should be able to post a url for the demo some time this weekend.

If it doesn't work, I'll probably sit down and write my book ... I've got lots of "interesting" things to write about that I haven't touched on here