BrainDump progress | Coffee

I am pleased to report that BrainDump opened its widdle eyes and smiled at me last night; it is now able to perform its central function, and immediately went from a whiff of inert vapor to a project with real potential, able to provide immediate feedback while I continue to work on it, rather than just a pile of error messages. I mean: it will still generate a pile of error messages every time I run it, but they'll happen in context of a program that visibly does something meaningful and otherwise works well, rather than a broken bunch of nothing.

This doesn't mean it's near release yet; the application has no UI to speak of, just an undecorated window and three menu commands. Even though I plan on keeping it simple, it will still take me a while to work the few widgets I have in mind. This process will no doubt include my realizing that the widgets I have in mind now are exactly the wrong ones, and then redesigning everything from the start. Two or three times, probably.

Also, there is also probably a frightening amout of memory leaks, since I haven't been paying any mind to that at all. One thing I don't like about Cocoa is the lack of any automated garbage collection; you have to manually take out the trash yourself, inserting memory-deallocation statements in the right places in your code. If I recall correctly, this isn't very difficult; you can just tell the doomed object to obliterate itself, via the standard release method. But that you have to think about it at all makes me sad; it's perhaps the most non-Perlish thing about an otherwise pleasingly Perlish programming environment. (Yes, yes, I know...)

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I'm going to experiment with reducing my coffee intake. Over the weekend, a friend stated her observation that I have an "addictive personality"; that is, she felt I was unusually susceptible to addiction, and pointed at my relationship with coffee as an example, in all seriousness. A little before that, I had a conversation with another friend about the effects of overcaffeination, and we agreed that it was Bad, and that we let it happen to ourselves at all it PlusBad.

So: For now, I will try to keep my daily coffee consumption to two large coffees, or its moral equivalent. If this seems like a lot, it probably is. But note that I'd usually have more; at maximum consumption rate, I'd acknowledge my entry into each new phase of a typical workday by getting a cup of coffee.