1.2

Mind Vault was recently updated to 1.2. This update is all about updating the design. It is by no means finished but it is getting more polished all the time. So enjoy the updated look while I keep working on a the next update. It’s going to be a big one. In the meantime here are a couple quotes about iteration that you might like:

Systems with unknown behavioral properties require the implementation of iterations which are intrinsic to the design process but which are normally hidden from view. Certainly when a solution to a well-understood problem is synthesized, weak designs are mentally rejected by a competent designer in a matter of moments. On larger or more complicated efforts, alternative designs must be explicitly and iteratively implemented. The designers perhaps out of vanity, often are at pains to hide the many versions which were abandoned and if absolute failure occurs, of course one hears nothing. Thus the topic of design iteration is rarely discussed. Perhaps we should not be surprised to see this phenomenon with software, for it is a rare author indeed who publicizes the amount of editing or the number of drafts he took to produce a manuscript.

Fernando J. Corbató, A Managerial View of the Multics System Development

Elegance is necessarily unnatural, only achieveable at great expense. If you just do something, it won’t be elegant, but if you do it and then see what might be more elegant, and do it again, you might, after an unknown number of iterations, get something that is very elegant.

Erik Naggum, Re: Filk, puns, and other time wasting