Directions

In the last 24 hours, I've tried to do three simple things:

• Set up an Android development environment on my xubuntu box and run the "Hello World"-style example here.
• Make sure that, while creating Common Lisp packages in SBCL, I could easily create and load them with Quicklisp and Quickproject, as per the directions in xach's blog.
• Replace the flourescent lightbulbs in my closet.

First, the good news: Quickproject works as well as advertised, or at least it did for the minimal set of files I created. I was able to close down my box, reboot, open emacs with SLIME, and type (ql:quickload "games-dice") (a lisp file based on Philip Newton and Ricardo Signes's perl module Games::Dice, and there it was: (games-dice:roll "3d6") returned a beautiful 14. That was the one unqualified success I had last night.

Next came the flourescent lights. Given 45 minutes, I was able to figure out how to install them. The clips that hold the bulbs are plastic, and seemed to fold back, so I took the bulbs out by doing that; this turns out to be the wrong way. You're supposed to twist the bulbs until they fall out of the socket.

This would not have occurred to me, although, given my age (over 19), I should have encountered this task before. Oddly, I hadn't. The only time I've ever twisted flourescent bulbs was when I was about eight, and they broke, so the thought of turning them at all when they were set in their sockets just wasn't on my radar.

I headed over to youtube to see if I could find some how-to videos to help me. Videos I found, but helpful they were not. The first few I found were about how to install the brackets and wiring. Then I found one where the narrator was changing them from a bracket on the floor as opposed to on the ceiling.

Several times in my googling for directions, I found the same dumb piece of advice: "turn the bulb clockwise until it slips out". Think about it: "clockwise" on one end of the bulb is the opposite direction from "clockwise" on the other, so this is pointless advice unless there's a canonical side of the bulb that you orient yourself towards.

In the end, I observed that the pins in the bulb line up with rotating slots at either end, and those slots rotate independently of each other. When I pulled the bulb out, I twisted one side, but not the other, so they were misaligned with each other. It was impossible to put the pins in until I figured that out and lined them up again. I had to insert the pins in one side, twist until it lined up, then do the same with the other side.

After that, it was a piece of cake. Simple, once you know how, but none of the directions I could find were clear enough to make that point.

Finally, I tried to install Android Studio and create a very basic, proof-of-concept, "Hello World"-style app. That took a long time, and I'm still getting errors. It turns out that Android is not wholly compatible with OpenJDK, which was the Java toolkit I had installed on my computer. The directions, however, either assumed I was using Oracle's Java, or that it wouldn't make a difference, but I ended up having to purge OpenJDK and then, semi-automatically, semi-manually install the Oracle JDK. And by just clicking on the stuff they told me to click on and typing what they told me to type—you'll have to trust me on that—I ended up with an app that compiled with a couple of errors in the source files... source files I have yet to touch with a text editor, mind you. So I'm still working on that one.

What to make of all of this? I don't know. In the case of the lights, the moral seems to be "slow down and look closely". But in the case of Android Studio, there's nothing to really look at. I guess the moral of that story is, directions are hard, and you should never make assumptions about a user's environment. And the wider-ranging suggestion might be, when you see someone struggling with something that seems easy to you, consider that they might be struggling with complications you can't even imagine, since you came to the same problem from a cleaner setup.

cheers,
Adam