diamondap

Yes, the same.

Paul Bradley Carr’s satirical thriller is a darkly funny page-turner and a very good read.

There's a fascinating podcast (with transcript) at https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/21121... about linguistic studies that show blue to be the last color named in virtually all languages. There was no blue in the Odyssey or the Iliad because the Greeks didn't have a word for it yet. It appeared a few centuries later. Same in other languages around the world. Centuries of writing with no reference to the color blue, and then one day it appears. The podcast is a good listen.

The two practices have quite a bit in common, including the need to break down a very large, hard-to-grasp problem (a novel or an application) into a set of smaller easier-to-solve problems (objects, functions, chapters) that fit together in a coherent whole.

I wrote a similar post when, after many years of software development, I finally got around to writing my first novel. https://adiamond.me/2015/01/writing-and-programming/

The author is right in saying the key is really to show up and put in the work. That can be really hard for a lot of people, but programmers are already accustomed to it.

BTW, Vikram Chandra's Geek Sublime also does a good job investigating the ties between writing code and writing prose. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19353724-geek-sublime

Chandra goes way back, pointing out that the generative grammar we use today to describe valid programming language constructs was first created 2500 years ago in India by a guy named Panini who fully and precisely described the structure of the entire Sanskrit language. There's more on that here, if you're interested: https://medium.com/@dmitrypavluk/we-should-thank-sanskrit-fo...

Yes. The author contacted the actual Louisiana attorney general with whom Abagnale claimed to have worked. The AG said Abagnale never worked there. The author also dug up the records of the bad checks Abagnale wrote against the airlines. He was a clever forger, and the airlines went after him, but the total bad checks came to only around $1200. And Abagnale was busted by a small town cop after passing one of those checks. The FBI didn't even have him on their radar.

All his exploits were small-time cons, and he often got caught. The author does a really good job of documenting all this with primary sources (arrest and prison records, etc.), secondary sources (news articles from the 1970s) and with interviews with people who were actually with Abagnale during some of the supposed exploits in the 60s and 70s.

Overall, it's good, thorough journalism. I wrote a brief review at https://adiamond.me/2021/03/the-greatest-hoax-on-earth-alan-..., but the WHYY review is more thorough.

And, BTW, I loved the movie. As author Logan points out, one reason con men can con is because people would much rather believe an exciting romantic story than a mundane and disappointing one.

I wrote a similar app for archivists to push materials into preservation repositories. I used Electron, since it has good cross-platform support. The source is at https://github.com/aptrust/dart with documentation at https://aptrust.github.io/dart-docs/users/getting_started/

The underlying JavaScript code in that app started getting messy because I was working on several other projects simultaneously, but you might find it useful to play with as you consider your desktop app.

The archival community uses a simple text-based packaging format from the Library of Congress called BagIt, which allows you to include metadata and checksums with your archived materials so you can ensure their integrity and make sense of them when you get them back.

Anyway, you're working on an interesting problem. I'd be interested to see how it goes.