xentac

I helped edit the first 4 chapters. One benefit of the book is it's short. All the information you need is condensed into 150 pages.

It starts out being immediately applicable (Chapter 2: Write Tests First), giving you systematic methods to measure various happiness qualities. After that, it helps you define what would make your life happier. From there it talks about specific ways to address the types of problems people run into when trying to improve their happiness.

Throughout the whole book, it tries to relate the concepts to programming ideas (testing, specs, debugging, etc). This isn't a general public self-help book, it's specifically for people who program or are technically minded. That's what makes it unique.

If I had to knock the book, I'd say that some of the metaphors are stretched a little bit. Overall the concepts map well, but every so often you're kind of like, "huh... yeah, I guess those are the same things..."

Edit: Added something negative to say.

I'm not sure you actually understand my phrase 'quantifying their happiness'. It uses tests derived from The Feeling Good Handbook, Dr. David Burns and Beck Anxiety Inventory, Dr. Aaron Beck to track emotional well being over time.

It makes it possible to compare how you feel with various points in the past to track an overall improvement or regression.

This book is by a programmer, for programmers, to help them quantify their happiness and take action to improve it, instead of focusing on churning widgets (GTD) or whatever it is you focus on.

It just reads mouse move events, so there are only so many per second. If you send me more events than I allow, I drop the rest of them on the floor.

That's actually not a bug, someone wrote a bot that plays in every position that someone else plays.

Not yet, but I plan on doing a little blog post about it and posting the code.

Yeah, I limit the number of moves you can make per second, but mice/multi-touch move pretty fast...

I did do some stuff to try and limit scripts. We'll see if they can figure it out.

Also, it's multi-touch enabled...

Written in Node.js, hosted on Amazon EC2, uses Socket.IO.

Try to make the screen all one color while your opponents do the same.

> 2) each version has permissions

Side-loaded apps still have permissions.

I agree on all your other points, though I don't know how a project like this could be made to work with the android market model.