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January 31st, 2007
Alt-Right. I keep complaining how Apple f*@#$d up Alt-Tabbing in OS/X, one of the more annoying character “qualities” of the Mac. Peter Maurer did better and fixed it. Looks like another essential download. (Via Lifehacker)
Rubyprise. I’ll leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions.
Living in a mixed couple. This morning the wife had some problems with her ‘puter. As I leave for work, she turns to me and says “I fixed it! I restarted the browser. Now I don’t have any buggy bugs, only features”.
I take full responsibility.
A-Z of office life. From the business jargon dictionary. (Via Lifehack)
Assmosis [v.]The apparent absorption of success that comes from sucking up.
Blamestorming [v.]Meeting to discuss a failure and find a scapegoat.
Carpool tunnel syndrome [n.]The semi-conscious state that is the result of repeated early morning ride sharing.
That, and many more in the business jargon dictionary.
Y explained. This brief and reasonably readable explanation of the Y Combinator explains precisely and succinctly why I’ll never program in Lisp.
Posted by Assaf
Filed in general
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January 30th, 2007
But apparently, there’s an issue with WordPress 2.1, and I just upgraded the other day. So if you are seeing partial feeds, it’s not a feature but a bug! Let me know, I’ll get it fixed.
Thanks, the management
Posted by Assaf
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January 30th, 2007
context "Blog post" do
specify "should be fun to read" do
words.size.should_be < 500
images.should_not_be_empty
reader.should_respond_to :post
end
end
I just started using RSpec, and loving every minute of it.
The first few test cases felt a bit weird. Badly written English in the passive voice: this.should_be_that. Enough shoulds to drive any English major nuts.
But I like the fact that my test cases look the opposite of my code. And somehow, they end up shorter and more fun to write than assertions. I can’t explain why, I just know with test cases, every bit of motivation helps.
This one is a keeper.
Posted by Assaf
Filed in ruby
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January 30th, 2007
1.0.0. Feels like I achieved some milestone, The Rounded Corners 100th Edition Suprema Palooza! But really, it just goes to show that even if you have nothing original to say, you can say it on a regular basis. Even if you’re an introvert. Anyway, I’m having fun, so Rounded Corners is here to stay, 100th is just a bump on the way to 101. More profound blogging will come shortly, once I’m done reviewing Chapter 2 … oops, I said too much. Now back to our regular programming.
Life imitating games. Because vandals like Tetris, too.
Web imitating paper. Isotope, as fun as the original thing.
Relationships in the 21st century. Letting go.
Combinatorial sins. This, explains everything.
Posted by Assaf
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January 30th, 2007
Because every Bay Area needs its own Ruby community, and because Ruby is too much fun to keep it all bottled inside. I guess. Anyway, kudos to Chris Wanstrath, of very many fames. Oh, and you’ll find it at the end of this URL.
Oh, and big congrats to Jeremy for proving he’s the craziest of the bunch.
Posted by Assaf
Filed in ruby
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January 29th, 2007
Quick summary. Reg Braithwaite: “Ruby Metaprogramming elevates the Decorator Pattern from a useful tool to a core idiom for creating idioms.”
Fleeting logins. Zephoria on ephemeral profiles: “Teens are not dreaming of portability (like so many adults i meet). They are happy to make new accounts on new sites; they enjoy building out profiles. (Part of this could be that they have a lot more time on their hands.) The idea of taking MySpace material to Facebook when they transition is completely foreign. They’re going to a new site, they want to start over.” Check out the comments on this article as well.
Where does online identity fit in my life? Labnotes has become my 401K blog, a long term investment I’m not going to give up on easily. My Flickr account is more like my digital camera: I might get a new one, and throw the old one away. This is not so much about adult/teen divide, though I have to admit, I wasn’t serious about 401K until late into my twenties. Just a point to consider when you’re thinking about the role Web presence plays in other people’s life. They’re not all as invester or dis-interested as you. (Via Chris Messina)
OpenID with your Yahoo! account. Simon Willison is blogging about OpenID, and building cool stuff He just launched idproxy.net, so you can sign to OpenID services with your Yahoo! account. I love it.
WP 2.1. It looked like a good idea, but the WYSIWYG editor in WP 2.0 messed up with my markup, whenever I tried anything tricky. WP 2.1 finally fixes that and lets you use WYSIWYG and raw HTML side by side. Along with auto-save. Unfortunately, I can’t get the TinyMCE tables plugin to work. Hopefully that will happen in due time.
Music to my ears. Find it through Pandora, buy it from eMusic. That just made my day.
Posted by Assaf
Filed in general
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January 26th, 2007
Premature abstraction. Building an operating system is not easy. Building an OS to abstract the OS? Would explain why Java failed on the desktop: “The virtual machine concept is inherently heavyweight, since you need to create a lowest-common-denominator computer, operating system, and related services every single time a program runs.”
In spite of that, Sun can be proud of …
Back to the source. Where does open source come from? 61% individuals, 19% companies, the rest foundation and universities. It’s still, powered by people. The top commerical contributors? Sun, IBM and RedHat, in that order. That’s some serious geek cred for Sun.
Although it’s certainly guilty of sucummbing to peer pressure …
ESB 2.0 Enterprise Edition Service Pack 1. I think it’s ironic that vendors are pushing for ESB to be a product. Where would you fit “a product” in a network of loosely joined services? Microsoft might be the last major vendor to hold “ESB as an architectural pattern”, but even they are feeling the pressure to conform. Analyst Driven Architecture?
I take it back. Not all analysts fall prey to hype …
W. Services vs Web. Nick Gall of Gartner calls the W3C to “extricate itself from further direct work on SOAP, WDSL, or any other WS-* specifications and redirect its resources into evangelizing and standardizing identifiers, formats, and protocols that exemplify Web architectural principles.” (Thanks Bill)
Maybe the W3C should drop unnecessary complexity altogether …
The trispecs are out. It only took the better half of this decade, but XQuery, XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0 are finally out! Can I hear a big sigh of relief? We can finally figure out what problems they’re trying to solve.
Derek thinks the trispecs are “worse late than never“. (Thanks Alex) I agree. But I’ll take the XPath 2.0 library, thank you very much, and run it in XPath 1.0 compatibility mode. XPath 1.0 doesn’t break unexpectedly when you add a schema file.
Posted by Assaf
Filed in general
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January 24th, 2007
CSS shoot out. 53 CSS styling techniques, including shadows, graphs, rounded corners, fancy controls and a lot more goodness.
DarkRoom reconstructed. Too funny. Although I have to admit, I do love the full-screen, hassle free mode. Call it “managed attention”.
(Try F11 in Firefox, or Ctrl-Shift-J in OpenOffice. You can thank me later)
No look, no feel. Jens Alfke on the dead-before-arrival Java UI: “The APIs are too clumsy to code to, and compared to any decent Mac app, the results look like a Soviet tractor built on a Monday.” (Via Simon Willison)
CLI, Redux. The WordPress CLI Theme is a work of art. Test drive it here.
You think you’re special? “Sixty-five percent of Americans polled said they spend more time with their home computer than their spouse or significant other.”
Posted by Assaf
Filed in general
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January 24th, 2007
The story of XMLHTTP. Alex Hopmann’s story, getting IE5 to add HTTP support into its XML library. And the rest is history. (Via Ajaxian)
A function of simplicity. “Imperative programming is sometimes reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg machine. Both require meticulous thought to ensure that a process works correctly despite a myriad of state transitions and interdependencies. It is amazing these complicated programs work at all.” Wesdyer explains the benefits of functional programming.
BetterCode for BigCo. “Convincing a set of established “Enterprisy†engineers that Rails is worth paying attention to it is like convincing a Texas oil baron that he should purchase a Subcompact hybrid vehicle and become a Vegan.” Is it really that hard? Timothy M. O’Brien gives some answers in Bringing Rails to the Enterprise. (Via Jeremy McAnally)
The future of phones. Nokia has some amazing design concepts, most interestingly dropping “legacy” input devices in favor of bigger screens and gestures. (Via tnkgirl)
Apropos tnkgirl. In her world, it’s just another day of a) walking around with two cell phones, one in each pocket; b) watching TV on the OQO, bluetoothed to the cellphone, pulling it over EDGE from the SlingBox at home; c) developing your own set-top box. And she blogs about that stuff.
Posted by Assaf
Filed in general
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January 18th, 2007
Suck-o-meter. Brian Oberkirch lists 11 ways to tell if your product or service sucks. Let’s check back in June, and see how people fell about it.
Scary, but true. If planes were built like software.
A little ironic. Bruce Tate: “The Java community’s obsession with static type checking is curious because Java developers are now spending an ever-increasing amount of energy looking for ways to delay binding.”
Futurism. If cell phones are any indication: “This year fashions will see an emphasis on elegance through extreme simplicity and ergonomic design, going for comfort by matching body lines”.
It’s better now … Microsoft Firefox 2007 Professional Edition. (Via Ajaxian)
Posted by Assaf
Filed in general
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