The day the music died

Tuesday, May 06, 2008 at 01:43 AM / diveintomark.org

“Apple calls these songs ‘iTunes Plus’, because it sounds so much better than calling everything else ‘iTunes Minus.’”

An Under-Appreciated Fact: We Don't Know How We Program

Monday, May 05, 2008 at 07:13 AM / paulspontifications.blogspot.com

“… in every one of these processes and diagrams there is a box which basically says ‘write the code’, and ought to be subtitled ‘(and here a miracle occurs)’.”

Kent State Massacre

Monday, May 05, 2008 at 05:52 AM / youtube.com

This was the first year in a long time that I didn’t make it over to Kent to see the memorial and pay my respects. Growing up a few miles from where all this went down is still one of the most sobering experiences of my life.

xkcd: Forks and Spoons

Monday, May 05, 2008 at 05:05 AM / xkcd.com

Reading xkcd has become one of my last regular forms of physical exercise. My abs are burning right now from violent guttural reactions to this one.

Just add scaling!

Sunday, May 04, 2008 at 09:32 PM / ola-bini.blogspot.com

“I still haven’t found anyone who knows how you implement Scaling in a language, so I guess that LRM will never have it… Anyone who care to enlighten me, please send me a detailed email with an implementation of Scaling.”

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 03:07 PM / herecomeseverybody.org

“Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.”

GitHub Adds Gem Server Support

Friday, April 25, 2008 at 09:43 AM / gems.github.com

A gem for your project is automatically built each time the project_name.gemspec file is changed on your master branch.

LimeChat: IRC Client for OSX

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 03:18 PM / limechat.sourceforge.net

I think I may finally be able to get rid of Colloquy.

‘I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!’: A Guide to Proper Usage

Friday, April 18, 2008 at 02:04 AM / nymag.com

I finally watched “There Will Be Blood” a few days ago and the milkshake line practically jumps out of the movie at you. I have no idea what the hell happened in the movie but that line made it all worth while.

"All I need is a Programmer"

Thursday, April 17, 2008 at 04:27 AM / codeclimber.blogspot.com

Ethan Vizitei with a great piece on people’s misconceptions about what coders do and the difficulty with which they do it.

That Vista Thud is the sound of executive layoffs

Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 05:21 PM / cincomsmalltalk.com

eWeek: “… Nearly every Microsoft executive associated with the Windows Vista launch has left the company. Vista has proven to be a career-ending enterprise …”

Doctorow Declares His Virgin Media (ISP) Contract Null, Void

Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 05:18 PM / boingboing.net

In response to Virgin Media CEO stating that he considers Net Neutrality to be “a load of bollocks” and promising to put any website or service that won’t pay Virgin a premium to reach its customers into the “Internet bus lane.”

Burning the midnight oil

Sunday, April 13, 2008 at 06:47 PM / codeclimber.blogspot.com

Ethan Vizitei on the difference in productivity found in the middle of the night vs. any other time of day. Nails it, IMO.

Git Magic

Sunday, April 13, 2008 at 06:50 AM / www-cs-students.stanford.edu

All manners of good stuff here.

A run-time for “the New Reality”

Saturday, April 12, 2008 at 12:20 AM / projectzero.org

“… the ‘new reality’ is the realization that Dynamic Scripting Languages are ready for prime-time and that REST is a simple, yet scalable architecture to build a servers on.” - I’d say that’s definitely a new reality for the enterprise, Bill.

Say hello to the (GitHub) Network Graph Visualizer

Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 02:40 PM / github.com

Now this is the kind of direction I hope to see GitHub and Gitorious go in the future.

Multiprocess versus Multithreaded ... or why Java infects Unix with the Windows mindset

Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 12:57 PM / erikengbrecht.blogspot.com

Erik Engbrecht: “Java took cheap Unix processes and made them expensive. To compensate, it provided primitives for multithreading.”

Clouds Rolling In: The Google App Engine Q&A

Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 02:44 AM / redmonk.com

Stephen O’Grady with the obligatory Q&A, which is excellent as always.

Interactive Google App Engine Python Shell

Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 02:10 AM / shell.appspot.com

The Python REPL running on Google’s infrastructure.

App Engine and Open Source

Wednesday, April 09, 2008 at 03:39 PM / blog.ianbicking.org

Ian Bicking: “Many people are excited about how far up you might be able to scale something based on App Engine, but I’m excited about how far it could be scaled down.”

commit-patch

Tuesday, April 08, 2008 at 03:05 PM / porkrind.org

A nice solution to “The Tangled Working Copy Problem” for VCS’s that don’t allow you to pluck out portions of a working copy to commit. Allows editing the diff that’s about to be committed.

Git HOWTO Index

Tuesday, April 08, 2008 at 01:23 PM / kernel.org

There are some great tips for owning your local workflow in here.

My initial reaction to Google App Engine (in Simon Willison's comments)

Tuesday, April 08, 2008 at 01:19 PM / simonwillison.net

I’ve since went to sleep and reawakened. I’m typically fairly curmudgeony when I wake up but I’m still having the same reaction.

The Differences Between Mercurial and Git

Tuesday, April 08, 2008 at 01:15 PM / rockstarprogrammer.org

I can’t say whether this is an accurate description of hg but he nails a lot of the things that makes git interesting, IMO.

The Thing About Git

Tuesday, April 08, 2008 at 12:16 PM / By Ryan Tomayko

It’s as though every other version control system I’ve ever used was created by people who were really into version control and Git was created by people who were really into hacking.

Indexed

Tuesday, April 08, 2008 at 03:56 AM / indexed.blogspot.com

The more interesting aspects of life described using only venn diagrams, an occasional line graph, and a scatter plot here and there.

Google App Engine

Tuesday, April 08, 2008 at 02:53 AM / code.google.com

Christmas in Python land! Run Python/WSGI code on Google’s infrastructure. This is an incredibly H U G E win for the Python web community and further validates WSGI’s architectural awesomeness.

My rules of thumb for developers: less code

Monday, April 07, 2008 at 11:11 PM / rc3.org

Rafe kicks off a series detailing various aspects of his coding philosophy. The first is near and dear to my heart: less code

Ruby’s not ready

Monday, April 07, 2008 at 11:08 PM / glyphobet.net

Matt Chisholm evaluates Ruby against Python for an upcoming project and determines that it’s a big pile of doodoo. I can’t agree with the conclusion but he details a lot of Ruby’s warts really quite well.

Jason Blevin's on Moving from Bazaar to Git

Sunday, April 06, 2008 at 03:10 PM / jblevins.org

I’m a bzr refugee in Git-land, myself.

What a DVCS gets you (maybe)

Sunday, April 06, 2008 at 02:57 PM / dehora.net

Bill de hÓra gives some reasons for using a distributed VCS even when the downstream repo is non-distributed.

Adrian Holovaty's Insanely Great Remix of Radiohead's "Nude"

Friday, April 04, 2008 at 06:09 PM / radioheadremix.com

Ranked #22 of 470 derivative works – that’s up from #35 as reported on Waxy at 2:47 PM (roughly five hours ago). Unfortunately, there’s no mp3 / ogg in sight. Somebody really ought to torrent all 470 of them up.

highlight.js

Friday, April 04, 2008 at 11:11 AM / softwaremaniacs.org

JavaScript based source highlighter with support for many languages in separate modules. Similar to the JavaScript Prettifier in that <pre><code> blocks are automatically detected and highlighted without an explicit language class.

To a T

Friday, April 04, 2008 at 01:10 AM / worldwidewords.org

“… tittle is easily the most likely source, since to a tittle was in use in exactly the same sense for nearly a century before to a T appeared (it’s first recorded in a play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher of 1607) …”

Maintainable Programmers

Friday, April 04, 2008 at 01:00 AM / lesscode.org

This was a really great lesscode.org piece by Aristotle. The follow-up discussion in the comments was superb as well. Being in the middle of everything really warped my view of what was going on back then, I think.

Why PHP is good but bad

Friday, April 04, 2008 at 12:37 AM / plasmasturm.org

Not sure how I missed linking to this. Pretty much mirrors my feelings on PHP to a T, except more thought out.

The Rec.humor.funny Ban

Thursday, April 03, 2008 at 08:55 PM / netfunny.com

“John McCarthy, better known to many as the originator of the LISP computer language, called me up to say he would be leading the fight at Stanford to reverse the ban.” - Could the man possibly be any more credentialed amongst hackers?

The immediacy of PHP

Thursday, April 03, 2008 at 02:57 PM / loudthinking.com

David Heinemeier Hansson: “PHP scales down like no other package for the web and it deserves more credit for tackling that scope.”

Agreed!

Git for Computer Scientists

Thursday, April 03, 2008 at 02:53 PM / eagain.net

Okay, I’ve read about five of these articles purporting to explain Git’s internal conceptual framework. This was the first that really made things click in any significant way.

What Is the Open Web and Why Is It Important?

Thursday, April 03, 2008 at 02:46 PM / codinginparadise.org

Brad Neuberg (Google Gears): “Our historical closeness to the web creates a kind of myopia, where we can’t see how amazing it is. It’s a billion Library of Alexandria’s dropped into our laps.”

April First Reconsidered

Wednesday, April 02, 2008 at 01:05 PM / crummy.com

Interesting take on AFD as launch-crazy-but-legit-projects day. I didn’t use the Internet at all this AFD and sent everything in my reader to /dev/null. Now, I feel kind of bad. Sorry about that, internet.

The Tech Press Has Come Along Way

Wednesday, April 02, 2008 at 12:22 PM / By Ryan Tomayko

That’s doodoo, baby.

Mistaking Cons for Pros

Wednesday, April 02, 2008 at 08:39 AM / oreillynet.com

chromatic on million-line Java programs: “I can only imagine how much larger the Java code would be without all of those XML files.”

Why aren’t you using ionice yet???

Wednesday, April 02, 2008 at 08:33 AM / friedcpu.wordpress.com

I’m more than a little embarased that I’ve never heard of this utility. I think most modern kernels prioritize IO with normal nice, though…

On software architecture

Sunday, March 23, 2008 at 01:52 AM / roy.gbiv.com

Roy Fielding on the difference between architecture, architecural styles, patterns, implementations, and applications.

Addressing Doubts about REST

Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 06:04 PM / infoq.com

Stefan Tilkov addresses some of the most common doubts people have when first deprogram and come up to speed on REST. Short and well done, IMO. I think I’ll be handing this out quite a bit in the future.

Translation From MS-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Joel Spolsky’s “Martian Headsets”

Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 04:37 PM / diveintomark.org

Mark contributes the obligatory fisking.

Consistent Hashing

Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 04:47 AM / spiteful.com

Superbly explained and with extremely useful circly diagrams. Bravo.

Jim Cramer: "Bear Stearns is Fine!" Tues, 3/11/08

Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 02:37 AM / youtube.com

Don’t be silly!

JavaScript Based Code Prettification

Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at 01:02 AM / By Ryan Tomayko

As seen on Google Code’s new and improved source browser.