Why I chose git
Wherein Aristotle convinces me to seriously consider moving my experimental bzr projects to git. I've seen the content vs. file tracking argument before but never really understood what the actual impact of this difference was.
DNA seen through the eyes of a coder
“Like with unix, cells are not ‘spawned’ – they are forked. All cells started out from your ovum which has forked itself many times since. Both halves of the fork() are identical to begin with, but they may from then on decide to do different things.”
The Federalist Papers
An online edition of the Federalist Papers which is pleasant to look at and provides paragraph-level permalinking. Each paper is marked up in the hAtom microformat with an elastic layout (stays beautiful with bigger/smaller font size).
A pool for the W3C validators
This is a good idea. The w3c hosted validators tend to perform on the bad side of horrible. I've run the validator locally but never thought to look for mirrors.
Why the Best Voting Technology May Be No Technology at All
“And there’s the big problem — the people running the elections aren’t actually running them. Vendors are doing that. Election officials don’t know how their equipment works and won’t know if it works wrong.”
I need a woman who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix
“Other than the fact our child will be bright, text-based and sarcastic, we will otherwise be a normal family.”
Working Productively in Bash’s vi Command Line Editing Mode (with Cheat Sheet)
“I am going to introduce you to bash’s vi editing mode and give out a detailed cheat sheet with the default keyboard mappings for this mode.”
The End of an Era - 6.001 is dead
Gerry Sussman is teaching this year’s 6.001 SICP class – the last time the class will be offered at MIT. It sounds like Scheme is being phased out of MIT’s CS program completely. What a sad day.
NetNewsWire is now free!
I wonder why newsgator would make this free. Seems like there was a pretty decent slate of paying users. Losing ground to Google Reader? Eventual ad placement? Just wanted to be nice? Weird.
The Pirate’s Dilemma
“We live in a world where it is legal for a company to patent pigs, or any other living thing except for a full birth human being, but copying a CD you bought onto your hard drive is considered an infringement of someone else’s rights.”
Simplifying Web Framework Deployment on Shared Hosting
On Dreamhost freaking out because they can’t get Rails deployed reliably.
Steal This Wi-Fi
Schneier advocates running an open wireless network at home. I've been doing this for about a year because I couldn’t get the Wii to work with security enabled. When I thought about it, I came to many of the same conclussions Bruce does in the article.
Shared Hosting is a Ghetto
“The constraints, the instability, and the unpredictability of a shared hosting environment are a big part of the reason why the web hosting business is moving towards virtualization everywhere you look. Big kids need their own sandboxes to play in.”
Under pressure from EMI, RIAA could disappear
Could be huge: “rumors continue to swirl that EMI will pull its funding from music trade groups like the RIAA and IFPI, an IFPI spokesman tells Ars that the group is in the middle of a major internal review of its operations.”
What PHP Deployment Gets Right
Ian takes a look at some of the attributes of PHP’s deployment model, why they work so well (for PHP), and why other environments have such a hard time duplicating them.
Reverse proxy roundup
Bob Ippolito wrote up some pros and cons to reverse proxy implementations in different servers a few months back. I don’t think much of it is out of date at this point but nginx isn’t represented.
DTerm - A command line anywhere and everywhere
Payware GUI shell thingy for MacOS. This is not a QuickSilver/Launchbar clone. It’s more like a magical bash interpreter that knows things about what’s happening in various Mac GUI applications (like Finder, Safari, etc).
Speaking of, "lying through their teeth..."
Sanjiva Weerawarana is such a tool.
ArchitectNotes - Varnish
“I have spent many years working on the FreeBSD kernel, and only rarely did I venture into userland programming, but when I had occation to do so, I invariably found that people programmed like it was still 1975.”
Lying Through Their Teeth: Easy vs. Simple
Steve Vinoski compares IDL as used w/ CORBA/DCOM with WSDL as used by WS-*. It’s interesting that IDL served as more than just a description for machines. Humans used IDL as spec text and built services accordingly, just like REST :)
My Open Wireless Network
Schneier adds a bit to his Wired article last week on running an open wireless network.
The apostrophe key does not mean "Holy shit, here comes an s!"
“You think your better then me just because you no grammar?” :)
Myth: RESTful Web Services Don't Need an Interface Definition Language
Dare weighs in on the usefulness of description languages in REST-based design and seems to conclude that Uniform Interface != Description Language and that simple discovery ( style) is the appropriate comparison.
Give Me a M: The MySQL/Sun Q&A
Steve does the Sun/MySQL aquisition Q&A and speculates on some interesting effects of the deal: “… YouTube sold for $1.6 billion, and consumed virtually no software. If that acquisition was to take place today, they would have been buying from Sun.”
How Software Companies Die
Orson Scott Card: “You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can’t exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they’re not looking, you can carry off the honey.”
In Unix, what do some obscurely named commands stand for?
Dennis Ritchie: “There was a facility that would execute a bunch of commands stored in a file; it was called runcom for ‘run commands’, and the file began to be called ‘a runcom’. rc in Unix is a fossil from that usage.”
Why I'm Pining for PDF Support in Firefox/Gecko
What I'd like to do is run Firefox/Gecko on the server. It would load up the report, render it with the print stylesheet and then output the PDF. The concept is not unlike khtml2png or webkit2png but instead of outputting a raster image, it would output a PDF: gecko2pdf, if you will.
Sun and MySQL: I don't get it
Oops: “At $1 billion … Sun paid a multiple of 10 times sales for MySQL today. Optimistically assuming a 20% profit margin, they are looking at a multiple of 50 times earnings for a return on investment of around 2% per year. Optimistically.”
MapReduce: A major step backwards
Rut-roh. The RDBMS crowd is none too happy about the recent MapReduce talk. This article suggests they've solved all these problems a long time ago and that MapReduce is basically retarded. This discussion will get interesting over the next few weeks.
Help! The WS-* vs. REST Debate Has Been Hijacked By People Who Want To Have Logical Discussions About Actual Real World Issues!
A call to arms.
Full Page Zoom Is For Sissies
Did I ever tell you about the guy that spent the better part of a day making his site’s layout entirely em based …
The Algorithm: Idiom of Modern Science
“The Algorithm’s coming-of-age as the new language of science promises to be the most disruptive scientific development since quantum mechanics.”
The problem with pixels
“… anybody who’s ever built out a relatively complex design using ems will agree that at some point they wondered if the benefit was really worth the effort.”
Programs on the scale of a million lines of code are getting more common. But how big is that?
“A million lines of code is not ten times more than 100,000. It’s well-known that schedules grow faster than the code … so the schedule for developing a million lines of code is 22 times bigger than for 100,000 LOC.”
On: “working alongside some of the better developers”
Why RedMonk is succeeding where other analyst houses fail: “Other analyst firms primarily target sell-side or buy-side. We really don’t see the world that way. RedMonk’s core constituency is ‘make-side’: the makers and doers, hackers and players.”
Websphere CTO Jerry Cuomo on REST & Project Zero
Whoa. I apparently haven’t spent nearly enough time looking into IBM’s Project Zero. It seems to come down to REST + (Groovy|PHP) and sneaking practical technologies in the front door with a “SOA” label on it. Interesting strategy.
Minesweeper and NP-completeness
The problem of simply detecting which squares are or are not mines is NP-complete, and that means, for Minesweeper fans, that their favourite game can be seen as being right at the cutting edge of mathematical research.
LEDs in your contact lenses?
Contact based HUDs are coming: “Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have developed a prototype contact lens that incorporates an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.”
Django People
Simon Willison’s latest project makes it easy for people developing in Django to hook up and get laid (since they have so much free-time due to developing in Django).
IE8 To Make Tender Chickens
“The MIT guy did not like this solution because it was not the right thing.”
Watching the market detox
“There is no one who actually WANTS the money right now, and so cutting the Fed Fund rate has no effect on inflation or anything else for that matter, except for the fragile psyches of the CNBC crowd.”
put a proxy in front
“… even if you have a single server, a proxy in front can help performance significantly. Through the simple expedient of buffering, your heavyweight processes don’t waste time serving every request for the entire length of time the client is connected”
Planetary Society Criticizes NASA's Manned Moon Plan (Which Is really Bush's Manned Moon Plan)
“He said he had a mandate from the president and Congress and he was not going to consider other options. It’s going to have to change. They don’t have the money to do it.”
Rap Lyrics Explained With Charts and Graphs
Includes a nice chart of the Differentiation of Fat Joe’s Liquid Based Promiscuity :)
The Standard Trolls
Microsoft missing the point with regards to “standards”? Inconceivable! Every time I read stuff like this I wonder if it’s intellectual dishonesty or if the folks over at MS are really this ignorant. You have to lean toward dishonesty here, I think.
War Breaks Out Between Hackers and Scientology -- There Can Be Only One
“… people of the Internet, the YTMNDers, trolls of the world, the GameFAQs members, the eBaumers; us old time Internet users, and the newest of noobs, the YouTubers and MySpacers, must band together for a fight that transcends our differences …” :)
Nigiri-zushi Hg
The Environmental Protection Agency are such alarmists.
Code Rush (A PBS Special on Netscape circa 1998)
“Code Rush follows the people of Netscape Communications during an intense period in 1998, when it was all but certain that Microsoft had already won control of the Internet user’s desktop.”
What should Microsoft do instead?
Holy crap, this is insane. Just let people run IE6 and IE7 as separate standalone browsers side-by-side with IE8. As James said in my previous post, they can even rebrand it as “Intranet Explorer” :)
The Speed-up Loop [thedailywtf.com]
“Nothing – and I mean nothing – in IT takes less than 80 hours, and whatever you think it’ll actually take, multiply it by 20, and tell management that. You see, 80/20.”
Perl as a Web Scripting Language
No, but seriously, the only reason we’re not all using Perl for web development is because all the problems are already solved … and have been since around 1995 or so. (See Also: mod_perl, libwww-perl, Fielding et al.)
Reddit: "merely a collection of trivia, narrow, shallow, and sensational"
Kragen throws some useful criticism at Digg/Reddit: “If you fill your head with ‘merely a collection of trivia, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational’, it won’t stay there; it’ll trickle right out again.”
The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power (Time's Cover Story on Scientology)
Time Mag pulls back the curtain on Scientology and reveals the cult for the batshit criminal organization it is. It’s about time. EDIT: sorry, this was published in 1991 :–(
Hypermedia WTF!
“… there’s a sub-constraint that goes by the unwieldly name of ‘Hypermedia as the engine of application state’, which is arguably the most important constraint of REST in the sense that it alone provides the bulk of the ‘shape’ of RESTful systems …”
Firefox 3.0 Native Mac Theme Lands On Trunk
Firefox 3.0’s new default Mac theme showed up today in the current trunk nightly (Minefield). The theme is very similar to Safari’s.
Interview with Steve Yegge on Rhino on Rails
Dion Almaer sits down with Yegge to talk about his JavaScript/Rails port. Nice one-on-one video, candid, and thick in technical detail.
pv(1) - Pipe Viewer
pv can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion.
Browser Usage
I've long thought that the percentage of visits going to Firefox in my site statistics were oddly high. It turns out it’s pretty much in line with numbers put out by both Bob Sutor and Joe Gregorio…
“The Bug Count Also Rises” by John Browne
“Hernando who worked down the hall and who was large with microbrews came to him and told him that the ship day was upon them but the bugs were not yet out. The bugs which were always there even when you were in Cafes late at night sipping a …”
Microsoft Boy Announces His School Homework
“What is catching users' eyes? Legibility, correctness, conciseness…. the list goes on and on. Simply put, this history essay is a significant release for me – one that builds on all of the great things that I was able to deliver last year […]”
Yoda Fail
“… sued the restaurant where she worked saying she was promised a new Toyota for winning a beer sales contest in April. Berry, 26, believed that she had won a new car, but she was blindfolded, led to the parking lot and presented a toy Yoda …”
James Gosling Supports Closures in Java
“Closures were left out of Java initially more because of time pressures than anything else. Closures, as a concept, are tried and true – well past the days of being PhD topics.”
How I lost my faith (in lisp) - comp.lang.lisp
“Between 1988 and 1991 I worked on the research program that led to the Mars Pathfinder rover […] All three of [the prototypes] were programmed not in Lisp, but in little mini-languages whose compilers were written in Lisp.”
Mother Earth Mother Board
Neil Stephenson writing on “the longest wire on Earth” (undersea fiber) for Wired in 1996.
Numb3rs
Bill de hÓra making all kinds of sense on the topic of Android, mobile platforms, the cloud, and other things.
Modern Firefox Theme That Looks Like Netscape 3.0 Running On Windows 3.1
This is pretty funny. Even the options dialogs are themed.
Dear IE6, I hate you
“There comes a time in every old browser’s life to pack up shop and, well, fuck off. This time has come and gone for IE6 …” Also: “42% of global users are still browsing the web with IE6.”
PrinceXML Is Extremely Impressive
I didn’t know it was possible to build such nice closed-source programs.
The Technology Rejection Curve
Joe Gregorio: “This is what I call the ‘Scooby-Doo’ phase of the technology rejection curve, where the rubber mask has been ripped off and the crook yells as he’s dragged off by the cops […]”
Ballmer: I'm completely out of ideas
“… Ballmer is an old-school kind of guy. He’s not really a tech guy. […] He’s a Big Three automaker kind of guy. And this is a Big Three move. It’s Ford buying Jaguar and Land Rover and Volvo because they can’t think of anything else to do.”
Håkon's Wium Lie
Ahh, it turns out Håkon’s Wium Lie (Opera CTO and the guy who first proposed CSS) is on YesLogic’s board, makers of PrinceXML. I'm not sure how I missed that.
Printing a Book with CSS: Boom!
Bert Bos and Håkon Wium Lie show off some of Prince’s more advanced CSS and HTML features, including styling page size, generating headers/footers, advanced use of the CSS content attribute, page numbering, cross-references, and table of contents.
Mercury is a new, purely declarative logic programming language.
What PrinceXML is coded in, apparently. It’s like Prolog for large systems: declarative, strongly typed and type inferencing, module system, closures, currying, lambdas, and with a strong determinism system. Compiles down to C (as a portable assembler).
SwitchPipe - Process Manager and Proxy for Rapid Web App Deployment
Peter Cooper scratches the deployment problem itch.
PostgreSQL 8.3 Release Notes
I've been watching the weekly changelogs and there were a ton of performance tweaks. The FreeBSD port landed today as well.
Google Super Tuesday Twitter Map View Thingy
Watch tweets pop up around the country on a google map as people comment on the goings-on of Super Tuesday.
htop - top(1) replacement with hierarchical process listing, nicer keyboard interface, and more...
Runs on Linux and FreeBSD (with linproc mounted on /compat/linux/proc). I've always wondered why top(1) just kind of stopped being developed 10 years ago.
Wanted: Git Cheat Sheet for Collaboration
There’s some good questions here. I've been running into a few of the same issues while experimenting with moving some of my bzr projects to git. Can one of the git pros out there have a look?
Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's Company-Wide Memo Regarding the Microsoft Takeover Bid
“Welcome to Microsoft.”
W3C's Excessive DTD Traffic
“Our hope was that the authors of misbehaving software and the administrators of sites who deployed it would notice these errors and make the necessary fixes to the software responsible.” – You must be new here.
valgrind and ruby
Evan Weaver: “These leaks tend to grow slowly. Your Rails app definitely has this kind of leak, especially if it uses the ActiveRecord session store.”
Git User's Manual
Finally: “this manual is designed to be readable by someone with basic UNIX command-line skills, but no previous knowledge of git.”
Ubuntu's Upstart event-based init daemon
I have a strange fetish for init systems (sysv, rc, launchd, etc). This is the first quick introduction to Ubuntu’s new init system (Upstart) I've seen. Nice examples of using the initctl command and writing job files.
RubyForge: cameltoe-0.0.1-released
“Cameltoe is a set of utility functions for making Ruby objects more like camel toes.” — You've piqued my interest :) It looks like this adds a String#cameltoeize method, amongst other things…
Tab Control
Lightweight Firefox extension that causes new tabs to open to the right of the current tab. Works with Firefox 3.0 betas and nightlies with extension compatibility checking disabled.
assert{ 2.0 }
Nice Ruby assertion library that’s block based. Shows block contents when the assertion fails. Much cleaner than Test::Unit assertions and without the retarded RSpec non-sense. This really ought to be rolled into the stdlib Test::Unit, IMO.
9 Practical Ways to Enhance your Web Development Using the Firefox Web Developer Extension
From the comments: “the only things i find [useful] in Web Developer Extension is the shortcut to clear cache… for other things i use Firebug…” — Me too!
Single file Rails Application
A “Hello World” Rails webapp in fewer LOC than a Java console app that System.out.println(“Hello World”). The routes and controller DSLs look pretty interesting as well.
GitHub
Seriously interesting web based git browser and collaboration tool from the folks at Engine Yard. If anyone has a spare invite laying around, hook me up: rtomayko@gmail.com. I have a bunch of stuff sitting in bzr repos that I'd like to flip over to git.
GitHub: rtomayko's Profile
Huge thanks to al3x for the invite. I’ll be writing up my experience over the next week or so.
Firefox 3 nightly builds shipping w/ FreeBSD's malloc(3) implementation
“The reason we are integrating our own allocator is that we've found jemalloc to be better than all the default allocators of our three main platforms (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)”
This is where you send new features into the ghetto so that they can 'battle it out' ...
“The last features standing get re-integrated into another branch known as the ‘trailer park’ to try to find a new life for themselves. Note that ghetto is frequently called ‘trunk’, and the trailer park something like ‘releng’”
A Nice Big Purple Reddit Stack Trace
reddit.com is running Pylons-0.9.6, Paste-1.4.2, Routes-1.7, Beaker-0.7.5 on FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE (amd64). Wow. Nice environment.
Chroot in OpenSSH
“… adds a chroot(2) facility to sshd, controlled by a new sshd_config(5) option ‘ChrootDirectory’. This can be used to ‘jail’ users into a limited view of the filesystem, such as their home directory …”
IBM Web services guru predicts WSDL future
From 2002: “On this latter specification, Sutor is emphatic: web services are defined by whether they are described in WSDL.”
Process title support for Mongrel
Constantly updates the the process title ($0) with something like: “mongrel_rails [10010/2/358]: handling 127.0.0.1: HEAD /feed/calendar/global/91/6de4”. Let’s you monitor backends with ps and top.
GitHub: mongrel_proctitle GemPlugin
I repackaged mongrel_proctitle as a GemPlugin so that all mongrels on use it automatically. This is the first chance I've had to play with GitHub, too. Lovin' it.
Unfortunately, I think it's a little more complicated than that...
“Math class is tough; let’s go shopping!”
bzr2git
A quick script I threw together to convert simple bzr branches to git repos. Requires git, bzr, and rsync.
Zero Sign On - 1 better or Infinitely better than Single Sign On?
This is so right. Why didn’t client certificates ever catch on in the browser? Or signed emails? Neither are hard to get set up but nobody uses it. It’s weird.
Dumb and Dumber in 5 Seconds [youtube.com]
This is far and away the funniest part of the movie… Whelp, see ya later.
Csh Programming Considered Harmful
Uggghhh. I just spent 30 minutes hunting some arcane tcsh bug caused by coreutils dircolors. This is my revenge. I don’t even know I had any csh code running on this machine. It turns out that MacOS X’s /usr/bin/which is implemented in csh. Dumb.
NginxHttpEmptyGifModule
“The ngx_http_empty_gif_module keeps a 1x1 transparent GIF in memory that can be served very quickly.” — That’s so amazingly awesome; spacer.gif for life.
GitHub: My Kind of Social Software
Fork me!
FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE Announcement
I thought I had a few more months. Dammit. This is going to be a huge time-sink.
GNU is killing Solaris
I can’t think of single piece (package?) of software I use, admire, and depend on more than GNU Coreutils. Maybe Firefox. Maybe OpenSSH. Some days rsync(1).
Vimperator
Make Firefox like Vim. No, like, insanely like Vim. Not just h,j,k,l mappings but everything. Looks like it’s been around for awhile. I'm not sure how I missed it.
The Ruby Programming Language
Yukihiro (Matz) Matsumoto, David Flanagan, _why the lucky stiff, David A. Black, Charles Oliver Nutter, and Shyouhei Urabe: that’s what I call a writing team. Wow.
Javascript online massive social password cracking ?
Yes! Please. Make your friends on myspace work for you. Idle CPU is wasted CPU, dontchaknow.
Must Watch: I Am Legend's Original Ending
Hmmm. I knew there was something fishy with the last 15 minutes or so.
On The Use of Code in Weblog Titles
So you've decided to start a weblog and have a really clever idea for titling it based on a snippet of code you find particularly novel. Rad!
The Ten Commandments of Unicode
“I am Unicode, thy character set. Thou shalt have no other character sets before me.”
20 Year Archive on Google Groups
I'm apparently the last person on the internet to see this. The rise of internet culture as recorded on Usenet. It’s beautiful, really.
So, What Does "HREF" Stand For, Anyway?
Today it occurred to me that, after a little over ten years of basic fluency in HTML, I have absolutely no idea why the href attribute is named “href”. Why not “url”, “link”, or even just “ref”?
Mozilla Bug 417302 – about:robots
“In the spirit of the Firefox 3 firstrun pages, I would like to permanently commemorate the noble deeds of the robot community in their fight for an open web.”
css_color.vim - CSS color preview : vim online
Makes the background of hexadecimal color codes the respective color. So, background-color:#f00 will have a red background in the vim editing window. Nifty.
jQuery evangelism
I need to give jQuery a serious look. Prototype’s Ajax.Request stuff is crippled (no PUT or DELETE) to the point of being worthless; the jQuery selector magic looks a lot more intriguing than what you get with Prototype, too.
HyperText.m - source to TimBL's first implementation of hypertext (Sept. 25, 1990)
From the comments: “HyperText is like Text, but includes links to and from other hypertexts.”
Presentational JavaScript to adjust text line-height in proportion to text column width.
“If you can’t control the text width the next best thing you can do to compensate for an overly wide text measure is to increase the leading.” — I never considered that but it makes sense.
Dion Almaer's Home Page
This takes “the use of code in weblog titles” to a whole new level. Hilarious.
It's Pi Day!
“Coincidentally, Pi Day is also the birthday of Albert Einstein, who no doubt knew more than a little about pi.”
I Can Haz Hardcore Forking Action
More praise for GitHub from a small team of Django hackers that built a site in three hours on one night with a little help from git…
Administrative Debris
“I hold that simplicity is the most important attribute of design,” I say. To which Tufte would reply, “No, you don’t.”
The Common Lisp Directory finally crashed after 823 days
“So the CLD lisp process uptime experiment is now over and I will move the CLD to a better place than a simple server in my basement.”
Martian Mindsets
Sam Ruby filling in for Mark Pilgrim (and featuring Mark Pilgrim in the comments) skewers Joel Spolsky over his “Martian Headsets” piece on the IE8 standards-mode dilemma. I use the word “skewered” in the nicest way possible, of course.
Scientists fight to save the last Java gibbons
I thought this was a computer programming related article … buh-zing!
JavaScript Based Code Prettification
As seen on Google Code’s new and improved source browser.
Translation From MS-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Joel Spolsky’s “Martian Headsets”
Mark contributes the obligatory fisking.
Addressing Doubts about REST
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.
On software architecture
Roy Fielding on the difference between architecture, architecural styles, patterns, implementations, and applications.
Why aren’t you using ionice yet???
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…
Mistaking Cons for Pros
chromatic on million-line Java programs: “I can only imagine how much larger the Java code would be without all of those XML files.”
The Tech Press Has Come Along Way
That’s doodoo, baby.
April First Reconsidered
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.
What Is the Open Web and Why Is It Important?
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.”
Git for Computer Scientists
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.
The immediacy of PHP
David Heinemeier Hansson: “PHP scales down like no other package for the web and it deserves more credit for tackling that scope.”
Agreed!
The Rec.humor.funny Ban
“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?
Why PHP is good but bad
Not sure how I missed linking to this. Pretty much mirrors my feelings on PHP to a T, except more thought out.
Maintainable Programmers
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.
To a T
“… 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) …”
highlight.js
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.
Adrian Holovaty's Insanely Great Remix of Radiohead's "Nude"
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.
What a DVCS gets you (maybe)
Bill de hÓra gives some reasons for using a distributed VCS even when the downstream repo is non-distributed.
Ruby’s not ready
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.
My rules of thumb for developers: less code
Rafe kicks off a series detailing various aspects of his coding philosophy. The first is near and dear to my heart: less code
Google App Engine
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.
Indexed
The more interesting aspects of life described using only venn diagrams, an occasional line graph, and a scatter plot here and there.
The Thing About Git
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.
The Differences Between Mercurial and Git
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.
My initial reaction to Google App Engine (in Simon Willison's comments)
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.
commit-patch
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.
App Engine and Open Source
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.”
Clouds Rolling In: The Google App Engine Q&A
Stephen O'Grady with the obligatory Q&A, which is excellent as always.
Multiprocess versus Multithreaded ... or why Java infects Unix with the Windows mindset
Erik Engbrecht: “Java took cheap Unix processes and made them expensive. To compensate, it provided primitives for multithreading.”
Say hello to the (GitHub) Network Graph Visualizer
Now this is the kind of direction I hope to see GitHub and Gitorious go in the future.
A run-time for “the New Reality”
“… 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.
Burning the midnight oil
Ethan Vizitei on the difference in productivity found in the middle of the night vs. any other time of day. Nails it, IMO.
Doctorow Declares His Virgin Media (ISP) Contract Null, Void
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.”
That Vista Thud is the sound of executive layoffs
eWeek: “… Nearly every Microsoft executive associated with the Windows Vista launch has left the company. Vista has proven to be a career-ending enterprise …”
"All I need is a Programmer"
Ethan Vizitei with a great piece on people’s misconceptions about what coders do and the difficulty with which they do it.
‘I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!’: A Guide to Proper Usage
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.
GitHub Adds Gem Server Support
A gem for your project is automatically built each time the project_name.gemspec file is changed on your master branch.
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
“Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.”
Just add scaling!
“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.”
xkcd: Forks and Spoons
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.
Kent State Massacre
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.
An Under-Appreciated Fact: We Don't Know How We Program
“… 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)’.”
The day the music died
“Apple calls these songs ‘iTunes Plus’, because it sounds so much better than calling everything else ‘iTunes Minus.’”
My Git Workflow
Oliver Steele details his (and others’s) Git workflow with a bunch of illustrative graphs, emphasizing one of my favorite aspects of Git: There’s More Than One Way To Do It.
Google Doctype
What Mark Pilgrim has been working on at Google for the past year or so: an encyclopedia of web development.
REST: Reducing Effort in Script-based Testing
Boo! Horrible name collision imminent. Is REST really that unknown or do they just not care?
The giant cow that's the size of a baby elephant
… and other freakishly large animal pr0n. Awesome. (via sogrady)
Dynamically created methods in Ruby
Ola Bini on def vs. define_method vs. eval for defining methods in Ruby. There really ought to be a simple way of getting stuff like this from blogs and into the standard Ruby doc.
Mozilla Firefox 3 RC1
And I was just starting to get used to the Minefield icon… I've been running the nightlies for about three months now and FF2 is really feeling a bit like legacy software.
Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons NonCommercial (-NC) License
Sold! All my stuff will soon be non-NC.
The Rise of Contextual User Interfaces
Interesting look at evolution of UI and the semi-recent trend of adopting the web’s content oriented interface. Definitely overlaps with the fundamentals of “admin debris” and related ideas.
Apache 3.0 (a tall tale), Roy Fielding
Nice ApacheCon EU ‘08 presentation (warning: video + slides, no transcript) covering various blue sky stuff on Roy’s brain for Apache and HTTP.
Counting Characters in UTF-8 Strings Is Fast
Aristotle Pagaltzis: “Not exactly as fast [as SBCS strlen], but if you write it in asm, it only takes one extra instruction to count characters in UTF-8 vs those in an 8-bit encoding, per character.”
peg-markdown
An implementation of Markdown in portable ANSI C that’s roughly 28.5x faster than the canonical Perl implementation on a 179K test file. Looks like a complete implementation; includes smarty and footnote extensions.
Don't give Microsoft the remote control
Short and exceptionally well written take on Microsoft’s Vista DRM strategy. I'm really enjoying the FSF going on the offensive with sites targeting very specific issues (badvista.fsf.org).