2008
Applying CSS
Why Programmers Suck at CSS - a great primer on how to get from mechanical knowledge of how CSS works to actually using it to make nice things.
Stupid Struct Tricks
All About Struct - there’s always more to learn about @Struct@, unless you’re James Edward Gray. Useful and illuminating for all shades of Ruby developers.
Stream of curiosity
Questions going through my head right now:
- Why is “The Men All Pause” seven minutes long?
- What was the point of that “heavy breathing” break?
- Was it really necessary to have six ladies in Klymaxx?
- Why am I listening to this again?
Learn You a Haskell
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! - if you learned Ruby via The Poignant Guide, you’ll like this. Plus, Haskell does cool stuff to your brain.
Garrett's life, yesterday
My Day, Yesterday - a glimpse into the world of Garrett Murray. Best ninety seconds of video I’ve seen all week. If you like it and/or my style of humor, you’ll like his Qwick Reviews too.
Launch the missiles!
The A-Z of Programming Languages: Haskell - a great interview with the awesome Simon Peyton-Jones on Haskell. I love his use of the “launch the missiles!” metaphor for thinking about side-effects and IO in programs. Via projectionist.
JBox2D equals fun
JBox2D is a port of a C++ physics engine to Java. Being Java means you can use it in Processing. Being Processing means you can use it for fun. And the demos, behold, they are fun!
Mining my Git repositories
Since I started using Git, I’ve been finding myself creating tons of repositories. Anything I think might someday prove interesting or that I work on for more than a few minutes, I create a Git repository. I’ve yet to discover that ultimate workflow, but between experimenting with using it to put presentations online, managing the Dallas.rb website via Git and using it extensively at FiveRuns, Git is proving quite fun.
But let’s get back to that earlier point: I have a metric shit-ton of repositories laying around in my home directory. This morning I found myself wondering exactly how many I have and how many actually have a remote (i.e. how many have yielded a project worth backing up remotely and/or sharing). So, I did the numbers:
| Directory | Repositories | Remotes |
|---|---|---|
| @/Users/adam@ (Home, sweet home) | 287 | 263 |
| @~/FiveRuns@ (Work stuff) | 161 | 160 |
| @~/repos@ (All source-ish stuff) | 85 | 69 |
| @~/repos/sources@ (Interesting code of others) | 62 | 60 |
| @~/repos/projects@ (My own code) | 9 | 6 |
| @~/Desktop@ (Landing pad for the newest of projects) | 1 | 0 |
Which is about what I’d expect in terms of quantity and ratio. I’m a little surprised I have so many work repositories laying around, but we use submodules extensively so there’s probably only about 40 repositories that are meaningful to us. I’m a little suprised that so many of my personal projects do have remotes though. I guess I’m making progress towards doing more.
For those interested, the script that begat all this fun data. Run it yourself and share your numbers!
Rich Kilmer speaketh
Ruby’s Best Feature? Rich Kilmer is one of those uncanny developers who can crank out orders of magnitude more good code than your average developer. When he speaks, I always listen.
Awesome writing
I want to take that video behind the middle school and get it pregnant.
You need more Lyle Lovett
Lyle Lovett is quite possibly one of Texas' finest exports. If you’re not hip then you’re missing out. Heck, I was missing out; consider a couple of his appearances on the Johnny Carson show.
Make it a…cheeseburger.
Do I wish that I could sing like Francine Reed or Lyle Lovett? Every day.
Read slightly less, practice slightly more
Chris Wanswrath, a smart and distinguished fellow, advises us to burn our news readers and just “hear it through the grapevine.” But how far can one go with that?
For myself, reading feeds gets me a few things:
-
Aesthetic where I have none. Feeds like BLDGBLOG and Coudal point me to things that make me better at what I do, in a tangential way, and a more interesting person. These are things that otherwise I wouldn’t know where to start.
-
Awareness on the edges. Reading folks like Simon Willison or Jason Kottke make sure that interesting topics in programming or erudition don’t go unseen even though I am focused on that topic.
-
Aggregation of ideas. This cuts two ways. Most people worth reading compress a bunch of different sources down to a manageable stream. This gives me more bang for the buck in my feed reading time. On the other hand, if a link is mentioned several times in the aggregate of feeds I subscribe to, then its probably worth checking out.
I can see how following interesting folks on Twitter and reading aggregators occasionally can you get you some of this, but not all of it. With sources like Reddit or Hacker News, signal to noise is a problem - you can’t control who posts what. Some people have a lot of extra angst and/or spare time. Which is also the other side of the Twitter story. Some people are great to read, but a pain to put up with at times. So it goes.
When Chris' essay first hit the wires, I was tempted to adopt his ways. But, I think I’m pretty good at ignoring the need to unbold things and cut down to business. What has proved immensely useful to me was has encouragement to just code all the time and make lots of stuff. I’m just getting started with this, but already I’m liking the increased feeling of accomplishment.
Regardless, we could all probably stand to trim our feed lists and hunker down on our projects, no?
Our trip to Germany in pictures
Here are four of my favorite pictures from our trip to Germany:
From top to bottom we’ve got the cool elevator at BMW Welt with glass doors, an old building in Munich with rather modern wings added on, a pygmy hippo at the Berlin zoo and a cool video wall at the BMW museum showing numbers that might appear as model numbers.
You can “look at all my pictures”:flickr.com/photos/th… or “check out”:flickr.com/photos/co… “Courtney’s”:flickr.com/photos/co… “pictures”:flickr.com/photos/co…
Vector Prime
Vector Prime. Yeah, I’m that big of a Star Wars nerds, I read these little novels when I need a break from heavier stuff. This one isn’t as good as any in the Thrawn trilogy, but its not horrible action sci-fi and fun for Star Wars nerds, like myself.