Curated
Dean Allen on LOST
Dean Allen on LOST:
It’s crap. Utter, arbitrary crap. They make it up as they go along.
I’m not judging, but he could prove correct. Oddly enough I found this on his colophon page. Interesting information architecture there.
Rails Scenarios
Rails Scenarios - a sane way to specify really complex fixtures in Rails. Lets you write classes to specify data and helpers to operate on that data. There’s a sane way to compose data and create relationships, as well as support for test/unit and RSpec. Personally, I’m currently in a not-unhappy place with YAML fixtures, but if you aren’t, this is worth a look.
Ballmen for Half Life 2
Ballmen Mod - a Half Life 2 mod where you can walk on walls and do all sorts of insane jumping due to weird gravity. Please tell me someone is making a Möbius strip map for this mod. I'd always wanted to make one of those for Quake 2.
Corrupted by cosmic rays
ACID Databases: Fact and Fiction
"A final note: There are other things that can go wrong, such as the disk not writing the data properly, a bit in memory being flipped by a cosmic ray, etc which only redundancy can solve. "
There is something distinctly awesome about mentioning data loss by cosmic rays. I do it whenever I have the means.
Its a musical rollercoaster
If jazz is more your thing, then you should watch this animation based on “Giant Steps”.
Ryan Norbauer's got the right idea
Amy Hoy interviews Ryan Norbauer. This got my attention:
"Simplification, unification, and reduction: these are the values of a great craftsperson, whether she's a tradesperson in the guild of ideas, words, paintings, or software."
Tackling complexity in software:
Programming should be about making things that seem complicated easy to handle.
The world of the programmer:
In this way, programmers are really lucky. Unlike biologists or mechanical engineers, who have to deal with the world on its own terms, programmers deal in a world that is entirely of their own making. We have the luxury of being able to re-work and re-invent our world to make it easier to understand. Physicists don't have the option of re-writing the laws of relativity in order to make the cosmos easier to understand for everyone, but programmers do have an analogous power. If something like the exchange of data over the web, or the modeling of database records as programmatic objects is too complex, we have the power to invent a new world that makes everything easier to get our head around.
Its a long interview, but worth it if any of the above resonates with you.
Two Microsofts
I get the impression that there are really two Microsofts. There’s Ray Ozzie’s Microsoft. He’s a geek. He gets developers. He understands technology and users. Then there’s Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft. He’s an old-school businessman in the mold of Scrooge McDuck. If Ray Ozzie is calling the shots, then there is reason to be hopeful for the future. If the buck stops with Steve Ballmer however, Microsoft is f**ked.
Pretty hiring trends
Pretty graphs at Simply Hired:
- Interesting how Ruby, Python and PHP so closely track each other
- I would have never guessed how close JS and C# are, especially given that one has basically no vender and really spotty implementations while the other has a massive vendor and two pretty good implementations
My dog misses me
I’m at the Microsoft Technology Summit this week.
Of course, Fred misses me (and I miss him!), so he’s sleeping on my pillow to keep it warm.
Write a script in April for Script Frenzy
Script Frenzy – wherein one writes a script in the month of April. I’m tempted to take part, though I’m sure it’d would end up in detriment to all the other plates I have spinning.
Fix Subversion conflicts
Got a case where you did a @svn up@ and now you have a bunch of conflicts where you just want to overwrite your changes? I’ve got a little bit of Ruby cleverness for you:
`svn status`.split("\n").grep(/^C/).map { |c| c.scan(/\S+/).last }.each { |c| `svn cat #{c} > #{c} && svn resolved #{c}` }
I run this from @irb@ at the root of my Subversion working directory. It makes me happy.
Update: lord that looks ugly on one line!
status = `svn status`.split("\n")
conflicts = status.grep(/^C/)
files = conflicts.map { |c| c.scan(/\S+/).last }
conflicts.each do |c|
`svn cat #{c} > #{c} && svn resolved #{c}`
end
Git is nouns and verbs
Git was originally not a version control system; it was designed to be the infrastructure so that someone else could build one on top. And they did; nowadays there are more than 100 git-* commands installed along with git. It's scary and confusing and weird, but what that means is git is a platform. It's a new set of nouns and verbs that we never had before. Having new nouns and verbs means we can invent entirely new things that we previously couldn't do.
Summertime Blues
“Summertime Blues” The Who (originally Eddie Cochran)