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23 Nov 09

Why experts are morons: a recipe for academic success « Finite Attention Span

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if the world were made of custard, global warming might lead to major dessertification

19 Aug 09

Majikthise : Protesters tote semi-automatic assault rifles at Obama event

"Taking a loaded assault rifle to a protest is naked intimidation. Whoever is organizing these militia mental midgets needs to call them off right now. They may be within their legal rights, but their behavior is profoundly anti-democratic."

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Taking a loaded assault rifle to a protest is naked intimidation. Whoever is organizing these militia mental midgets needs to call them off right now. They may be within their legal rights, but their behavior is profoundly anti-democratic.

11 Feb 09

Giz Explains: Why Kindle 2 Isn't a Big Step Forward For Voracious Readers

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There are improvements that make the Kindle 2 marginally better for readers, like faster page turning, smaller better page-turn buttons, longer battery life and the ability to charge via USB.

03 Feb 09

Best Practice work-flow with git | Wildfalcon

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we had a centrally hosted repository
we had an authoritative branch on that repository. We all set our authoritative repository to be called “origin” and the branch was called master.
9 more annotations...
- no-one, absolutely no-one was allowed to work on master. Most of the time everyone in the team (except the gatekeeper) did not even have master set up as a local branch.
- we had another branch on origin, called stable. Stable was always an ancestor of origin/master, but lagged behind a bit. Stable had various tags placed on it, which represented the actual public releases we made.
- each developer had as many branches as they wanted. Foremost though, each developer had a branch named after themselves. So I mostly worked in the ‘laurie’ branch, which was also on origin as origin/laurie.
- This command gets the latest version of master, and applies any new changes to my code base. Master is not changed. I run all my tests again, and then deploy to stage-laurie.
- After I have gotten my code to a point where this all passes, I push the state of my local branch to origin/laurie, and I go and talk to the gatekeeper.
- The gatekeeper has a local master branch.
- He then gets a summary of what the changes are, and orders them in order of business value. Then, starting with the most critical change, he merges it into master, and runs all the tests. He then does this for the next most critical fix and so on. If at any point one of the merge results in code that fails the tests, he can simply un-merge
- After my changes (which are of course the most important) are successfully merged into master, everyone else can pull master again, and merge it back into their branch, - preempting any conflicts and fixing them.
- the gatekeeper then merges origin/master into origin/stable. Tags it with the latest release revision number, and deploys onto our production environment.

31 Jan 09

Let’s all grow up | Zen and the Art of Programming

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as far as spitting on Arrington, in Germany (where it happened) that’s only a misdemeanor, and be honest, he’s been spitting on people on his blog for years. I can understand that he didn’t enjoy it, but I can’t understand at all how it surprised him. I can only even explain the surprise with either a failure to understand cause and effect, or a sense of entitlement so monumental it includes the assumption that he can abuse strangers, but strangers can’t abuse him.
Discourse is not getting less civil. It is our ever-more-refined empathy that makes it *APPEAR* discourse is less civil. Discourse was always uncivil on the internet/newsgroups, just that Antonio never noticed when he was younger.

The best solution to incivility is to be civil yourself, and politely point out incivility in others. The last thing you should do is have a “senior moment” and lecture about how things were better when you were young.

30 Jan 09

Comet Daily » Blog Archive » Facebook Chat and Comet Scaling

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Thrift was used to allow the PHP, Javascript, Erlang, and C++ parts of their system to invoke each other

04 Jan 09

Python to Chicken Language Tr...

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Man lives in solar-powered bike mod for 30 years

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10 Dec 08

Cookbook/UsingIPythonWithTextMate - IPython

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Here are some commands that I've found handy for integrating TextMate a bit with an IPython session running in OS X's Terminal.app.

27 Nov 08

Why the webstandards world appears to be choosing Django | Morethanseven

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Django’s templating introduces a very simple syntax and nothing else. Rails lets you have the full power of Ruby to do with as you will within your views. Rails also makes heavy use of helpers, further adding to the complexity of views.
For the most part with Django you use the html you’re used to, Rails often wants you to change this to helpers – in much the same way as ASP.NET does in fact. I think some of this comes from the Rails don’t repeat yourself ~~philosophy~~ obsession. Sometimes this leads to programmatic complexity which makes working with templates more akin to programming, even if it means less duplication.
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- Some of the bits and pieces that come bundled with Rails are just plain wrong, the Javascript helpers being one example. The abuse of HTTP by default in some of the scaffolding code being another. Oh, and the markup coming out of various helpers as well. In trying to help the application developer Rails gets in the way of the professional webstandards types. Django does next to none of this for you. Programmers coming from Rails might see this as missing features. Frontend types prefer this clean slate approach because it means you don’t have to fight the backend (sometimes including people) for control of the output.
- frontend loving folk quite like writing CSS (well, sometimes) and absolutely love writing HTML. Most of the time for good reasons too – just look at microformats for an example. Frontend developers tend to like using a mix of tools

GusG.us Moving to Rails 2.2 Headaches - Vol 1

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Seadragon : Microsoft Live Labs

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Schneier on Security: <i>Here Comes Everybody</i> Review

"Economists have long understood the corollary concept of Coase's ceiling, a point above which organizations collapse under their own weight -- where hiring someone, however competent, means more work for everyone else than the new hire contributes."

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Economists have long understood the corollary concept of Coase's ceiling, a point above which organizations collapse under their own weight -- where hiring someone, however competent, means more work for everyone else than the new hire contributes.
What's new is something consultant and social technologist Clay Shirky calls "Coase's Floor," below which we find projects and activities that aren't worth their organizational costs
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- "most user-generated content isn't 'content' at all, in the sense of being created for general consumption, any more than a phone call between you and a sibling is 'family-generated content.' Most of what gets created on any given day is just the ordinary stuff of life -- gossip, little updates, thinking out loud -- but now it's done in the same medium as professionally produced material. Unlike professionally produced material, however, Internet content can be organized after the fact."
- In a world where the Coasean floor is at ground level, all sorts of organizations appear, including ones you might not like: violent political organizations, hate groups, Holocaust deniers, and so on.
- We never realized how much our security could be attributed to distance and inconvenience -- how difficult it is to recruit, organize, coordinate, and communicate without formal organizations. That inadvertent measure of security is now gone. Bad guys, from hacker groups to terrorist groups, will use the same ad hoc organizational technologies that the rest of us do.

Scientists are high on idea that marijuana reduces memory impairment

"scientists find that specific elements of marijuana can be good for the aging brain by reducing inflammation there and possibly even stimulating the formation of new brain cells."

www.osu.edu/newsitem2227 - Preview

scientists find that specific elements of marijuana can be good for the aging brain by reducing inflammation there and possibly even stimulating the formation of new brain cells.
THC joins nicotine, alcohol and caffeine as agents that, in moderation, have shown some protection against inflammation in the brain that might translate to better memory late in life.
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- "When we're young, we reproduce neurons and our memory works fine. When we age, the process slows down, so we have a decrease in new cell formation in normal aging. You need those cells to come back and help form new memories, and we found that this THC-like agent can influence creation of those cells,"

At Long Last, Physicists Calculate the Proton's Mass -- Cho 2008 (1121): 2 -- ScienceNOW

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myriad gluons and quark-antiquark pairs flit in and out of existence within a nucleon. All of these "virtual" particles interact in a frenzy of pushing and pulling that's nearly impossible to analyze quantitatively.
Ninety-five percent of the mass of a nucleon originates from these virtual particles.

25 Nov 08

How Comet Brings Instant Messaging to meebo - O'Reilly News

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The average meebo session lasts over two and a half hours. For every session, meebo's servers need to maintain a connection with the instant-messaging networks (which include that of AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google) as well as with the user's Web browser. Traditional Web-based middle layers begin to break down very quickly due to memory consumption and the excess overhead of framework creation and teardown for each HTTP request made.

04 Nov 08

AppleInsider | Apple's unibody MacBook: the review

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the new 13" MacBook represents one of the most fundamental rethinks of Apple's notebook design philosophy in several years and is an even greater change than for the professional-level models.

21 Oct 08

breakpoint: What do Rails Documentation and Carrot Juice Have in Common?

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Rails is a lot like quantum mechanics. It is extremely powerful, parts of it are deceptively simple, and if you look at anything, it changes. You quickly become convinced that Rails might as well have a no cloning theorem, because anything you copy from an existing example will behave completely differently when you put it in your application.
An extremely frustrating percentage of the answers to even simple questions about how to do things using the nuts-and-bolts of Rails itself, and custom JavaScript, with or without Prototype, etc., are met with "Oh, just use this plugin". Maddeningly, another large chunk turns out to be cobbled-together code chunks for old Rails versions that either no longer work properly for Rails 2.1, or will take you off into the weeds, reading about techniques that, even if they still function, are totally obsolete, replaced by far more elegant and practical techniques-- which you will be completely unable to find documentation for, anywhere.
1 more annotations...
- Q: Is Rails a mature technology?
  A: Maybe. If you have at least a few top-notch developers who have lived and breathed Rails for the last few years, maybe.