The web and the word processor
On an almost daily basis I must address the question of how best to organize content so that it can be managed effectively. On an almost daily basis I find myself oscillating between two distinct-yet-closely related worlds … On one hand there is the classic word processor world. … On the other hand, there is the less cozy but utterly compelling world of the web and web-oriented editing tools.
Sean McGrath, ITworld.com — This is an interesting subject. The product I’m working on, Raconteur, is right in the middle of this mess. One of these days we’ll put something on our website that actually says what Raconteur does. We are dealing with web pages in the order of a dozen to around 6000.
Here you will find various sorts of documentation written by Erlang users. We call them HowTo’s since we want them to guide the reader in order to accomplish something related to Erlang.
This is handy, and I can’t believe I’ve missed this before. Good grief! that’s annoying! (and, of course, entirely my fault… which makes it all the more annoying :-)
Twitter, Rails, Hammers, and 11,000 nails per second
This whole thing has me wondering why it is that SQL databases are used as the all-purpose hammer for solving all data storage problems for web apps. To some degree this has to be a historical accident, because I don’t think it’s necessarily obvious.
Thought Palace — I am with this guy. I have no problem with SQL databases, but i’ve got to wonder what the purpose is in small applications. There’s a rant going to come out of this!
Why would you want to build a website without a database? I’ll try to answer this question for you by explaining some of the reasons why I did it.
Micro Business Experiment — This is related to the last item. Holy @$!* — what’s so threatening about not using a SQL database?
I learned lots of things this week, but the most important thing I learned is that coding by dogma is a widely followed practice. Who knew? I didn’t. And it really took me by surprise.
The Micro Business Experiment — I think he’s being ‘nice’ — he knows perfectly well that people code by dogma. Yeah, yeah… I’m piling it on. And you know what? There’s no comments on this tumblelog yet.
I picked up a free copy of 19 Deadly Sins of Software Security at a conference last year. I didn’t expect the book to be good because it was a free giveaway item from one of the the vendor booths. But I paged through it on the flight home, and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s actually quite good.
Coding Horror
Predictions of the Year 2000 from The Ladies Home Journal of December 1900
The Ladies Home Journal from December 1900, which contained a fascinating article by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years”.
This is really great! The predictions tell a lot about how people thought 100 years ago. Wonderful!
Delusions of skill and of grandeur
In this post, I’m not just calling out TechCrunch, I’m calling out all his friends and everyone like him.
Warren Henning, Metacircular thoughts — Excellent rant!
Lately I’ve been having a blast with Joe Armstrong’s new Erlang Book. At some point I’ll blog about the really neat way the Erlang database unifies the set-based SQL query language and list comprehensions (it’s obvious when you think about it, but it blew me away when I first read it). But I just wanted to start off with some simple stuff.
PragDave — Another nice series.
Businesses Don't Demand Industrial Strengh Technology
And in many cases nor should they.
James Governor, Monkchips — He’s right… how could anything new ever be introduced otherwise?
Women in web design: just the stats
The underrepresentation of women and minorities in the information technology workforce is like the weather: everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything.
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents — At my last company we did stuff to address this. Women comprised the majority of the development team (majority plus one). There were something like forty-five of us. I don’t know about minorities, but I think we were approaching 40% (more if you include language minorities like Quebecois). Was this easy to achieve? No. Did we have to do things to encourage women? Yes. Minorities? No (though it does matter that we were in Toronto, outside of Toronto we’d have had to do something). Most importantly I think, were we an effective team? You bet! And I’ll tell you this was a great team to be a part of!
Chi Master vs. A Dude Who Can Throw a Punch
Reader Andrew K. sent this video of a “Kiai Master” using “chi” to knock back dozens of fighters with nary a touch. The punchline, so to speak, comes when the master offers $5,000 to anyone who can defeat him with any mix of martial arts, with predictable and even tragic result. This poor old huckster seems legitimately surprised to be smashed in the face by the power of a fist and the man who punched him seems pretty sorry he has to beat down an old man with no ability to defend himself.
Dethroner — A couple of videos. What a downer.
Clips: Chi Master vs. A Dude Who Can Throw a Punch at Dethroner
Reader Andrew K. sent this video of a “Kiai Master” using “chi” to knock back dozens of fighters with nary a touch. The punchline, so to speak, comes when the master offers $5,000 to anyone who can defeat him with any mix of martial arts, with predictable and even tragic result. This poor old huckster seems legitimately surprised to be smashed in the face by the power of a fist and the man who punched him seems pretty sorry he has to beat down an old man with no ability to defend himself.
Proper Use of ALT and TITLE Attributes fadtastic - a multi-author web design trends journal
The World Wide Web Consortium requires all images and links in a webpage to have an ALT attribute and TITLE attribute respectively. Making web pages Accessible and usable is an important part of the creation process. Overall, using ALT and TITLE attributes on everything eliminates almost all accessibility problems on many web pages. ALT and TITLE attributes also improve user experience and help assistive technology translate content for users with physical and sensory disabilities.
Nice discussion of what you are actually supposed to do with ALT and TITLE tags.
Learning lisp will alter your life.
Your brain will grow bigger than you ever thought possible.
You will rewrite all of your applications in just a handful of lines
Society will shun you. You will shun society.
You will become disatisfied with everything and everyone around you.
Lisp is so simple to learn that you can learn lisp in just a few minutes. I just learnt it now while I was waiting for a bus.
Ha! :-)
Heresy and turtles (all the way down) with Avi Bryant
I spoke with Avi recently about the birth of Seaside and the state of web development. He shared with me the beauty of Smalltalk and the value of micro-communities. We talked about how the path to success often lies against the grain of industry groupthink, and where things seem to be going wrong: the problems with REST, how MVC is widely misunderstood, why JRuby lacks promise, and what’s wrong with Ruby on Rails.
caboose — Don’t expect controversy, Avi has a grip on reality.
The Micro Business Experiment: 10 Ways To Procrastinate And Still Be Productive
If you’re reading this post then you may have problems with procrastination. I’ve developed a list of things I can do when I’m procrastinating. The trick here is that even though I’m still avoiding the work I’m supposed to be doing, I’m still engaged in doing something useful or meaningful. Here’s my top 10 list. I hope you find something of use.
Very funny! :-)
OutdoorsBanksy - — Wow!
THE HEROIC IMAGINATION: A Talk With Philip Zimbardo
It was especially heroic because, being a lowly private army reservist, he had to take it to a senior officer in the investigating unit, and that took a lot of guts. He also knew that his buddies in his unit were going to get in trouble, and that if they got in trouble, there could be serious consequences. Namely, they might harm or even kill him. But he did it anyway; he did the right thing. In the end, he had to be put in protective custody for three years because everybody wanted to kill him – not only the people in his unit, but the people in his home town. The military also had to hide his mother and sister to protect their lives. Darby was seen as a traitor to America, to the honor or the military and to the Bush administration because he exposed the abuses and thus became an enemy of the people. The messenger was the enemy, rather than the people who gave him that message. … My sense is that the typical notion we have of heroes as super-stars, as super heroes, as Superman, and Batman, and Wonder Woman, gives us a false impression that being a hero means being able to do thing that none of us can actually accomplish. I want to argue just the opposite: that what we have to be doing more and more is cultivating the “heroic imagination” – especially in our children.
This is a must read. (I’m not kidding, even though it is buried way down here). Make the effort and just click on the link!
Can We Please Have Politicians Understand The Internet Before They Regulate It?
This one is pretty ridiculous, basically requiring anyone who provides internet service (including if you have a WiFi connection) to register with the government (hello, bureaucracy). Then it includes all sorts of impossible to obey rules about censoring and blocking users and content. ISPs won’t be allowed to allow “past offenders” to access the internet. They have to block all sites “that promotes violence against women, promotes hatred, or contains child pornography.” Failure to do so can result in jail time. Also, they have to (of course!) allow easy access for the government to search records of what users are doing.
Techdirt — How do these idiots get into positions of power? (and yes, I’ve got a stake in this, I’m Canadian)
Google Sued For Infringing On Just Granted 'Enhanced Hyperlink' Patent
Wasting absolutely no time at all, a Kentucky-based company appears to have gone straight to court on Tuesday, the same day it was granted a patent for a “method for adding a user selectable function to a hyperlink, and proceeded to sue Google for infringement. The patent appears to cover the ability to pop up various choices if you mouseover a hyperlink
Techdirt — That’s so obvious I don’t know why I didn’t think of it!
British Airways cuts Richard Branson out of in-flight movies
This is pathetic: British Airways cuts scenes showing rival aircraft and aviation execs out of its in-flight movies. … Virgin boss Richard Branson appears briefly in the James Bond film Casino Royale. … However, British Airways passengers watching the film as an in-flight movie won’t see Branson’s brief appearance because BA has edited Branson out of the film, along with a shot of a Virgin Airways aircraft.
Boing Boing — Idiots!
Self-flagellation may have led to rabies
Eduardo Sese of Pampanga, Philippines may have exposed more than 100 men to rabies during a self-flagellation ritual. Sese died from rabies two weeks ago, but he had previously shared a knife with a large group of people who slashed their backs before whipping themselves with bamboo in honor of Good Friday.
Boing Boing — Sigh
Mayor of Boston bans Boing Boing
Jake tried to access Boing Boing from Boston’s free WiFi network and got this notice – topped by the seal of the Mayor of Boston no less! Banned in Boston
Boing Boing — More idiots. Turns out that the ban is due to a ‘safe=0ff’ in a google search link in a Boing Boing post.
I have just released version 0.40 of ContextL. The idea is that this version is feature-complete with regard to the feature set of the upcoming 1.0 release. The goal is now to test this version extensively, and to write a documentation of the current features and the API of ContextL before version 1.0 is eventually released.
Pascal Costanza — Try this in your favourite programming language.
It bemuses me to read about people who are seriously working on artificial intelligence using stone-age programming languages like C or, heaven forbid, Java.
Arto Bendiken — Amusing :-)
Web Startups and the Lying Liars that Lie About Them
Bloggers tell lies when they review startups? No, no - they just stretch the truth a little. OK, a lot. Inspired in part by Paul Kedrosky’s Top Ten VC Lies, I whipped up 10 semi-truths that we tend to use on Mashable for the sake of brevity, hyperbole or just plain laziness
Mashable — Hmm :-)
Russia plans $65bn tunnel to America
Russia has unveiled an ambitious plan to build the world’s longest tunnel under the Bering Strait as part of a transport corridor linking Europe and America via Siberia and Alaska.
The 64-mile (103km) tunnel would connect the far east of Russia with Alaska, opening up the prospect of the ultimate rail trip across three quarters of the globe from London to New York.
TimesOnline — I wonder if this is real?
An Open Letter To Scott Guthrie.
Why not place text-based advertisements on the default ‘yellow screen of death’ error page that comes with asp.net.
Just little one-liners, right down the bottom of the page, are all you’d need, something like this:
- Website troubles making you depressed? Change your attitude to life!
- Website development taking too long? Try Ruby in your browser!
I know many companies that would pay a premium to be included on such oft-visited pages.
Say there are 100 million asp.net sites, visited 10000 times a day each, erroring just 0.01 percent of the time, that’s 100 million impressions per day!
secretGeek — A re-work of the old joke of advertising on the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death — and if you don’t know what that is, then lucky you).
Sleep Enforces The Temporal Sequence In Memory
Previous findings from a research group headed by Jan Born at the University of Lbeck have confirmed the widely held view that long-term memories are formed particularly during sleep, and that this process relies on the brain replaying recently encoded experiences during the night. The same research group now provides evidence that sleep not only strengthens the content of a memory but also the particular order in which they were experienced, probably by a replay of the experiences in “forward” direction.
ScienceDaily — As if you need another reason to not miss your sleep.
Octopus camouflaged and then escapesheadlessness — This is an amazing video!
Two Projects at Mont St Michel Seek to Preserve and Enhance
In late 2006, work began on a hydraulic dam that will hopefully disperse accumulated silt in order to preserve [Mont St. Michel, Normandy] as an island at high tide. Whereas once the island sat at a remote 4km from the coast, encroaching mudflats have reduced this distance to mere metres. The islet is now only surrounded by water at the highest tides.
Citizen21
