Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back For Your Water
In response to the beeping sometime later, I walked over and opened the door to the over [sic]. I was surprised to see that the water was completely undisturbed, as if it had not been warmed at all. Thinking that perhaps I had accidentally set the microwave for “1:00” instead of “2:00,” I reached out and tapped the side of the glass with my finger, to see how hot it was.
defective yeti — I was talking to someone at work, circa 1984, when I saw this happen. He tossed a tea bag into the water and it exploded… it took awhile to clean up.
Oracle tackles files in the database, againCMS Watch — Sigh.
'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy by Daniel SoloveSSRN — A long essay that I’ll read over the weekend. The title explains the subject pretty well.
Smarter Ways to Work with PDFs
One of the nicest things about Mac OS X is the effortless way it creates PDF documents in just about any circumstance you can think of. If you can preview something for printing, you can make a PDF of it with one additional click. … But there’s a less attractive consequence of this remarkable feature: a build-up, over time, of PDFs all over [your disk]
MacDevCenter.com — I looked into a bunch of the suggestions in this article. I don’t really like any of them. Nevertheless, there are good ideas hear, and, certainly, some of them are pretty clever. You might find they work for you.
Cooperative Visitor: A Template Technique for Visitor Creation
This article presents a flexible and efficient variation of the Visitor design pattern in C that accommodates arbitrary argument and return types.
Artima — That’s just too complicated.
There are several reasons why one should prefer LaTeX to a WYSIWYG word processor like Microsoft Word: portability, lightness, security are just a few of them (not to mention that LaTeX is free). There is still a further reason that definitely convinced me to abandon MS Word: you will never be able to produce professionally typeset and well-structured documents using most WYSIWYG word processors.
LaTeX is a free typesetting system that allows you to concentrate on content and forget about the layout: the software takes care of the actual typesetting, structuring and page formatting, producing documents of astonishing elegance.
Dario Taraborelli — Nice examples. If this stuff doesn’t matter to you, keep using Word.
Ruby Project Spotlight, June '07 : Sequel
I really like what I see here. It’s really a different feel than full blown ORM like ActiveRecord, and seems like it might be the ideal choice for quick and dirty SQL hackery. I definitely think that you could pick up the basics for this lib in 10-15 minutes and already have it be useful for you.
O'Reilly Ruby — This looks very nice.
Forever Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright
How long should copyright be? Should we increase or decrease the strength of copyright during periods of rapid technological innovation? These are all questions I address in my paper entitled Forever Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright, which I will be presenting at the 2007 SERCI Congress in Berlin this week.
For those who want to know more, the full abstract is below and the latest version of the paper can be downloaded [here]
miscellaneous fact
When you’re writing HTML, over time, your CSS files begin to fill up a lot. If you’re working on a large project, you might even end up with several people contributing to the CSS file, not to mention refactoring each other’s work. The result is a directory full of HTML files, and a very large CSS file.
What tends to happen is that not ever selector in the CSS file actually applies to your HTML; many are rendered redundant by refactoring, or by changes in HTML. But when you’ve got a 70k+ CSS file, it’s not easy to check precisely which selectors aren’t in use any more.
Infovore — This could be really good, I’ll be checking this out. This is a really nasty problem when you simultaneously develop CSS and HTML in an iterative way – you can pretty much count on this happening.
A thread on REST-discuss recently turned into a JSON vs XML fight. I had not thought too deeply about JSON before this, but now that I have I though I should summarize what I have learnt.
The Sun BabelFish Blog — What he learned is worth knowing.
Recent years have enjoyed a florescence of interesting implementations of Web servers, including lighthttpd, litespeed, and mongrel, among others. These Web servers boast different combinations of performance, ease of administration, portability, security, and related values. The following engineering study surveys the field of lightweight Web servers to help you find one likely to meet the technical requirements of your next project.
DeveloperWorks — A nice overview. Some good options are missing from the discussion, but that doesn’t detract from the article.
merb is an exciting web application framework by Ezra Zygmuntuvitcz. Let’s try it. Source code for this tutorial application is available in this zip-file.
on Egil Strand — I’ve used Merb on a couple of projects, and it is very very nice. This tutorial might be helpful since Merb documentation is a bit sparse.
Introduction to AWS for Ruby Developers
With Amazon Web Services (AWS), developers are no longer limited by expensive-to-scale infrastructure, lack of funds to build a data center, or a smaller IT staff. To meet increasing client demands to store ever-growing data, mine vast amounts of information, and gather information from the Internet, developers turn to Amazon for its Amazon EC2™, Amazon S3, Amazon ECS, and Alexa web services, among others. Ruby and Rails are the perfect combination to work with AWS. Getting started with most of the AWS solutions requires little or no experience with Ruby, Rails, or AWS, making them extremely simple to use and highly addictive.
Amazon Web Services Developer Connection — This could come in handy.
Computer prices then and nowMatthew Yglesias — Things change :-)
I once again realized that there is quite a bit of confusion around the role of the CTO. The first thing that always comes up when you want to discuss the role of a CTO is that there is no well established definition of what a CTO actually does.
All Things Distributed — No kidding
It's not plagiarism, it's an easy essay
Boy! was I surprised and riveted by the audacity! Custom Writing is a service that will write you an essay that is guaranteed to be free from plagiarism and to not get picked up by plagiarism checkers like turn it in. … So I’ll add a link alright, and I’ll do it for free! This is thoroughly interesting stuff and right down my alley, in terms of pressuring education and academia to rethink its role and practices.
So I replied to Andrew and asked for an interview. Within a few hours he replied with a, “yes, send the questions through..”
Learn Online
Found: the giant lion-eating chimps of the magic forest
Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local hunters speak of massive creatures that seem to be some sort of hybrid between a chimp and a gorilla.
Guardian Unlimited — Apparently they don’t actually howl at the moon.
Welcome to the era of the $225,000 parking space
To give you an idea of how much of a premium Manhattanites place on parking, consider that a new condo development on the Lower West Side is selling five guaranteed parking spaces for $225,000 apiece. That number is on top of whatever the condos themselves cost. The knee-jerk reaction is, of course, to laugh and dismissively say something like, “Who in their right mind is going to pay that to park their car?”
There are eight people vying for those five spaces.
Autoblog — Yeow!
Optical Illusions UpdateDark Roasted Blend — These are good, some will require your browser’s gif animation to be enabled.
Trojan Horse - The ChaserYouTube — So. Not everyone learns from history. Very funny :-)
Test-First Word Wrap in Erlang
I’m continuing to play with Erlang. This week, I needed to write some code that extracts information from a bunch of source files. Part of the output was supposed to be a list of strings, nicely word wrapped to fit on a terminal screen.
PragDave
Understanding Engineers: Feasibility
here’s a quick lexicon of what computer programmers generally mean when they’re talking about how hard some problem is
The Fishbowl — I’ve sent links of this article to a few people. I admit that this pretty much defines the terms as I use them, though I think the reasons are a bit off in my case.
Static Typing = Tightly Coupled
Dare Obasanjo points out an issue with static typing when it runs into dynamic services … And yet, this sort of thing makes some people feel safe.
Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants
Something one has to experience
Canada’s most ornate Hindu temple – a $40-million vision hand-carved by Indian artisans out of 24,000 hunks of Italian marble and Turkish limestone – is to open this Sunday
National Post — This is in Toronto, and it is spectacular.
Email tricks, that might solve a few webapp problems
I did not know you could do this, and I never really thought of it before. I don’t normally like HTML in email, but maybe I’ll reconsider.
So. — Another way of interacting with a webapp?
