October 2011
1 post
This is not a brony tumblr
I moved all my brony stuff to another tumblr, but I forgot to update the bio in all of my profiles to point to that site. So if you’re looking for stuff from my less professional side go follow that one. This one’s mostly for programming-related stuff these days.
September 2011
16 posts
“Great ideas don’t sound like great ideas before they happen. They sound...”
– Scripting News: Can Larry reboot Google?
3 tags
My Little Pony Character Classes
Earlier today on Twitter I was talking with some bronies on the topic of our favorite ponies. I explained how I started out liking Rainbow Dash but settled on Twilight because apparently I can suspend enough disbelief to say a world with talking ponies exists but giving myself wings is *too much*. A discussion as to whether wings or horns was cooler ensued, and I sided with the uncool Earth...
Weird Al at Moody Theater brain dump
This show edges out the TMBG at Stubb’s show that’s been my favorite concert for years. We had great seats, it was a great show, and we got roped into a sort of audience participation. Weird Al is a really good performer. He changed into song-appropriate costumes often, and filled the costume change breaks with content from his Al TV show and clips from the many shows that have...
Why Silverlight was destined to fail and my time... →
Wow. Just wow. Curious how much is rage and how much is true.
The Fraying of a Nation's Decency - NYTimes.com →
Whoa just read this, so true
“If you’re indispensable, you can hold on to your job — maybe. But the flip side...”
– Do you really want to be indispensable? — The Endeavour
Capital punishment: A death in Georgia | The... →
stephpellegrin asked: TUMBLLLLRRRRRRAH!
9 tags
“TFS is actually a package of highly incompatible software that happens to work...”
– TFS is destroying your development capacity | Derek Hammer
Opinion - Image - NYTimes.com →
An interesting visualization of our economic crisis. I don’t know that we can sustain wage increases to match productivity increases. But not doing so is killing us. Something’s going to break.
Douglas Rushkoff - Blog - CNN.com: Are... →
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/nyregion/29bikes.... →
What is this thing you call a "type"? Part Two -... →
The “designers should code” bullshit and a not so... →
August 2011
7 posts
DebuggerDisplay attribute best practices -... →
How Irene Lived Up to the Hype - NYTimes.com →
Welcome to the Herd: A Feminist Watches My Little... →
Is That Review a Fake? - Graphic - NYTimes.com →
I’ll have to read the paper, but my gut goes against this.
For many people, the review is a narrative about what happened. How does one tell a story without using first person? How does one describe a four-person meal without referencing the other members of the party?
Most people overuse adverbs. Strunk & White didn’t say “omit needless words” for filler.
Verb use:...
4 tags
A Mess is not a Technical Debt →
nicholascloud:
“A mess is not a technical debt. A mess is just a mess. Technical debt decisions are made based on real project constraints. They are risky, but they can be beneficial. The decision to make a mess is never rational, is always based on laziness and unprofessionalism, and has no chance of paying of in the future. A mess is always a loss.”
(Google cached)
1 tag
July 2011
7 posts
Dyslexie, A Typeface Designed To Help Dyslexics... →
Petzold Book Blog - What is “Moral Relativism”? →
Quit Being a Dick, Cowboy Up and Pay Your Taxes :... →
Writes large correct programs — The Endeavour →
Why there will always be programmers — The... →
“I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime...”
– Warren Buffett: I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. | The Big Picture
How Software Companies Die →
June 2011
2 posts
“This is where Eric Schmidt is right. I’ll paraphrase him: If you want to hide...”
– Social is for sharing, not hiding « BuzzMachine
Scripting News: The Invisible Hand is a myth too →
May 2011
3 posts
5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor |... →
What's wrong with CS education (from Slashdot)
Forget the trees, the forest is burning. (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Concern (819622) * on Sunday May 22, @09: 40AM (#36208090) Journal
Cramming 150 kids into a lecture hall with a "mathematician" who wasn't smart enough for the math department, who has never written software for a living and doesn't natively speak the language of most of his student body, and who disappears at the end of the class, shoving his students towards some grad students when they have questions... Where the "teaching" involves reading pages from a badly written $300 book, and then having exactly two interactions with the class: "Midterm" and "Final..." And where in many schools the dirty little secret is that the curve takes the average "D" or "F" up to a "C..." Aside from a few top schools (who do their best filtering with the SAT, or heaven forbid, other parts of the application), this is the reality of undergrad CS (and these in particular are all true stories). I don't see why you'd waste time on the finer points. The entire academy in the U.S. is collapsing. Yes, the pipelines for the few moneymaking careers left in society are still somewhat functional (finance, law... medicine, somewhat), but in many other places, the tornado of American societal collapse has passed through. More and more of the marginal schools and departments have essentially opted to become high-gloss degree mills rather than go gently into that good night. The scam is the educational equivalent of shitting where you sleep - only one generation of undergrads is going to get themselves bilked for $200k of student debt for the experience described above, let alone when most of their degrees "prepare" them for a future career lacking any hope of paying it back. Computer science is still a white collar job in the West for a little longer, but it lacks a professional trade group giving licenses and setting educational benchmarks. And that leads us to the punch line. The C.S. degree isn't even needed for finding work. Anyone with good code to show from their own efforts, especially success in the open source world, will get a job today, and with a few resume lines no one is looking further down. And that, by the way, is because (aside from those top schools, and often even then), they know a degree is worthless as a predictor of quality. I guess you can ignore all this and still decide philosophically whether you think CompSci is like medicine or even like plumbing, where there is some effort to make it difficult and filter out the riff-raff... or it'll stay just another joke degree.
The shape of your problem →
April 2011
2 posts
The Management Myth - Magazine - The Atlantic →
Philip Greenspun's Weblog » Understanding... →
We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family’s income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription...
March 2011
4 posts
“Because different Microsoft teams have different masters — and different views...”
– Microsoft readies tool for managing iPads, iPhones and Android devices | ZDNet
Technical Difficulties: Consolitis- Destructoid →
This is an interesting article that articulates some of my thoughts about why recent games aren’t as good as they used to be. In particular the points about how Oblivion appealed to gamers in general while Morrowind appealed to a specific kind of gamer.
Software Carpentry » Literate Programming →
I commented on this. I like the idea of more literate programming but can’t imagine how the IDE would work. Graphical programming is difficult for complicated algorithms, yet text makes simple algorithms needlessly hard to understand.
Daring Fireball Linked List: Apple's 'Post-PC'... →
I like this concept of comparing devices by experience rather than by technical specs. Most consumer hardware is good enough to make this distinction today; why are the Apple alternatives still banging this drum?
January 2011
6 posts
design dare →
blog · RSS: A Reply →
Discussion of how browser makers and web developers are hurting the web by downplaying RSS.
Super Mario Bros 3 Level Design Lessons «... →
Interesting analysis of how SMB3 slowly introduced its mechanics to players. It gave you a tutorial without feeling like a tutorial.
“I don’t know how many teachers you have among all these ‘educators’. But I know...”
– BloodhoundBlog.com | Defending Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn: Is presenting ‘Freeing Jefferson’s slaves’ for Banned Book Week a Fair Housing violation … ? | National real estate marketing and technology blog | Realtors and real estate, mortgage and investment news
BloodhoundBlog.com | Defending Mark Twain and... →
Scripting News: The world is socialist →
December 2010
6 posts
Michael Feathers' Blog: Making Too Much of TDD →
Discusses some situations where TDD doesn’t work very well and generalizes it to a discussion of those kinds of scenarios. Concludes we need to study this area because it will likely improve design processes.
Scripting News: Humans are crazy →
I’m only halfway through it and really agree with Mr. Winer here. Looks like a rant about all the stupid stuff that’s been happening in America in the past few years.