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Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.


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One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com

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Saturday, September 27, 2014


Look, I appreciate that you're trying to save me keystrokes when I type try[tab][tab]. That you put the selection onto Exception so that I can immediately overwrite it is exceptionally thoughtful as well.

But come on, you can just check the prefs to see that I don't want you polluting my source with tab characters. Might be nice if you smart-tabbed[-as-spaces] the try-catch block to the context of the code around it too, you know?

Sometimes I feel you only pretend to care. It's a complicated relationship we have, isn't it? ;^)

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posted by ruffin at 9/27/2014 01:11:00 PM
Thursday, September 25, 2014

Security Experts Expect โ€˜Shellshockโ€™ Software Bug in Bash to Be Significant - NYTimes.com:

The mantra of open source was perhaps best articulated by Eric J. Raymond, one of the elders of the open-source movement, who wrote in 1997 that โ€œgiven enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.โ€ But, in this case, Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University, said, those eyeballs are more consumed with new features than quality. โ€œQuality takes work, design, review and testing and those are not nearly as much fun as coding,โ€ Mr. Bellovin said. โ€œIf the open-source community does not develop those skills, itโ€™s going to fall further behind in the quality race.โ€

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posted by ruffin at 9/25/2014 11:23:00 PM
Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Daring Fireball: Apple Releases, Then Pulls, iOS 8.0.1:

Apple has pulled iOS 8.0.1 from the Developer Center and it is also no longer available via an over-the-air download.


Embarrassing.

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posted by ruffin at 9/24/2014 08:00:00 PM
Sunday, September 21, 2014

Finally sprung for a 512 Gig Crucial SSD, as recommended on the Wirecutter. Didn't realize it came with an Acronis key, and spent too long searching for something to clone my drive -- and then getting Macrium set up once I chose it. Happy to say its recovery boot DVD route went off without a hitch.

Wow. Fast. Don't ever buy a box without an SSD. I keep trying to "challenge" it by opening old, disk painful apps. BAM. They're up. Reboot super fast. I even love not hearing the dang thing. My Lenovo T430 has a pretty loud fan, but now that's the only noise, which is more wonderful than I would've expected.

I'm an idiot for buying an iMac with platters. That was not a good deal. Trying to figure out an easier way than this to replace the drive, wondering if I can cut a slit in the back and pull just the ribbon out. /sigh

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posted by ruffin at 9/21/2014 06:17:00 PM
Tuesday, September 09, 2014

Revisiting the Iterative Incremental Mona Lisa | It's a Delivery Thing:

"It is not an iteration if you only do it once."





If your Scrum process isn't iterative, it's really just a small waterfall.

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posted by ruffin at 9/09/2014 10:17:00 AM

Daring Fireball: ABC News Teases Report of Inside Access to โ€˜Historicโ€™

Apple "Announcement"
That sure as [heck] canโ€™t be a reference to bigger iPhones, and it doesnโ€™t sound like a watch that counts your steps and shows you notifications as they come in.

Either Apple's marketing department has overreached, which I'm afraid of, or we finally see the Apple television whose rumors died out last year, give or take.

I am worried, with the IBM partnership, bigger screen iPhones, and recent, somewhat unfocused commercials that Cook's Apple is more about grabbing the hats of cash than it was before. I was disappointed to see Gruber write this yesterday:

The market shows that one size does not fit all. I donโ€™t know that they should have done it sooner, but it certainly feels like the time for multiple iPhone sizes has come.

Really? It feels right? Ask yourself why that is. Ask yourself why you didn't think it was time before *cough*realitydistortionfield*cough*. The question isn't whether it's a good business move. It is. There's cash on Apple's table, and Cook's picking it up. The question is why. Is this one-handed mode good enough to overcome the inherently inelegant UI of a larger phone? If it is, great. I'm looking forward to seeing it.

But historic? There'd better be something better than a watch.

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posted by ruffin at 9/09/2014 09:52:00 AM
Friday, September 05, 2014

Random thought: I wonder if the iWatch could have real, traditional, creatively integrated, low-energy hands.

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posted by ruffin at 9/05/2014 09:21:00 PM
Thursday, September 04, 2014

Introducing MarkdownSharp ๏ฟฝ Blog โ€“ Stack Exchange:

Jeff Atwood author Dec 27 2009

> Why donโ€™t you just use an Ajax call for the preview, Jeff?

We tried that on http://careers.stackoverflow.com in the CV entry fields which support Markdown, and people hated it. I canโ€™t blame them. The 200 ms latency (and thatโ€™s the best case) to get the preview to update is kind of a bummer.

But I agree in principle that keeping two sets of code in sync, in two different languages, on two totally different platforms, is a huuuuge PITA.

Look, in a perfect world, yes, you should always have everything related to data qa for a page on your server. In this case, that something isn't just validation, which obviously must always be on the server (but soooo often isn't), but also Markdown formatting. You're going to have this stuff on the server, so why not kill two birds and tie that logic into the client?

But that 200ms really is important enough to ensure that, after you know your server-side logic is ready to go, you have that PITA version ready for your client as well. I hate two languages on two platforms, which is part of why I think Node.js is fairly popular, but the bottom line is that users do expect quality, quick interactions which can only be done with [only marginally] thicker clients.

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posted by ruffin at 9/04/2014 12:23:00 PM
Tuesday, September 02, 2014

So structured programming is greatโ€”that is, until you have to exit from a set of deeply nested while loops. Thatโ€™s when pure structured programming leads to pathologically convoluted logic because you have to litter your program with Boolean variables and conditionals trying to achieve the flow of control you need. This is when being a little โ€œimpureโ€ and allowing the use of unstructured flow-control elements (including the infamous goto statement) is useful.

That's from Windows PowerShell in Action, 2nd edition, page 213. It's written by the guy who made PowerShell.

So many kneejerk style rules in the world, and the goto proscription is one of the ones I don't quite get. Don't be "pathologically convoluted" and "litter". Use goto when it's appropriate, and this is the use-case where you're asking for goto by name.

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posted by ruffin at 9/02/2014 01:26:00 PM

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Just the last year o' posts:

URLs I want to remember:
* Atari 2600 programming on your Mac
* joel on software (tip pt)
* Professional links: resume, github, paltry StackOverflow * Regular Expression Introduction (copy)
* The hex editor whose name I forget
* JSONLint to pretty-ify JSON
* Using CommonDialog in VB 6 * Free zip utils
* git repo mapped drive setup * Regex Tester
* Read the bits about the zone * Find column in sql server db by name
* Giant ASCII Textifier in Stick Figures (in Ivrit) * Quick intro to Javascript
* Don't [over-]sweat "micro-optimization" * Parsing str's in VB6
* .ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.fff", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); (src) * Break on a Lenovo T430: Fn+Alt+B
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