Clearly the art of the Tab Sweep has declined in the age of Twitter, and is apt to decline still further under the influence of Google+. But I think there’s still a place for it.
Hashbangs · Back in February, I fulminated about abuse of hashbangs, most notably by Twitter. They’re still doing it and it still sucks. Of the many responses, perhaps the most thoughtful was Jeni Tennison’s Hash URIs.
Web by Numbers · The title is Interesting stats, and the top stat is Average Bytes per Page by Content Type. The rest are interesting too.
Elixir · In Why Rubyists should try Elixir he claimed last spring that it offers “simple Object Orientation and charming syntax” on top of the Erlang VM.
Resty · Advertised as A simple HTTP REST client for Java; my recent work on hooking up Android and App Engine gives me a keen appreciation for how handy such things can be.
Moats · I don’t fully buy into this analysis, but the tag-line is to juicy not to link to: Android may be the opposite of that, the greatest legal destruction of wealth in history.
NFC · It’s popping up in more and more places, and Ars Technica ran a good technology primer, in case you wonder how it works.
Be Boring · Short for Your code should be as boring as possible, possibly the best essay on quality programming I’ve read this year. He’s right; the time I’ve spent spelunking through some of the world’s most widely-respected pieces of software has been, largely, unsurprising.
6.283185307179586... · Which is to say τ (Tau), which is among other things twice π.
Most people with an interest in math are aware that there’s This Guy who things we should be using τ not π; here’s why. Whether you agree or not, The Tau Manifesto is as entertaining as a math manifesto can possibly be.
Microsoft and Myths · I refer to Exploding Software-Engineering Myths by Janie Chang of Microsoft Research. Our profession is kind of important to the world, and we tend to be methodology fashion victims, so it’s nice to have some actual real hard data on what works, and how much.
Mis-Mapping · I’ve always had a deep aversion to Object-Relational Mapping. The only version that seems worth the effort is ActiveRecord, and it gets there by impoverishing the model to the point the relationality doesn’t matter. Laurie at Seldo.com takes this up at length in ORM is an anti-pattern. He actually disses ActiveRecord too, probably more than I would. Thought-provoking.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Tkil (Oct 29 2011, at 02:32)
Your original post on the #! stuff got mentioned by JWZ (down in the comments):
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/twitters-reprehensible-lack-of-an-image-api/
And the Tau Manifesto is excellent; thanks for reminding me of it.
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From: Dennis Doubleday (Oct 29 2011, at 09:36)
General comment on your blog--can't remember when, but at least a few months ago, maybe when you redesigned the site, all text on your site shows up with aliasing effects--doesn't matter whether I view with Chrome or Firefox, on any machine I use, and I don't see the problem anywhere else.
Is anybody else seeing the jaggies?
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From: juice (Oct 29 2011, at 15:10)
"destruction of wealth"?
It's frustrating to realize that this concept of wealth must be very deeply-rooted and widely held. It's certainly very influential wrt the monetary policies of today.
Let's say you find that you have so many homes in your country that it is possible to house every single family in their own mini-mansion. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Obviously it's bad. With so much quality housing, house prices will fall, and then nobody will have any money left; the value of houses go to 0 and the ability to make money off of building houses also goes to 0. All that money destroyed!
Because printing money is so terribly difficult, we need to burn down houses and get google to stop giving away quality software for free.
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