Linklog for April 2008
April 30, 2008
- Up or Out: Solving the IT Turnover Crisis
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In summa, rather than treating IT staff turnover as a bad thing, turn it to our advantage as other professions do. Realise that people will eventually quit, that this is a good thing, and maintain a good relationship with former employees. Alex’s idea of seeing former employees as alumni is a good one. Read the whole piece, it’s great.
- A tale of two Berties
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Can’t say I disagree with Adam’s assessment of Ahern.
- DiffMerge ¶
- ReportLab
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A pretty cool Python PDF generation library.
April 28, 2008
- Digsby
[via]
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A multiprotocol IM client. Might be worth using on Windows as an alternative to Pidgin.
April 26, 2008
- The 13th Duke of Wybourne
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“The 13th Duke of Wybourne is a fictional character played by the comedian Paul Whitehouse in the popular BBC sketch show The Fast Show. The character’s sketches consisted of the Duke commenting on his presence in various seemingly compromising, unsuitable locations, usually at 3 o’clock in the morning. These, along with the comments after stating his location, alluded to the fact that he was there ‘by accident’ and that women were present.”
- CSS Variables
[via]
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If browsers and other appropriate user agents implemented this, it’d be awesome! Till then...
April 25, 2008
- Timeframe, a nifty Javascript calendar widget ¶
- Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers [via] ¶
- Various free icons ¶
- Why we are the biggest obstacles to our own growth
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Tell your inner curmudgeon to shut up every now and again for your own good.
- Content Negotiation is not Broken ¶
April 22, 2008
- Part of being a good programmer is learning not to trust yourself
[via]
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Utterly, utterly true.
- SQL Antipatterns slides
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Great talk.
- Milliways: Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ¶
- Minimizing Code Paths in Asychronous Code ¶
- Tenkai palm
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“The Tenkai palm is a card magic technique used to palm a card (to temporarily hide it during a magic trick).”
- Why You Should Write Unit Tests [via] ¶
- Testable APIs [via] ¶
- More from less...
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“I’ve become increasingly convinced that what CEOs should be crying out for is not more innovation but fewer self-imposed obstacles.”
- Google AppEngine, BigTable and why RDBMS mentality is harmful ¶
April 21, 2008
- Those to Come
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“As a developer, what do I owe to other developers that may come behind me?”
- “All I need is a Programmer”
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Great piece on how severely people underestimate the complexity of what we software developers do for a living.
- Arete
[via]
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“Arete in its basic sense means goodness, excellence or virtue of any kind. In its earliest appearance in Greek this notion of excellence was bound up with the notion of the fulfillment of purpose or function; the act of living up to one’s full potential.”
April 17, 2008
- Three Small JavaScript Libraries
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The words “holy crap” come to mind.
- Stop the clock, squash the bug ¶
- svnmailer ¶
- Ketama: Consistent Hashing Library
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“libketama is a consistent hashing library written in C. You supply a list of servers and ketama will map keys to servers in a consistent way, even after adding or removing servers from the list.”
April 16, 2008
- Apple IIgs Original Hardware Laptop
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If somebody was to ask me to mockup what a laptop in Ill Bethisad looks like, I couldn’t have possibly done a better job than this.
April 15, 2008
April 14, 2008
- Probability Distributions
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I’m ashamed to admit it, but this—probability distributions in general—is something that never sunk in for me. Must read.
- John Gormley vs. China
[via]
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Kickin’ ass and takin’ names!
- Re: Python factory-like type instances
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I could use this to further improve the way the Lithium backends work.
- dbus-python tutorial
[via]
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I wish I’d known about this when I wrote the HAL backend for Lithium...
- Zeroconf Branch Sharing with Bazaar
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Sweet!
April 13, 2008
- Requiescat In Pace: John M. Ford ¶
- 10 traits to look for when you?re hiring a programmer ¶
- Quote, Unquote
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Yep, I’m in the camp that considers straight quotes nothing more than a bastardisation of type.
- Charles Debugging Proxy
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“Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).”
- What Does It Take To Become A Grandmaster Developer?
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Chunking, basically.
- SIGGRAPH: Game Graphics During the 8-bit Computer Era ¶
- Software estimation considered harmful? ¶
- 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong ¶
- Simplicity
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On simplicity in UI design.
- Kaizen
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Kaizen (Japanese for change for the better or improvement; the common English usage is continuous improvement). In the context of this article, kaizen refers to a workplace quality strategy and is often associated with the Toyota Production System and related to various quality-control systems, including methods of W. Edwards Deming.
April 12, 2008
- Tearing Down the Software Factory
[via]
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To quote the Tom DeMarco quote at the start, “The idea of a software factory is a joke — that we can build software by rote — that’s ridiculous. If the work is deterministic, we will do with it what we do with any other big piece of deterministic work. We’ll let the computer do the deterministic portion, leaving the person who interacts with the computer — the other half of the system — to do the work whose roteness has decreased, not increased. Every time you automate something, what’s left of the person’s work is less deterministic, until eventually, when you automate enough, there’s no deterministic element left for the person’s work—no rote. ... Our work is not deterministic. It’s far too inventive. We’re knowledge workers, not factory workers.”
- MVC Obscures the Mechanics of the Web
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Too bloody right!
- Dee
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Think Python + Linq = Dee.
- Leave a Line of Retreat
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“The principle behind the technique is simple: As Sun Tzu advises you to do with your enemies, you must do with yourself - leave yourself a line of retreat, so that you will have less trouble retreating. The prospect of losing your job, say, may seem a lot more scary when you can’t even bear to think about it, than after you have calculated exactly how long your savings will last, and checked the job market in your area, and otherwise planned out exactly what to do next. Only then will you be ready to fairly assess the probability of keeping your job in the planned layoffs next month. Be a true coward, and plan out your retreat in detail - visualize every step - preferably before you first come to the battlefield.”
- ikiwiki
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“Ikiwiki is a wiki compiler. It converts wiki pages into HTML pages suitable for publishing on a website. Ikiwiki stores pages and history in a revision control system such as Subversion or Git. There are many other features, including support for blogging, as well as a large array of plugins.”
- Throwing Away Your Code
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I never actually feel bad about this, especially these days. If anything, deleting code is kind of a release.
- Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law [via] ¶
- My rules of thumb for developers: less code ¶
- The Stunning Truth at the Center of the Pigeon Story
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In summa, don’t treat people like Pavlovesque automatons.
- Django Queryset Implementation [via] ¶
- In-depth django-sphinx tutorial
[via]
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I’m not posting this because of Django, but because of Sphinx, a fulltext search engine, which I’ve never heard of before, but looks quite interesting.
- The Art of Agile Development: Retrospectives ¶
- The Death of Read Replication [via] ¶
- How to use a notebook: 7 quick tips [via] ¶
- App Engine: Most Of The Stuff I Want, None Of The Stuff I Don’t ¶
- ImageShack Starts Free BitTorrent Download Service ¶
- GIT Howto Index ¶
- Design is in the Details
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Now, I can keep on saying this till the end of time, but will people listen...
- Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards ¶
- User-level transactional programming in Haskell
[via]
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To quotes from the LTU poster, “I thought this was an interesting paper because it gives a concrete example of a case where you want transactions, but positively don’t want the full suite of ACID properties.”
- “Stuffy” Dowding
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In summa, Joel’s Evidence-based Scheduling is great, but watch for people who’ll use it to manipulate your estimates. Also, stick to your estimates and don’t let anybody force you to make them more optimistic.
- The Economic Legacy of Bertie Ahern
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Excellent analysis of his true “legacy”. Ignore the comments; they’re full of SOS’s nonsensical rantings.
April 10, 2008
- Google App Engine: The Datastore API
[via]
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Interesting...
April 9, 2008
- The Thing About Git
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A crazygood article about git and cherrypicking. Not that you can’t do it with bzr, mind...
April 7, 2008
- Git for Computer Scientists
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Hmm... I thought I’d bookmarked this. Obviously not.
- Arimaa
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“Arimaa is a two-player abstract strategy board game that can be played using the same equipment as chess. Arimaa has so far proven to be more difficult for artificial intelligences to play than chess.”
- Moving from Bzr to Git
[via]
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I’ve no intention of abandoning Bzr any time soon, but this might be worth a read nonetheless.
- Setting up Subversion on Windows
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I shall be throwing this in the direction of a none-too-bright individual...
- Textpattern
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I don’t know why I never gave this a try. I think I’d some idea in my head that it was commercial or something.
April 3, 2008
- Python-by-example
[via]
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“This guide aims to show examples of use of all Python Library Reference functions, methods and classes”, fixing one of the weakest areas of Python’s otherwise excellent documentation. I think, however, that given the existence of doctest, a lot of this could be rolled back into the manual itself.
April 2, 2008
- ports/122305: multimedia/gstreame - gst-inspect-0.10 hangs when checking for playbin, audioconvert, audioresample, gconfaudiosink, and gconfaudiosrc plugins
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My pain with this upgrade is unending...
- On Top
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I hate top-posting. Read this to understand why it’s a bad, bad idea.
- On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services (PDF)
[via]
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To read.
April 1, 2008
- The next bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow’s big crash
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More or less the same thing happened here with our housing boom. If only people would have the cop on to realise it.
- The Art of Sucking Up ¶
- Recursive Make Considered Harmful
[via]
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Absolutely brilliant paper. If you use make at all, read it!
- Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning [via] ¶
- Front-Ahead Design
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A parody of stupid design methodologies, it also takes potshots at people who don’t take enough pride in their work to do it well.
- What To Know Before Debating Type Systems
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Oh, if only...