Inklings: a tumblelog

An alternative to hashtables.

If you’re writing a system that stores passwords as plaintext or simply hashes them, please read this!

Ditto.

Preventing the IE WYSIWYG editor from making all the paths absolute.

Much like MC Escher’s picture ‘Treppauf und treppab’ portrays the optical illusion of a never ending staircase, the Shepard effect is an acoustical illusion that gives the listener the impression of an endlessly rising melody.

An effort to make it easier for Irish citizens to get in touch with their public representatives and government in general.

It had to happen, I guess!

An example of Extreme Programming as it’s meant to be done at a game company. And they do regular hours!

To say I’m amazed by this whole thing would be an extreme understatement.

Aclare!

The universe is destined to end. Before it does, could an advanced civilisation escape via a ‘wormhole’ into a parallel universe? The idea seems like science fiction, but it is consistent with the laws of physics and biology. Here’s how to do it.

Yes kids, the increased militarisation of police in the US is something I think nearly everybody can agree is a disturbing development .

A bit late for me, but worth a read.

Full book for download in PDF form.

Sweeet!

Tony and Gordon set their eyes on becoming hegamons by passing an “Abolition of Parliament” Bill. No, I’m not exaggerating. Goodbye democracy in the UK, hello one-party state!

US government finally admits the Warunterrr is never going to end. Is there really anybody out there who still believes that this isn’t just a big con-job to keep people afraid and distracted?

It appears that now I as an Irishman cannot commemorate the 1916 Rising on April 24th without turning myself into a criminal. And if you’re an American, consider what this means for July 4th.

Sweeeeeet!

Pascal Van Cauwenberghe has written a series of ‘Things I didn’t learn’ blog entries that relate experiences he had pre-XP with XP practices and principles. He has a slyly self-deprecating style that exposes a problem/solution with some element of surprise to it. There is conflict, mystery, adversity, and challenge in the situations he describes.

I want anonymous inner classes (or closures) and I want them now.

A commercial quality OCR engine originally developed at HP between 1985 and 1995. In 1995, this engine was among the top 3 evaluated by UNLV. It was open-sourced by HP and UNLV in 2005.

In the post, he talks about database structures where you only add and never delete, so you have a full record of what changes have been made to the data. Think version control on your records.

Holy crap! A version of MSDN that doesn’t suck complete ass! An interface that work in Firefox; proper URLs; how did that happen?

A guy plays the music of Sonic the Hedgehog on a piano. It translates pretty well.

…which integrates nicely with NUnit and TestDriven.NET.

Lookin’ sweet!

…because the DRM stunt they tried backfired horribly on them. Ha-ha! If they think they can try the same with books, they’ve another thing coming.

“Religion” is the wrong word, “order” would be better. Worth reading as an example of how order can spontaneously appear in nature, and of how convention can easily trumps technology.

Haven’t listened to it, but I’ve heard good things, and the blurb on the front page is encouraging.

Looks nice!

:-(

Cheatsheet posters for the Prototype library.

One of the premises of writing user-stories for XP and other agile methods is the that story–as written–should not get into implementation details. However, the conversations between Customer/Product Owner and Developer and Tester can and should concern themselves with implementation details.

Which, in my mind, is a definite signal from MySQL that they’re going to make sure that if Oracle think they can push them about, they’re going to get a surprise.

No nasty dependencies, uses PCRE (fast), covered by the BSD license. Sweet!

Fun, but only something I could see myself doing once in a blue moon, or for fun.

They’re flippin’ closures, not anonymous methods! Phfth!

Here, here! A pox on accessors, I say!

I’m not a big fan of the original song, but this is pretty damned good! (Disclaimer: I’m a Postal Service fan, so I’m a bit biased here.)

I posted a few comments on why PHP has this problem, how to fix it, and what needs to be done on the client side to avoid it. I might expand on what I wrote there and turn it into a blog post.

I’m not a big fan of Template Toolkit, but this looks like fun.

This is incredible! I don’t know how they made it, but it’s perfect. And the true champion wins in the end.

Hurray! At least that’s something to be happy about after the riots.