Inklings: a tumblelog

All programmers have different styles and preferences, but teams that are not trying to work together lead to heavily siloed code; code that is redundant and inconsistent. A bad situation that only gets worse with time.

Which is why I’m such as a stickler for consistency in code bases.

These things are a pain!

Damien’s in the news!

I’m looking for a better razor, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about this.

WIX (pronounced ‘wick’) is a text markup format. Its syntax is a blend of Donald Knuth’s TEX and various wiki markup.

Hmmm…

One of the problems it seems most modern web apps face is the tendency to want to do everything all at once, and all in the same code that responds directly to a user. Because, while you’re in there building a user interface, it’s easy to implement everything else that needs to happen in that same UI module or library.

Great idea. I can’t think of any such sites off the top of my head, but if you can think of any, suggest them to Gavin in the comments.

Firefox extension that acts as an interface for Twitter.

I wonder if they ship to Ireland…

Think ASN.1 without the pain, XML without the bulk, and JSON but binary and with a schema language and more types. Looks to have an RPC system built in.

Looks like entertainment.ie are branching out with a dedicated cinema site. About time.

Lots of good stuff there, so take a listen!

The technique is generally applicable, mind.

Heh!

I don’t know if my Samsung F700 is a Symbian phone, so this looks like a reasonable alternative to PuTTY.

Herrie is a minimalistic music player that uses the command line. It is written to support a variety of operating systems, audio subsystems and file formats, including playlists.

I strongly believe that to understand systems, you must understand their pathologies–systems are most instructive when they fail. Unfortunately, we in computing systems do not have a strong history of studying pathology: despite the fact that failure in our domain can be every bit as expensive (if not more so) than in traditional engineering domains, our failures do not (usually) involve loss of life or physical property and there is thus little public demand for us to study them–and a tremendous industrial bias for us to forget them as much and as quickly as possible. The result is that our many failures go largely unstudied–and the rich veins of wisdom that these failures generate live on only in oral tradition passed down by the perps (occasionally) and the victims (more often).

FirePHP enables you to print to your Firebug Console using a simple PHP function call.

Ignore all the MS-specific crap: this is a pretty good article on messaging.

I really must try this some time!

About bloody time!

Syndication’s answer to mutt, which is a pretty hardcore recommendation!

A shell that appears to eschew bourne shell compatibility, but looks quite interesting and usable.

MySQL stripped down. Some interesting ideas on offloading busywork like query parsing to the client.

A tremendously clever method for doing for secure, cross-domain, browser-based data transfer.

High-performance, libre messaging.

We describe our experience building a fault-tolerant data-base using the Paxos consensus algorithm. Despite the existing literature in the field, building such a database proved to be non-trivial. We describe selected algorithmic and engineering problems encountered, and the solutions we found for them. Our measurements indicate that we have built a competitive system.

Too many applications don’t deal with important files in a safe way. Along with that, they don’t check error codes properly or do things like blindly rely on fsync() actually sending data to disk (which becomes a problem if you intend your application to be portable). Write to temp file, close, rename is not a safe operation. We’ll discuss why–along with the various behaviors of different file systems and platforms and all the different ways you can expect your important data to get mangled. More importantly, we’ll talk about how to write code using the POSIX file IO api and get it right-keeping your application portable, fast, and most importantly–respecting the data that users trust in it.

I’d love if there was a recording of this online.

Looks like an interesting shell. Might give it a try.

Two interesting videos. I wonder to what extent this applies over here in Rightpondia, especially in Ireland and the UK and what equivalents there are under Irish and European law, if any.

If you’re a coder, read it.

From the maker of the brilliant ‘Helvetica’, it’s a documentary about industrial design.

Random quotage! Hurray!