Aug 3
I bought a shiny 13" MacBook Pro last week. It's the second mac I've bought in the last year (the other being an iMac). If myself from five years ago were around, he'd probably be bonking me in the head with a foam rubber bat right now. I used to really dislike Apple, and their stuff1. So what happened?
Well, I’ve been thinking about software development recently. One of the more interesting things I’ve come to realize is that once you get out of the .NET world, there really isn’t very much interesting stuff going on with Windows. Java? I don’t particularly care for it, but you can do that on just about anything. Web apps like Rails/Django/etc? Windows is an afterthought, and often a pain to use. Mobile apps? Well
maybe Windows Phone 7 will work out, but they have their work cut out for them. All of the less popular and geekier languages (mainly the various Lisps) don’t really work that great on Windows either.
So really, if I want to push my boundaries out just a little bit beyond C#, what other options are out there?
1. And really, some of their practices today are just ridiculous. If someone else could build the same quality of hardware as them, and keep 3rd parties from messing it up, they might just be in trouble...
Aug 2
Wufoo has some pretty slick design in general. The forms you can create with their service are pretty, and quite functional. They just released a new API for their service, and have a contest to go with it. The page for the contest is just great, see for yourself.
Jul 29
This is an error page on rubygems.org. I'm a sucker for Wayne's World quips.
Jul 28
From Paul Graham's latest essay,
"The Acceleration of Addictiveness"Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, it's a hip flask.
The whole essay is worth a read, though that footnote is probably my favorite.
Jul 28
(Note, for non-programmers, this is not about shaving)
ASP.NET MVC has
shipped the first preview of version 3. This is a good thing, mostly. By default it will be using the brand spanking new
Razor view engine... and I'm having a hard time trying to figure out why it's even in there.
The raison d'être for Razor is to allow for less code in the Views. This too, is a good thing. But I just don't think it does enough. Here's one of the samples provided:
@inherits System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<title>@View.Title</title>
</head>
<body>
@RenderBody()
</body>
</html>
It is nice that you don't need a gigantic header any more, and I like that the masterpage syntax is a little slimmer, but in general all you're saving are a bunch of <%= %> tags. That's nice, but is that really that great of an improvement to warrant an entirely new ViewEngine? Am I missing something important here? Especially once you get into non-trivial pages with hundreds of tags and template syntax.
What I think would have been awesome would be to use the reduced <%= %> footprint but also incorporate something like NHaml, which would really minimize the code footprint.
Jul 27
On the latest episode of
The Pipeline. (And if you don't listen to the
5by5 podcasts, what's wrong with you?)
Adam Lisagor "You see guys all the time doing the, um, un-tucking the shirt gag, and because-"
Dan Benjamin "What is the un-tucking the shirt gag?"
Adam Lisagor "It's pretty much when you un-tuck your shirt."
Perfect.
Jul 26
I just like the simplicity of it. I definitely plan on stealing that design some day.
Jul 22
On people underestimating the power of exponential growth:
"If a uranium nucleus emits two neutrons, both of which collide with other uranium nuclei, causing them to emit two neutrons, and so forth—well, did I mention nuclear holocaust as a possible end to population growth?"
