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Rafe
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Sun Apr 25 10:48:09 PDT 2010
[commentary|software development]
I wanted to point the programmers in the audience at a series of three posts by Mike Taylor of The Reinvigorated Programmer. In the first, he challenges programmers to sit down and see if they can write an implementation of binary search on the first try, without testing. I tried the exercise without reading the whole
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Sat Apr 24 18:30:10 PDT 2010
I've been working on a Ruby database driver for Ingres. Most of the work has been in C, but I finally have my Ruby code (via C) fetching data from the database.
Now I'm starting on the Ruby on Rails portion. It involves adding a lot of additional calls that I didn't have in place. It's actually a pretty big test suite
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justin
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Sat Apr 24 15:51:51 PDT 2010
[transportation]
Perhaps you recall Pou Bel, the aptly named Citroën deux chevaux? Well today I found him a mate: Culotte. That’s French for underpants.
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justin
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Sat Apr 24 11:34:18 PDT 2010
[neatlinks]
NY Times inspired by The Onion: Tinkering With Taco Night
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justin
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Sat Apr 24 00:53:05 PDT 2010
[neatlinks]
The playful side of art: Kevin Van Aelst
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Fri Apr 23 18:30:10 PDT 2010
One my college buddies, Eric Star is at Evoca, a very cool startup. I'm not going to try to tell you everything they do... I'll just say that they let you post audio "blogs" and make them searchable. There are free accounts and professional level accounts as well.
Here's an article about them over at TechCrunch.
Eric
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justin
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Fri Apr 23 16:54:42 PDT 2010
[neatlinks]
Informative read: History of the user-agent string (I had always wondered why IE advertised itself as Mozilla/4.0)
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Thu Apr 22 18:30:10 PDT 2010
I finally got myself a MacBook Pro. This is the first Mac I've every owned or spent any serious time on, so I guess I'm what the Mac folk call a "switcher". Given that I've spent a lot of time on Windows and Linux boxes, I thought my impressions might be of interest to others thinking about this new Intel Mac
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justin
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Wed Apr 21 23:54:11 PDT 2010
[neatlinks]
Incredible photos of the sun: NASA shows 1st images from solar observatory
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Wed Apr 21 18:30:10 PDT 2010
A short article I wrote entitled The Cornerstone of a Great Shop was published in the spring edition of Methods and Tools. It's a great online only magazine, available via PDF or HTML.
Jared
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Wed Apr 21 17:00:37 PDT 2010
23:26 @fbac Odd question having nothing to do with CSS: did you happen to grow up in Raleigh? #Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
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Wed Apr 21 13:29:22 PDT 2010
[silverlight]
On the heels of the release of Silverlight 4, Adam Kinney and John Papa have put together
an online Silverligh
4 training course over on Channel 9. Units in the course cover the new features
in SL4 as well focusing in on how many of the new features enable Silvelright base
line of business (LOB) applications. They dive
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Rafe
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Wed Apr 21 12:36:03 PDT 2010
[commentary|the media]
Matthew Yglesias on the two ways to break news:
But there are really two ways to break news. A Type 1 scoop is a story that if you don’t break, just won’t be broken. A Type 2 scoop is a pure race for priority. You get Type 2 scoops by becoming the favored destination for deliberate leaks, or by ferreting out
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Rafe
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Wed Apr 21 07:40:42 PDT 2010
[commentary|health]
Seriously, who needs this?
Being fat is bad for your brain.
The New York Times blogger Olivia Judson runs down a ton of scientific evidence documenting the ways that being obese in middle age raises the likelihood of dementia in old age.
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justin
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Tue Apr 20 22:03:36 PDT 2010
[transportation]
BMW 3.0 CS on Mason between Pine and California
It’s funny, I’ve been taking these photos of cars lately, but I’m not really a car person. Mostly it’s just entertainment for me on my walk to and from work, but I’ve also found that among the hundreds of parked cars I pass by each day, which
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Tue Apr 20 18:30:10 PDT 2010
A project that I've been working on has involved calling C code from Ruby code. It was much easier to do than I anticipated and I thought others might find it interesting.
Why would you do this? Suppose you have a bit of Ruby code that's too slow in a key portion of your program? You can easily move that bit of code
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Tue Apr 20 17:44:45 PDT 2010
Now better watch out,
you better code right.
You better test first
and refactor that right!
Carl and Richard are coming to town!
The .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2010 Road Trip is headed back to RTP for a special LIVE
event Thursday May6th and will be joined by a special surprise guest. If you’re still
kicking
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justin
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Tue Apr 20 15:40:07 PDT 2010
[neatlinks]
If I only had a smoker: Kyle makes bacon!
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Rafe
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Tue Apr 20 13:11:34 PDT 2010
[commentary|war]
People are disconcertingly accepting of torture as a means of getting information from people we detain, and it seems to me that assassinations are even more popular than torture. You just don’t see many people protesting the United States blowing up suspected terrorists in countries like Yemen with missiles
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Rafe
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Tue Apr 20 10:53:01 PDT 2010
[commentary|apple|iphone]
Marco Arment discusses the rumored 960×640 display in the forthcoming iPhone, and argues that the tradeoffs involved with including the display probably aren’t worth it. Here’s his conclusion:
I’m sure I’ll fall in love with the high-density iPhone display as soon as I see it. But on paper, I’m
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justin
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Tue Apr 20 10:25:53 PDT 2010
[neatlinks]
Art of art: “Paintings of Handmade Pottery” Project
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Rafe
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Tue Apr 20 07:47:41 PDT 2010
[commentary|books]
Kids who grow up near books do better in school than kids who don’t, on average.
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Mon Apr 19 18:30:10 PDT 2010
In a meeting today AJAX was mentioned and several people asked what it was, so I thought I'd pass on a just a little bit about AJAX.
AJAX just means that the web page you are hitting is getting updated without reloading the entire page. Think about most web sites. If you click on a link, or a tab, or anything, the
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justin
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Sun Apr 18 23:21:27 PDT 2010
[food]
Claudine threw a birthday party for Danny over at St. George Spirits in Alameda this weekend. If you know your spirits, you might be familiar with their Hanger One Vodka or Absinthe Verte, the first American-made absinthe on the market after it was re-legalized in the US.
We got a very informative and amusing tour of
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Rafe
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Sun Apr 18 21:59:24 PDT 2010
[commentary|treme|tv]
Some links to things mentioned in episode 2 of Treme:
Coco Robicheaux
Voodoo stuff: loa and Marie Laveau
St. Gabriel, Louisiana
Calliope projects
Preservation Hall on St. Peter is closed on the show — it didn’t reopen until April, 2006
Steen’s Syrup
Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. In 1927, the
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Sun Apr 18 18:30:10 PDT 2010
I saw a great post on Ed Burnette's ZD Net blog about developing
software The Eclipse Way. It had some great quotes and the ideas can be applied nearly anywhere. It's not Eclipse specific
by any means. It's about developing good software.
Some of the good quotes:
Project health is stronger than saying "quality".
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Anton Zuiker
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Sat Apr 17 19:48:58 PDT 2010
[north-carolina]
A couple of weeks ago, on a bike ride through the Lake Hogan Farms neighborhood near my home, I noticed that there were trees gnawed cleanly and downed along the creek, and that the waterway seemed to be more marshy than normal. On closer inspection over the next few days, I saw that there was a beaver dam in the
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Sat Apr 17 18:30:10 PDT 2010
I was so tired the week that I wrote My Long Week that I left off the best story. I wouldn't have even remembered it but I told it to someone at work and he reminded me.
Again, as with the original story, if you disgust easy, don't read this one. If you want a hint, just look at the Google Adsense ads I have on the
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Rafe
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Sat Apr 17 08:55:48 PDT 2010
[commentary|mysql]
There is no application nearer and dearer to my heart than MySQL. I’ve build applications on a lot of different platforms over the years, but pretty much all of them have used MySQL as the data store. That said, i don’t usually pay attention to what’s going on in the MySQL community. I use whatever
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justin
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Fri Apr 16 20:03:39 PDT 2010
[photos|transportation]
Geo Tracker LSi 4×4 with lift kit, massive off-road tires, and safari-style roof rack. The mud splatters are a nice touch.
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Fri Apr 16 18:30:10 PDT 2010
Over the last two weekends I've been at conferences in St. Louis and Boston. (I've got to get another hobby!) At both locations I was involved with the Birds of a Feather session for architecture.
I found it very interesting that in both cities, SOA and it's usage was discussed. Teams using SOA technologies (like Web
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Thu Apr 15 18:30:10 PDT 2010
Last week was a Long Week... and the story is pretty funny, so I thought I'd share it. However, be forewarned... this story is not for those with a weak stomach. :)
Last weekend I was in St. Louis on my first NFJS conference of the year. I called my wife Sunday morning to say good morning and she was in tears. She had
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Thu Apr 15 15:38:58 PDT 2010
Today on the Official Microsoft Silverlight site http://www.silverlight.net is
the announcement we have all been waiting for:
It’s been just three short years since the first release of Silverlight, and truly
amazing to see where things are at. I’ve been extremely privileged to have had opportunities
to work with
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justin
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Thu Apr 15 14:12:23 PDT 2010
[meta]
Source: MeeGo 1.0 on Many Devices and Screen Sizes
This one just boggles the mind. Apparently a QR Code (a sort of fancy 2D barcode for URLs) that I generated pointing to http://justinsomnia.org/ ended up in a YouTube demo video for MeeGo, a Linux-based mobile operating system joint-venture between Intel and
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justin
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Thu Apr 15 11:32:33 PDT 2010
[neatlinks]
This lyric from The Good Life’s “Lovers Need Lawyers” just never gets old:
I could never take another’s hand, it’s to you I’m condemned.
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justin
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Thu Apr 15 09:00:24 PDT 2010
[neatlinks]
Great photos:
Today, British civil aviation authorities ordered the country’s airspace closed as of noon, due to a cloud of ash drifting from the erupting Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland.
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justin
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Thu Apr 15 00:12:15 PDT 2010
[neatlinks]
Wow, suddenly it’s everywhere: Dirt! The Movie (via SFGate)
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justin
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Wed Apr 14 22:35:43 PDT 2010
[art|books]
Ideal Bookshelf 6, GW by Jane Mount
At first I thought they were just some random, thematically similar books painted together, but when I thought of it as a person’s “portrait” (idealized or otherwise) it took on another dimension.
For a while, I’ve been documenting people’s bookshelves
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Rafe
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Wed Apr 14 19:07:06 PDT 2010
[commentary|twitter]
Twitter has launched a new feature for third party Web sites, @Anywhere, automatically converts Twitter usernames to links with a hover effect that provides information about their Twitter account. I’ve added it to the blog. Here’s an example: @rc3dotorg.
If you’re a Twitter user, feel free to use
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Wed Apr 14 18:30:10 PDT 2010
Ted Neward's blog has an interesting entry on evaluating a language based on the number of keystrokes (not even lines) that it takes you to express a concept. This should, naturally, lead to a more productive team, since more of the details are wrapped up the well-tested language libraries, not code that you've
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Wed Apr 14 09:00:48 PDT 2010
The Windows 7 / Office 2010 Bus Tour is going to be making it’s way through North
Carolina in June (Raleigh June 2, Charlotte June 3) and is a great opportunity to
learn more about both products from some great speakers, including Mr. TalkingAboutWindows himself
Stephen Rose.
See you on the
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Rafe
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Tue Apr 13 22:27:17 PDT 2010
[commentary|security]
This weekend the Apache Software Foundation suffered a security breach. The post-mortem from the Apache Infrastructure Team is worth reading, because the attack was vsophisticated and they explain exactly how it worked.
Nelson Minar blames problems with passwords for the Apache security breach this weekend. Paul
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Tue Apr 13 18:30:10 PDT 2010
Lecando's Haven product is a continuous integration and continuous testing system; it runs your tests in parallel across many different machines. This looks great for anyone who wants commercial support for their continuous integration systems as well as massively parallel testing. It looks like a great idea, and like
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Mon Apr 12 18:30:10 PDT 2010
Not only is it still alive, it's getting better! For those of you wanting to run Rails in a Java runtime, do not despair. Charles Nutter posted today with a JRuby Progress Updates: JRuby on Rails, IRB, and the Future.
It's a great read on several different levels. If you are porting any of the scripting languages to
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Sun Apr 11 18:30:10 PDT 2010
If you haven't seen it, Amazon Connect is a new feature on Amazon that just recently went live. It's author's blogs hosted on the Amazon book page. It's a pretty neat idea, but I doubt that most of the people who are reading this would need to visit the Amazon page to track me down. :)
On the other hand, there are a
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