Archive for 'general'

Myth of the Genius Programmer

This video from Google IO ’09 is 3 years gone now but it is so incredibly relevant I had to post it. Every place I’ve worked with other developers has had a strange mix of elitism and anxiety. Its well worth watching for any developer – ‘genius’ or not:

MIT OpenCourseware Computing Courses

I’ve known about the free materials at MIT OpenCourseware for a while now but procrastination has always gotten the better of me. If you’ve not heard of it I’d give it a gander as there’s a lot of free learning material up there if you’re feeling adventurous. Apart from having a marathon horror film binge [...]

HTML5 – Browser Ability

Doing a quick test of the major browsers (on OSX Snow Leopard) and of the 160 HTML5 features tested these are the scores: Chrome 5.0.342.9b 137 Safari 4.0.5 113 (this is the score I got on Chrome Windows which suggests an older version of Webkit) Opera 10.10 38 (I expected much better from Opera as [...]

8 Code Snippet Sites

Snippet sites first cropped up as a way of sharing code with others in IRC and forums where formatted code with syntax highlighting wasn’t practical. Since then they’ve grown to provide version control, sharing and other features. Here’s a quick list of the major players. Personally – I’d recommend Github. dZone Snippets Part of the [...]

Tabs vs. Spaces

Every time I’ve seen one of these “vs” posts its gone into great length about the philosophy behind such and such.  You’ll never convince someone based on ‘religious argument’. So I’m going to take a different approach here and state who does what and hopefully the weight of ‘who does what’ will make the point [...]

Epic Self Documenting Code

This is the best: switch (mIntegrationDirection) { case InventoryIntegrationDirection.DoTheSameChangeInShop: DoTheSameChangeInShop(GetChangedDataFromInventory(mLastSynchDate)); break; case InventoryIntegrationDirection.DoTheSameChangeInInventory: DoTheSameChangeInInventory(GetChangedDataFromShop(mLastSynchDate)); break; case InventoryIntegrationDirection.DoTheSameChangeInShopThenDoTheSameChangeInInventoryForNotChangedDataInInventory: DoTheSameChangeInShopThenDoTheSameChangeInInventoryForNotChangedDataInInventory( GetChangedDataFromInventory(mLastSynchDate), GetChangedDataFromShop(mLastSynchDate)); break; case InventoryIntegrationDirection.DoTheSameChangeInInventoryThenDoTheSameChangeInShopForNotChangedData: DoTheSameChangeInInventoryThenDoTheSameChangeInShopForNotChangedData( GetChangedDataFromShop(mLastSynchDate), GetChangedDataFromInventory(mLastSynchDate)); break; default: break; } Read how this travesty occurred at DailyWTF

Mac Blogging Software …is rubbish?

You’d automatically think that an application you need to pay for would be better than a Firefox plugin. Unfortunately that’s not the case but it baffles me how no one else seems to realise this. For example take the array of Mac blogging apps out there: Ecto, MarsEdit, Blogo, MacJournal, etc, etc… Paid for applications [...]

Freebase – Structured Data

Can’t believe I’ve not spotted this before. Freebase is a freely editable store of structured data. If you want a table of programming languages or Greek poets then Freebase can provide. This has endless possibilities for tinkering and scripting with. If you’ve not seen before then I strongly recommend a visit.

Insight, Facts and Hmmms

I’m a big fan of Google Insight.  Mainly because it burns time when I’m bored and provides lots of “hmm” moments.  Its a service Google provide that lets you see search volume against a range of other factors such as geography, time, etc.  I thought I’d put a few together that may be of interest [...]

13 OS Reviews in Seconds

After the success of my previous quick-fire review on Ajax frameworks I decided to do another on operating systems. I’m taking a good chunk of Linux, Windows and Mac here. So here’s the no-holds barred reviews on the major OSs. Debian – A proper man’s OS and although the installer doesn’t look friendly its got [...]