Category Archives: technical

10gui window management not innovative enough

A friend suggested that I look at the R. Clayton Miller’s 10gui video (2009) for ideas on window management and interaction. The video makes some interesting observations about human-computer interactions (HCI): mice excel at pointing on the screen without obstructing … Continue reading

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A criminal says trust is stupid but security “experts” trust

Sam Antar, convicted white collar criminal, says trusting is stupid clearly and explicitly: President Ronald Reagan said: “Trust, but verify.” As a convicted felon, I say: “Don’t trust, just verify.” “Verify, verify, verify.” As a criminal, I considered people’s humanity … Continue reading

Posted in broken, rants, technical | 1 Comment

Indifference to process leads to Mozilla contributor departing

Tyler Downer announced he was no longer contributing to Mozilla because the Mozilla bug triaging process was being sacrificed on the altar of “rapid release”. Tyler likes the idea of the Rapid Release, but rather the tools to handle bug … Continue reading

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Excellent Css tools

Here are some websites I have found useful when learning css: http://css-tricks.com/ http://quirksmode.org http://www.css3.info/ Css3 tutorial via Css Tricks: CSS3Please.com Border-Radius.com HTML-Ipsum.com Button Maker Update ( 28 July 2011 ) : Now for some excellent tools: Sass (http://sass-lang.com ) Compass … Continue reading

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Installing private ruby gem in rails project using heroku

If you have a private gem, deploying to heroku can be frustrating.. In my case, I do not have even a server so I am not looking (yet) to set up a private rubygem server. I just have another project … Continue reading

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Use Subclasses and alternative interface implementations to reduce “future” bugs

One of the little-appreciated consequences of subclassing or alternative implementations of Java interfaces is to reduce or eliminate “future bugs”. “Future bugs” are bugs that are currently not wrong, but will cause problems in the future. Every conditional ( if, … Continue reading

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Don’t jump into a project, wade in

When starting a new programming task (or company ), it is very tempting to just plunge in and start coding (or doing) right away. The release early-and-often mentality encourages this approach. Documentation becomes optional and design is seat-of-the-pants. Hard-lessons learned … Continue reading

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How to do “status meetings” right (aka avoiding “Death-by-Status”)

A truism in the start-ups v. “big” company battle is that start-ups have a big advantage because they don’t have to waste time in internal communication. Status meetings are quick and focused; not long-drawn out off-site affairs. However, many startups … Continue reading

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How to do a redirect after POST

Continuing an StackOverflow answer: Its a little non-obvious but: create a keyed-object in the user session. the value is a Request + java Future for the result return immediately with a client-side redirect. while the client-side redirect is being handled, … Continue reading

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When to do asynchronous programming

Jose Maria Arranz has a post up about The “joy” of asynchronous programming. Jose’s key point is programmers are “reinventing the wheel”. By manually breaking tasks into a multi-threaded asynchronous/callback paradigm, programmers are reinventing the thread scheduling that the operation … Continue reading

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