Tumbly goodness

1. 

   P1020717 by electrachrome.

   13 August 2010 ¶

2. As an alternative to five hackers doing five 80% solutions of the same problem, we would be better off if each programmer picked a different task, and really thought it through — a 100% solution. Then each time a programmer solved a problem, no one else would have to redo the effort. Of course, it’s true that 100% solutions are significantly harder to design and build than 80% solutions. But they have one tremendous labor-savings advantage: you don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel. The up-front investment buys you forward progress; you aren’t trapped endlessly reinventing the same awkward wheel.

   Example[…] I needed an emacs mode in graduate school for interacting with Scheme processes. I looked around, and I found a snarled up mess of many, many 80% solutions, some for Lisp, some for Scheme, some for shells, some for gdb, and so forth. These modes had all started off at some point as the original emacs shell.el mode, then had been hacked up, eventually drifting into divergence. The keybindings had no commonality. Some modes recovered old commands with a "yank" type form, on C-c y. Some modes recovered old commands with M-p and M-n. It was hugely confusing and not very functional.

   The right thing to do was to carefully implement one, common base mode for process interaction, and to carefully put in hooks for customising this base mode into language-specific modes — lisp, shell, Scheme, etc. So that’s what I did. I carefully went over the keybindings and functionality of all the process modes I could find — even going back to old Lisp Machine bindings for Zwei — and then I designed and implemented a base mode called comint. Now, all process modes are implemented on top of comint, and no one, ever, has to re-implement this code. Users only have to learn one set of bindings for the common functions. Features put into the common code are available for free to all the derived modes. Extensions are done, not by doing a completely new design, but in terms of the original system — it may not be perfect, but it’s good enough to allow people to move on and do other things.

   — Olin Shivers (emphasis his)

   28 July 2010 ¶

3. 

   Pulpit, by Kim.

   13 July 2010 ¶

4. 

   Ampersand Love, by Patrycja Zywert.

   30 June 2010 ¶

5. [W]hen you have a spec that almost *everyone* ignores or gets wrong[…] it might be time to acknowledge that the problem is the spec instead of the implementors.

   — David Megginson (emphasis his).

   18 May 2010 ¶

6. In order to keep my life and work organized, the tool I use to track tasks has to be streamlined and seamless. Do you know what I mean? Any hassle or delay, and I’m likely to get distracted or postpone the bookkeeping of adding a new task or updating the status of a task. If I’m hampered in bookkeeping, I fall behind and the system becomes less trustworthy so I can even fall out of the habit of keeping it up-to-date simply because it’s already not up-to-date. It requires discipline as well as ease-of-use.

   — Lisa Dusseault

   13 May 2010 ¶

7. TTML has the air of being designed for a situation where a bunch of people in suits turn up to help you do accessibility. SRT has the air of something designed so that some guy in his pants in his basement can subtitle anime. Historically the successful parts of the web have been much closer to the guy-in-his-basement design than the people-with-suits design.

   — James Graham, in #whatwg

   16 April 2010 ¶

8. 1. andywaer Just learned the CSS property text-transform:capitalize has a bug with all-caps text: “FAIL” will not convert to “Fail,” it remains FAIL.
   2. joshthewebguy @andywaer that’s what strtolower() is for.
   3. andywaer @joshthewebguy Ha. Thanks, smartass. Not if you’re working only in CSS
   4. joshthewebguy @andywaer jquery?
   5. andywaer @joshthewebguy In a CSS-only environment, it fails.
   6. andywaer @joshthewebguy what good is a CSS property if it requires the help of another language in order for its tests to pass?
   7. hober @andywaer: ‘text-transform: capitalize’s definition: “Puts the first character of each word in uppercase; other characters are unaffected.”
   8. hober @andywaer: see http://tinyurl.com/5mt3wz for more.
   9. andywaer @hober yeah, I’ve read the spec. it’s just a useless definition in practice.
   10. andywaer I’ll have one ball-busting with a side of RTFM, please.

   14 April 2010 ¶

9. It's absolutely true. There's all these people sitting around, and if you read these blogs and the comments, it's like—I got so many nasty notes from "fans" about how I wasn't feeding their need for more tips. I'm grateful that people like what I do, but I'm also becoming increasingly confrontational with people who go, "I can't wait 'til this new thing comes out!" Whether that's an Apple tablet or a new release of a text editor or whatever. I increasingly will say to them, "What are you unable to make today with what you've got?" Or, put differently, "What's the best thing you [made] last year that you're really proud of and how will this help you do that again?"

   You're absolutely right. You're gonna die. You're gonna die. And nobody's gonna care which version of the iPhone you used to make something on Twitter, or to go and post about your bowel movement on Facebook. And I'm not even talking about legacy; I'm talking about the fact that I personally feel most alive when I'm making something, and I feel least alive when I'm being led around by some obnoxious use of my attention that I wasn't aware of. To me, that's the thing. You can buy the jogging shoes and you can buy the Runner's World, but until you put them on and walk out the door every day, you're just a fat man.

   There's no amount of information that's going to take the place of putting on the shoes and starting to move a little bit. And you're not really doing Tae Kwan Do unless you're kicking people. Reading all the sex manuals in the world is not going to do anything unless you're touching genitals. Otherwise, you're just reading. But it's painful. People get mad when you say that, because we derive a lot of our self-esteem and satisfaction out of these things that we choose to consume. I'm not even talking about Pepsi. I'm talking about blogs, and I'm talking about Facebook. I'm talking about MySpace and what widgets you put where. We form our identity through all these alliances we build, and for a lot of people to say to them, "Well, what are you making as a result of that?", what they're making is a different version of their personality every day. That's fine as long as that's what they want to do, but when you're 60, are you going to be happy that that's where your youth went?

   — Merlin Mann

   7 April 2010 ¶

10. 1. @hober: "@Github is all the rage with the kids these days, but it turns out it's actually pretty awesome." — @iamcal, in http://bit.ly/cfkGTO
    2. @mgrdcm: @hober: I want AfsOldFilesHub. That should be enough revision control for anyone. [ref]
    3. @hober: @mgrdcm {{citation needed}}, though what's the bib format for when you cite a cubism? [ref]

    25 March 2010 ¶

11. We worry about whether relatively poor people in rich nations are rich enough for our tastes rather than about whether the global system of borders and passports wrongfully traps the world’s poorest people in places with corrupt, immiserating institutions.

    — Will Wilkinson

    15 February 2010 ¶

12. Any spec is a good spec if it doesn’t require a Joel-in-a-box to get it up and running.

    — Joe Gregorio, on Hixie’s spec-writing style.

    9 February 2010 ¶

13. HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.

    — Mark Pilgrim

    3 November 2009 ¶

14. You should read the rest of Henri’s article, because I’m simplifying immensely here. Even in IE5/Mac, there were a few older doctypes that didn’t count as far as opting into standards support. Over time, the list of quirks grew, and so did the list of doctypes that triggered “quirks mode.” The last time I tried to count, there were 15 doctypes that triggered “standards mode,” 5 that triggered “almost standards mode,” and 73 that triggered “quirks mode.” But I probably missed some, and I’m not even going to talk about the crazy shit that Internet Explorer 8 does to switch between its four — four! — different rendering modes. Here’s a flowchart. Kill it. Kill it with fire.

    — Mark Pilgrim

    28 October 2009 ¶

15. It says a lot about CEDET that a full-blown CLOS implementation is the least onerous part of it.

    — Phil Hagelberg, in #emacs, referring to EIEIO.

    23 September 2009 ¶

16. here’s a toast to Alan Turing
    born in harsher, darker times
    who thought outside the container
    and loved outside the lines
    and so the code-breaker was broken
    and we’re sorry
    yes now the s-word has been spoken
    the official conscience woken
    – very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –
    and the story does suggest
    a part 2 to the Turing Test:
    1. can machines behave like humans?
    2. can we?

    — poet Matt Harvey, on the BBC

    14 September 2009 ¶

17. I’ve found that it’s useful for antisocial behaviors to be given names and URLs. It makes it easier to refer to them in conversation, and you can direct people here for further explanation.

    — Mark Pilgrim, commenting on his own HTTP Error 447: Gone until I get the attention I deserve.

    14 August 2009 ¶

18. My reply to an email sent to help-gnu-emacs.

    Has anyone tweaked Viper to become more productive? Care to share your tweaks?

    One trick I learned from Kai Großjohann is to use the z key as a prefix for my custom key bindings. (I don’t even know what z is supposed to do in vi.) He posted his .viper to comp.emacs a few years ago, with lots of goodies inside.

    I use zz for C-c C-c, and zs for C-c C-s. You can see how to do that in a general way by looking at `ted-viper-install-z-bindings' in my .viper.

    4 August 2009 ¶

19. As a long time “web accessibility” guy myself, I have to concur with Joe – the WCAG 2 is unworkable, fatally flawed, and will never receive the required up-take within the developer community required to make it useful. Oh, and it does nothing to improve web accessibility – something Joe has amply illustrated. I may not always agree with Joe’s “style”, but this time he’s bang on the money!

    — John Foliot, in a comment on Joe Clark’s ALA article To Hell with WCAG 2

    3 August 2009 ¶

20. 1. @Paulymer: '.mine .sweet' This is what happens when I spend the day writing CSS and listening to Guns N’ Roses.
    2. @hober: @Paulymer I think you mean '#me > .sweet'. “Sweet descendant of mine” doesn’t have quite the right ring to it.
    3. @jauricchio: @hober But the child selector doesn’t work in IE6. Welcome to the Jungle of legacy support.

    11 June 2009 ¶

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