Get ready for some epic hand-waving. I'm reading Reg Braithwaite aka Raganwald's new book JavaScript Allongé , and -- because it's a Leanpub book and therefore to some extent a work in progress -- subjecting it to some pretty merciless copyedits as I go. JavaScript Allongé explores Ja...
It's the name of a Murakami book and exhibit, but it's also the question taunting online journalism. Jason Calcanis thinks newspapers will die ; newspapers themselves are trying to heal ; and Adrian Holovaty wants to open the door . But Digg, Reddit, and Hacker News have all chosen su...
I guess I was pontificating a little, but I want to go into more detail. Rails does something brilliant with its association classes like belongs_to and has_one ; it gives composition the same kind of emphasis and importance that inheritance already enjoys in every class-based object-...
The book will guide you through the creation of a simple language written in Ruby. Once you’ve been through the exercises in the book and feel ready to dive in and create a real language, you’ll start from the template language running on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) included with t...
Two very intelligent individuals named Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil have a long-running $10,000 bet about whether or not, by 2029, the Turing Test will be beaten. However, both these individuals have missed something painfully obvious. The Turing Test has already been beaten - and the...
One of the big author names to drop in the 1990s, besides the cyberpunks, was Hakim Bey, a philosopher who wrote Pirate Utopias and The Temporary Autonomous Zone . Temporary autonomous zones empowered the kinder, gentler post-modern anarchist to create safe havens of sane behavior out...
Inheritance is always bad, only composition can be our true savior! Only standalone command objects can give us the reusability this application needs! Turning patterns into articles of faith takes them out of the realm of rational discussion. Code either adheres to the holy patterns ...
In a "How I Work" interview on LifeHacker.com, Tim Ferriss recommends the OS X app Scrivener: Scrivener, the word processor I've used for the last two books. Unlike Word, it doesn't crash every five minutes, and I can look at multiple docs at once in the same window. [It's] minimalist...
I am in awe of Persimmon who is our raid leader. She works in a hospital in real life. She is the stabilizing force during the raids, supporting the class leaders, nudging the conversation and keeping the raid moving as fast as possible without moving too fast. I find that she reminds...
I had a random thought the other day: I actually did write it. You can buy it if you want. The funny thing is I wasn't actually serious when I tweeted that. The "I should write that" part was really just a knee-jerk reaction. Whenever I'm complaining about the non-availability of some...
"We built it, and that drew an audience, so we'll monetize the audience, even though it'll drive them away. The audience is big enough that we can probably make a little money before the whole thing falls apart, and if we're lucky, we might be able to sell the company to somebody who ...
Here's an easy way to write better blog posts. First write out your idea, without concern for quality. Just express the thought at hand. Next go through the text, eliminating the passive voice anywhere you find it. Do it again for adverbs , and a third time for run-on sentences . Maki...
The biggest problem with Markdown: John Gruber. ...the fact that there has been no improvement whatsoever to the specification or reference implementation for five years is kind of a problem. There are some fairly severe bugs in that now-ancient 2004 Markdown 1.0.1 Perl implementation...
Undoubtedly overkill, but the time for sacrificing basic usability to personal cleverness was the 1990s, when the Web was new and its user experience fundamentals were unknown enough to justify experimenting. Breaking the back button two decades later is just shameful, especially now ...
A Downside To Curated "Journalism" A Refactoring Opportunity Within Rails 3 The Dark Side Of Trolling Why Does Twitter Suck? Believe It Or Not, It's The... When Pixar Makes A Horror Movie, The World Will Be... You Fuckers Are Adorable I Think This Would Be Better Stylization And Abbre...
Apologies to the entire open source community, because I'm raising this on my blog rather than participating in the open source development process around Rails, especially since it's entirely possible this is already fixed in Rails 4. However, I've often gotten the impression that sp...
How To Get A Kickass Job, Making Six Figures Working From Home With The Stars Of Your Community, Even If You Just Got So Fired That The Cops Hauled You Out Of The Building In Handcuffs
How To Get A Kickass Job, Making Six Figures Working From Home With The Stars Of Your Community, Even If You Just Got So Fired That The Cops Hauled You Out Of The Building In Handcuffs
MAY CHEER AND GOOD FORTUNE BE HEAPED DEEPLY UPON YOU THIS MORN! THE WENCHES AND GOOD MEAD OF THE BYGONE EVE STILL HANG THICKLY UPON ME! WHAT GOOD FORTUNE THAT I MAY WAKE TO 512 MOAR MEGA BYTES OF YOUR RAM IN MY GHOSTLY VIRTUAL COMPUTING DEVICE!
As a hacker who also wants to be a filmmaker and musician, my life takes some weird twists and turns. I kicked some entrepreneurial ass in 2010, but returned to hacking for hourly rates in 2011. Here's why: I took a job that didn't pay very well because I got to work with a very accom...
SynthBot is an unsupervised programmer for software synthesizers. It takes as input a target sound file and a software synthesizer, and returns the set of parameters for the synthesizer which produce as similar a sound to the target as possible. [Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficient]s are...
I advertise this in my blog sidebar, and blogged it once or twice: I've run into a couple misconceptions here and there on Twitter, etc., so I'm going to blog this quick FAQ. It's more a "frequently mistaken assumptions," then a true FAQ, though. First of all, I didn't write it. It wa...
Wrap function definitions in wrapper functions Identify similar JavaScript code blocks Calculate similarity percentage between any two code blocks Compare code blocks to see how many specific tokens they differ by Extract the variant tokens by which similar code blocks differ Extract ...
Everybody loves the way you can just git push origin master in a Heroku project and see your changes live on the web right away. If you're on EC2, Slicehost, or any other non-Heroku environment, it's exceptionally easy to hack that functionality into your own project. This is literall...
If you don't fuck around with iMovie's ridiculous "projects" horseshit, and you just want to get your shit from a camcorder and onto your Mac, use iMovie to import the video, and then just quit out of that useless piece of fucking garbage and go to the "iMovie Events" folder on whiche...
I think listening to Node.js hype at all is foolish. It's just not worth having an opinion about. It leads to a foolish brattiness in those who believe it and an equally foolish hostility in those who harp on its flaws. Hype is hype. It's bullshit. Let it go. Node will change course t...
lost an argument with me on GitHub ranted about it on his blog: Giles... bemoans bundler, because typing "bundle exec" represents ceremony, and using any of the myriad solutions to avoid typing "bundle exec", such as bundler binstubs or rvm gemsets, represents configuration which viol...
I don't know why this band doesn't have ads on this video, but if they did, YouTube would be paying them every single time somebody saw it. As it is, iTunes is paying them every time somebody buys their song -- which still puts them ahead of nearly everybody who's dealt with the enter...
with Loren Segal. Realized why I was right when I revisited TomDoc and took a look at how it handles the public/private distinction. # Public: Duplicate some text an arbitrary number of times. # # text - The String to be duplicated. # count - The Integer number of times to duplicate t...
Super Saiyan: Heavy Metal Remix Peter Cooper's CoffeeScript Drum Machine Teaching The Robots To Sing: Episode 2 (TDD With J... Making Music With JavaScript Is Easy: Free 35-Minu... Rails Went Off The Rails: Why I'm Rebuilding Archa... Awesome VJ Tech: Turntable Projection Mapping Hack...
