Software As She’s Developed

After accidentally searching for “XMLHttpRequest” in Google Maps and discovering no such location exists, I wondered about the fate of half.com, Oregon. This is the town which changed its name from Halfway to half.com during the tulip-mania of the late 90s. Half.com the company continues as an ebay subsite and half.com the town lives on […]

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Personal Domain and Lifetime Email Addresses … no, I’m not selling them. I just wish people would get an easy-to-remember email, resembling their name somehow. So I wouldn’t have to be told to update my address book, and so I could easily send them mail without having to lookup their address. Unlike a phone number, […]

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Honest Communiction: The Quote If your organization punishes honest communications and you start to communicate honestly, you’ll be destroyed. That’s a quote from Kent Beck I just came across on CoachSpot. I agree with the sentiment, I disagree with the fervour. Dishonest communication is frustrating and counter-productive Many programmers, at least most of the good ones, love what […]

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The Treo has a physical slider to quickly let you switch calls on and off. Hardly earth-shattering. but consider this: apparently no other smartphone has that same feature! Now, I haven’t investigated and I’m not enough a gadget freak to do so, but at least it’s what the Treo Director of Product Marketing claims: […]

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It’s nice to see an example of clear, personalised, instructions. I just upgraded to Ubuntu (I’ll post about it later), and visited the Firefox site to pick up extensions. It gives me the following message: Firefox on Ubuntu You appear to be using the Firefox package provided by Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu distributed a new version of Firefox […]

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Cedric on Interface naming convention: Some argued that using ‘I’ adds noise. Usage of ‘Impl’ suffix takes care of this problem too. I wonder if the author of this remark noticed the irony of this comment Neeraj Kumar left a good comment on […]

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Why is the default scrollback setting always so small? This applies to DOS, XTerms, terminal emulators like putty (which could really do with a way to save the scrollback setting too). How much memory does a 10,000 line scrollback cost? Let’s knock ourselves out and assume it’s full unicode - four bytes per character. On 80 […]

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Marcus Baker recently wrote about Ajax applications not being responsive enough, so the argument goes you should do just about everything in the browser, and mainly use the server-side for periodic persistence. I don’t think that’s always the right thing to do, but there’s definitely going to be more apps developed that way, and there’s […]

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A few Ajax UI idioms are emerging, e.g. progress icon while waiting for server response. But I haven’t yet seen anything for awareness of other users. I was just playing with the magnetic poetry demo (via Ajaxian. The pieces started moving on their own volition, which I assumed was, uh, due to magnetism. It turns […]

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I’ve been fortunate enough to have received various updates on Ajax projects from some of the developers. Right now, there are so many new Ajax frameworks coming out, and so much Ajaxification of existing frameworks, that it’s getting hard to keep track of what does what. So here’s a round-up of Ajax (and related) frameworks, […]

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