Software As She’s Developed

Andy Hunt asked a while ago, What happens when t approaches 0?” One of the interesting topics that came up today at Software Trends was “what happens when the time to develop a new application approaches zero?” It will never be zero, of course, but it will, over time, asymptotically approach zero. Suppose we finally get to […]

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Quick tip. Been playing with Adobe Air recently and was trying to let the user drag a "systemChrome="none" transparent="true" around. The definitive Air reference has an example that shows how to close and minimize, but not how to move it. And all the examples I could find are Flash-based rather than the HTML/JS/Ajax approach I'm [...]

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So there's this Japanese R&D blog that focuses on covers and spotted an uncanny resemblance. Ajax本が一杯出てきているけど、トウトウこんな本まで登場です。 Ajax Design Patterns http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/ajaxdp/index.html Ajax Design Patterns 作者: Michael Mahemoff 出版社/メーカー: Oreilly & Associates Inc 発売日: 2006/07 メディア: ペーパーバック カバー表紙が「バクダッド・カフェ」風味。ちょっと惹かれる。   紀伊国屋、DVD「バクダッド・カフェ 完全版」を4月25日に発売―日本初公開版に、カットシーンを追加した完全版で登場http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20030204/kino.htm 少しは読もうかな？ Bagdad Cafe is an arthouse that was always in the video library but I never watched. The film runs 95 minutes in the [...]

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I've had a Rails website which works fine for about 12-18 hours, then starts giving out intermittent 500 errors because the mongrels die. After searching around, I ended up fixing it on two levels. (a) Direct solution - Fix MySQL config One reason Mongrels die is MySQL connections not timing out, leading to starvation. Apparently there's a [...]

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Jeff Attwood recently pointed out the difference between Gamma et al's Design Patterns and Alexanders' equivalent and outlined a critique of the former which characterises it as "replacing actual thought and insight with a plodding, mindless, cut-and-paste code generation template mentality". First, I want to note that the critique above surely defies belief to anyone who [...]

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I had my first remote desktop sharing experience on a Mac yesterday. I needed to run a demo on my Mac for a remote user, and it turned out to be not all too challenging, once I worked out what software was required. All of it free and painless to set up for both parties. Here's [...]

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Man, JSON has come out of nowhere! I first came across it amid the Javascript hype in early '05, now it's everywhere. Not only in your Ajax apps, but in the On-Demand Javascript APIs of the world. Sharing an ethic of simplicity with Rails, it's not surprising these technologies have come closely together, with JSON support [...]

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It goes something like this: Startup website takes off New features continue pumping out like crazy. Soon, you have everything covered - tags, RSS feeds, gradient bling, and your very own corporate blog Cha Ching. FunkyBigDotCom just bought you. You explain on your blog now you'll have the resources to do all [...]

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Having already tipped my hat to the iPhone with an off-key post about finger gestures, let me now go rambly with the (distant) second biggest story of the week: danah boyd's class division paper which argues something along the lines of "Facebook is for preps, MySpace is for Emos". In the week since I've read [...]

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