Software As She’s Developed

I made a little music mashup you might enjoy using. A Little Music As I was playing around with the new layout of this blog, I added a Last.FM widget to the sidebar. It looks like this: table.lfmWidgetradioeef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 td {margin:0 !important;padding:0 !important;border:0 !important;}table.lfmWidgetradioeef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 tr.lfmHead a:hover {background:url(http://cdn.last.fm/widgets/images/en/header/radio/minired.png) no-repeat 0 0 !important;}table.lfmWidgetradioeef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 tr.lfmEmbed object {float:left;}table.lfmWidgetradioeef448421daa7cdb759397e5f8ea67f8 tr.lfmFoot td.lfmConfig a:hover {background:url(http://cdn.last.fm/widgets/images/en/footer/red.png) no-repeat [...]

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Jeff Attwood encourages developers to eat their own dogfood: I've found that much of the best software is the best because the programmers are the users, too. It is UsWare. It behooves software developers to understand users, to walk a mile in their shoes. If we can bridge the gap between users and ourselves-- even if only [...]

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Ajax, AjaxPatterns As foretweeted last week, I created a little Ajax app called BlingText. As you can see, it takes a message and provides some ASCII renderings. In particular, it includes a port of the old UNIX/C Banner utility. If I do more work on it, the main improvements will be: Options. Let the user specify, for [...]

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I've just updated my favicon library, which I first wrote about here. I'll explain more about the update in a separate post. For now, I want to talk about browser tabs. Browser tabs were introduced by Opera. Then Firefox adopted them a few years later, as did Safari. Then Microsoft stepped into the '90s with their [...]

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OAuth is not Open ID. They have a different purpose. I've been playing around with OAuth a bit in the past couple weeks and have a grip on what it's aiming to do and what it's not aiming to do. To start with, here's what OAuth does have in common with Open ID: They [...]

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I am amazed that for all the talk about future Java features, there is hardly any mention of operator overloading. Certainly syntactic sugar is high on the priority list, with the Java world starting to realise the benefits of powerful literals and closures. (Good thing too. Steve Yegge: "Java's biggest failing, I've decided, is its [...]

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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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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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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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