Binary Code

The programmer, who needs clarity, who must talk all day to a machine that demands declarations, hunkers down into a low-grade annoyance. It is here that the stereotype of the programmer, sitting in a dim room, growling from behind Coke cans, has its origins. The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-It notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer.

- Ellen Ullman

Ted Dziuba may be crass and crude but at the end of the day he’s also the one making the most sense of Chrome and the rise of “desktop-killer web apps”:

Users have pretty basic needs when it comes to computers. They want word processing, spreadsheets, communications, and games. These needs have not changed much since the advent of the personal computer. So, when your Aunt asks why her 1.2GHz computer isn’t fast enough to run an online word processor that has the same fucking features as the 1987 version of Corel WordPerfect, you don’t have an answer for her. There is no justification.

If you’re reading this you, like me, are probably one of the people who should be paying close attention to that message because the other 90% of the world isn’t, and doesn’t have to, and they’re just fine with that.

Update: Dziuba follows up over at The Reg in Chrome-fed Googasm bares tech pundit futility.

The blogosphere sprayed its shorts and Google is sitting there, holding its whistle, trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.

YA-programming Q&A site is springing up (perhaps I shouldn’t complain; anything that helps dilute the online influence of that PoS Experts Exchange can only be a good thing) and it is members-only beta. Unless you circumvent the security-through-obscurity via this weak bit of trickery:

P.S. If you’d like to try Stack Overflow yourself, simply go to http://beta.stackoverflow.com and type the following into your address bar: javascript:alert(document.cookie="soba=-9999999");

Then again, perhaps gaining access is just the first skill-testing question on the site….

(Via Stack Overflow: the Blind Leading the Blind).

Xbox 360 + Connect360 + MacBook Pro + Airport Extreme + external 500 gig USB2 hard drive = media centre awesomeness!

(I confess I stole the title from here because that title rocks. And fits.)

I used MySQL for years and years before coming across this little MySQL output-formatting tip that makes all the difference in the world when viewing your raw data. Instead of:

SELECT * FROM users;

use:

SELECT * FROM users\G

The result is very nicely formatted output (almost YAML-like, save for the spacing) that’s much, much easier to read (at least for those of us on small, 17″ laptops instead of the mega 30″ monitors).

A great article about how to tell if your kid’s become one of them dreaded hackers: Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?

I particularly like this bit:

There are, unfortunately, many hacking manuals available in bookshops today. A few titles to be on the lookout for are: “Snow Crash” and “Cryptonomicon” by Neal Stephenson; “Neuromancer” by William Gibson; “Programming with Perl” by Timothy O’Reilly; “Geeks” by Jon Katz; “The Hacker Crackdown” by Bruce Sterling; “Microserfs” by Douglas Coupland; “Hackers” by Steven Levy; and “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric S. Raymond.

Sadly, I confess to owning each and every one of those titles, and many more. To whom do I turn myself in?

(And yes, the whole thing’s a joke.)

I love this rant: Read Giles Coren’s letter to Times subs.

That’s passion for your work!

As a collective industry we’ve been building web apps for about fifteen years now. In many ways we’ve greatly improved our development processes, our tools, our methodologies and our expectations. Today we whip out Rails apps in days that would have taken months before; single developers are producing entire commercial sites where once a team would’ve been required.

But alas not all is golden in this day and age. Time and time again I come across development practices and code that would not have been out of place in 1995, and that is not a compliment (and incidentally, these practices and code would have been bad then too, we web developers were just too divorced from the comp-sci folks to know it at the time).

Fortunately experience and hindsight can now provide us with rough guidelines against which we might develop our own apps. In the spirit of fifteen years of web development advancement I present to you “You’re Doing it Wrong If”.

You’re doing it wrong if:

• You’re not building atop an open-source framework
• You’re writing your own framework upon which to build
• You’re not using a database abstraction layer
• You’re writing your own database abstraction layer
• You believe you can write it faster or better or more efficiently than any available library
• You have more than one developer on your project and no written coding style guidelines
• Your bug tracker serves as your functional scope or your development roadmap
• You aren’t using source control
• You comment the what but not the why
• You tend to pass properties instead of instances to functions
• Your “deployment procedure” involves any combination of FTP and/or drag n’ drop
• You write code in a manner that cannot be unit tested
• Your primary method of code reuse is copy/paste
• You don’t read any development blogs focused on your primary and secondary languages or technologies
• You haven’t been to a conference or birds-of-a-feather meeting in the past year
• The only code you read at work is your own
• You worry that some day someone else will read your code and know it was written by you

and finally

• You’re doing it wrong if you aren’t learning every day

Only truly terrible places are victims of all of the above, however no one is immune. The more hurried we are, the more stressed we are, the more of a monoculture we work in, the more likely we are to become affected by these ailments.

(It goes without saying that these are general rules of thumb, applying ye olde “90/10″ rule and you, of course, are part of the 10. However for the sake of everyone else I urge you to consider Bruce Schneier’s famous words: “anyone who creates his own security protocol is either a genius or a fool”. The odds are not in your favour).

Update: Changed “ORM” to “database abstraction layer”.

Microsoft is sponsoring the Apache foundation and I am indeed impressed:

Microsoft is becoming a platinum member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), paying $100,000 annual membership.

Now one could take the cynical approach that it is yet more lip service from Microsoft about being “open” without actually being open (and really, a hundred grand is pocket change to MS) but I like to think this could be the start of something good. Especially given this statement:

Ramji, who made the announcements at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) Friday, promised “a lot more” PHP patches in the coming months now Microsoft had established processes he said clarified how employees can contribute to open source.
…
The decision to work on PHP fits with the overall strategy of improving the language’s interoperability with Windows and stemming the loss of PHP application deployments to Linux. LGPL allows code to be used with proprietary programs - such as SQL Server - unlike its GPL cousin.

(The word from the Apache Foundation itself.)

I had no idea Microsoft was even interested in PHP much less in a position to contribute patches. A quick googling suggests that this is not a new development so I suppose my surprise is a function of not paying much attention to web development on the Windows platform.

Regardless, PHP is the dominant web language and anything (and anyone) who helps improve PHP, regardless of platform, helps us all.

PHP, IronRuby… Microsoft, I feel like I hardly know you.

User interface design is not about dumbing things down for the poor stupid user.

We software developers, understanding the software as we do, find it easy to look down upon those who lack our understanding.

This is wrong.
- These things I believe.