“I had the feeling that top-down and bottom-up were opposing methodologies: one more suitable for program exposition and the other more suitable for program creation. But after gaining experience with WEB, I have come to realize that there is no need to choose once and for all between top-down and bottom-up, because a program is best thought of as a web instead of a tree. A hierarchical structure is present, but the most important thing about a program is its structural relationships. A complex piece of software consists of simple parts and simple relations between those parts; the programmer’s task is to state those parts and those relationships, in whatever order is best for human comprehension not in some rigidly determined order like top-down or bottom-up.”
— Donald E. Knuth, Literate Programming (emphasis added)
Great writeup by Cory Doctorow on a story that is all too common. A professor of Computer Science tried to bar a student from getting public, open source, peer review on his source code for a project after the course was completed. The complaint was that it would make it easier for other students to cheat. Thankfully, the student appealed and the school board ruled that his goal is quite acceptable and in line with academic rigor.
From the article:
Students work harder when the work is meaningful, when it has value other than as a yardstick for measuring their comprehension. I’ve always thought it was miserable that we take the supposed best and brightest in society, charge them up to $60,000 a year in fees, then put them to work for four years on producing busywork that no one — not them, not their profs, not other scholars — actually wants to read.
I’d bet the odds are great this kid will go on to do great things in software…in spite of whatever company he works for.
Student challenges prof, wins right to post source code he wrote for course - Boing Boing .
I’m not saying that you can’t have success by pouring in all your waking hours. Of course you can. I’m saying that you don’t have to. That the correlation between the two is weak.
O-so-true. Working *smart* is essential. Otherwise, you’re working *stupid*.
DHH from 37signals on The lifestyle business bullshit.
We’re used to the future turning out differently than we expected; it happens all the time. When the past turns out differently, though, it can get really upsetting, and because people don’t like that kind of upset, we’re at risk of finding new reasons to believe false things, rather than revising our sense of what actually happened.
Too true. It’s really hard to admit one could be so passionately wrong.
I had a blast at the first ever Ignite Cleveland event. I was honored to be one of the speakers who had to cram huge ideas into 5 minute talks. We had 20 slides, each advancing on their own. And when they were done, we were done. Tremendous fun under pressure. And if you missed it, you can see me in my rapid fire glory right here.
Via the Ignite Cleveland website.
Design is now a key sales differentiator and is an area where old-school companies can catch up. Apple (AAPL) benefits from the company’s obsession with aesthetic austerity…and there’s no reason Dell can’t do the same.
A concise article that masterfully blows off the enormous complexity of what makes “good design” and the real differences between Apple and Dell. Oh yes, there are *plenty* of reasons Dell might not be able to do the same.
Amortality is a stranger, stronger alchemy, created by the intersection of that trend with a massive increase in life expectancy and a deep decline in the influence of organized religion — all viewed through the blue haze of Viagra.
This is one of those articles you have to read several times and ponder the laws of unintended consequences.
Rails autoloading, while nice in theory, frequently doesn’t work. Back in the day (you young whipper-snappers!), Rails took f–o–r–e–v–e–r to start up the development server. So they setup a mechanism to auto reload certain classes and files on every request in development mode rather than the whole stack. It was a slick idea, but if your code does anything fancy, it could confuse the autoloader and your app server needs to be restarted manually when you make those changes.
Since Rails 2.3+ is so fast when completely reloading the server, I wrote this script to listen to the given directories, and kill/restart the server when any file is changed. It’s inspired by one of Merb’s development modes as described by Yehuda Katz in a talk he gave last night.
It’s quick, simple, and reliably reloads your application when changes are made.
To install, just copy it into the scripts directory and set it to be executable.
Paul Graham doesn’t need Viagra. He is NP-hard.
Chuck Norris may have been the first, but he can’t divide by zero.
Overheard on twitter a while back. I’ve been thinking about it a bit.
I love the sense of criticality expoused by some of the CSS trolls: “You have X validation errors?!?!”. Yet, somehow the wheels kept turning - @d2h
Yeah. I totally know what he’s talking about. I’ve heard similar complaints in other industries, too. I mean, look at all those debt-warning trolls that keep cranking on and on about watching our budgets to make sure we as a nation don’t spend more than we make. Don’t they understand that the wheels keep turning? The money keeps flowing in. It doesn’t matter where it comes from. Why, just the other day, I was…
Oh. Yeah.
While doing some introductory reading about Haskell, I’ve been stumped by monads. It’s a pretty abstract concept related to functional programming that I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around. There are articles here and there that try to explain it, but the bottom line I’ve been looking for? How do I use it?
Well, it looks like I found a good article to break that barrier. If you know javascript and are familiar with jQuery, you can get in on the fun, too.
It’s said that every Haskell programmer writes their own monad tutorial, and with good reason: once you finally understand the definition and capabilities of a monad, you’ll be eager to try and break the mystique surrounding the concept of monads as a whole. To the outsider, monads are an impenetrable barrier to truly understanding Haskell; they’re cursed with a very unfortunate name, have bizarre syntax, and seem to do a thousand things at once. However, monads aren’t hard to understand when you see them in action.
The above is from Patrick Thomson, who writes how jQuery functions like a monad. The concepts we’ve been putting to use in this excellent javascript library have been whetting our appetites for monads all along. Of course, it can get more complicated and glorious than that, but this is how knowledge works…building on what we already know.
This also contributes to my growing suspicion that out of the two heavyweight champs of javascript libraries (the other being Prototype/Scriptaculous), jQuery is the “better” abstraction. More on that later.
In an interview with Alan Kay (one of the pillars of computer science):
If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
Yet another example of how commercialization complicates matters. A must read interview!
Ableton has been really busy. Their new version of Live packs in more goodies that make obsolete some of the ad hoc plugin/device chaining to get the same effect. Here are the features I’m most looking forward to.
I guess it’s time to upgrade from version 6.
Americans remain the wild-eyed spenders of the world, and that was never likely to change without external pressure. They have, however, been forced into this, with their equity investments and real estate investments all sliding into nothingness, and with the economy in a deep recession. They must repair their broken personal balance sheets, and so, as painful as it might be, they are saving money.
It’s funny. My grandfather thought saving was a joy.
So, when you’re all done playing Spore or SimCity on your iPhone, what’s it actually good for? I’ve been asked by several people what apps are most useful and must haves. Your mileage may vary depending on what you need, but here’s my picks and why I use them.
Beatmaker ($19.99)
Imagine Propellerhead’s Reason on the iPhone. This is it. Powerful and a little bit overwhelming. Sequencer and drum machine. Record your own samples on the phone. Effects. Different time signatures. If you write music with any sort of electronic flair, you must get this. It’s worth way more than $19.
Weatherbug (free)
Much better than the built in weather widget. Set up custom locations, see weather radar. The weather video is cute but I’m not the kind of guy who watches the Weather channel, either. But, hey…it’s free!
Twitterfon (free)
One of the top twitter apps. Many are great, but I found this one to be the most stable and full featured. You can search twitter for popular terms. It also lets you search within your location. It treats direct messaging like a back and forth chat. The only feature that’s missing in this (that Twitterific does) is that it doesn’t offer the option to save your spot or bookmark where you are. When you quit the app and come back, everything refreshes.
TouchOSC ($3.99)
If you’re a computer musician, you probably know something about Open Sound Control, the possible replacement for MIDI. This is a great little app that gives you four presets of screens with controls that send OSC data back and forth to your computer or musical instrument. They say eventually you can make your own layouts. Very nifty stuff.
Things ($9.99)
I know, I know, 9 bucks for a todo app? But it’s one impressive app that’s the companion to the desktop version. I used to use OmniFocus, but I found it didn’t fit my workflow. I know this will sting GTD purists, but I like to have multiple tags on my todos and projects. Things eventually will soon have subprojects, too. It’s a great app that syncs Oh-so-effortlessly with the desktop. If you don’t already have a productivity routine in place, try out the desktop version for free to see if this would work for you.
Stanza (free)
My top recommendation. I love reading. I love reading older books. This one has ‘em all. Thanks to the likes of Project Guttenburg, you can get your hands on all kinds of book texts that are in the public domain. This is a superb eBook reader. The best one on the iPhone in my opinion. And I just found out that they are offering some purchase options for current books as well.
RulerPhone ($3.99)
This is one of those oddball ones that you are glad you have when you need it. It’s a way to measure dimensions and distance by comparing anything to a credit card sized object. You simple place a credit card in view near the object you want to measure. Snap a picture of the scene. Then, when you tell RulerPhone the dimensions of that card, you can measure anything else in the picture. Wild, eh? I’ve used it several times. There’s a lite version, too.
Pandora (free)
Music lovers most likely know about Pandora, the internet radio station that makes playlists based on the musical “DNA” similarities of other songs and bands. Now you can do it on your iPhone. Tuneage!
Instapaper (free and $9.99)
If you haven’t used the site yet, check it out: http://instapaper.com. You get a bookmarklet that you can click while visiting a page. Once clicked, it saves the page to your instapaper “pages-to-read” list. You then have a list you can read through later. The beauty of the iPhone version? It downloads the page text to your phone so you can read offline. I use this every single day.
Fourtrack ($9.99)
For the musicians who need to capture their quick and dirty ideas…and then overdub some more. This is a quick and dirty four track recorder. No frills other than simple compression to help even out levels. All it does is record and playback four tracks, just like the old cassette versions. It works great and solid, and you can download the recordings easily over WiFi.
FileMagnet ($4.99)
A great way to read Word Documents, spreadsheets, and PDFs on the phone. There’s a desktop version (free) to help you transfer stuff. It keeps your place when you are reading so you can come back later. It also lets you read in landscape mode. Definitely recommend.
Byline ($4.99)
If you use Google Reader as your RSS feed reader, you’ll like this one. It integrates with it nicely. Whatever you read on Byline is reflected in Reader and vise-versa. It also lets you specify if you want it to download the text for offline reading (like instapaper).