Blogs

If there is no such thing as offline, does this mean that web programmers should be exploring how to code for web-enabled physical devices? Like, starting yesterday?

Day One at MakerSquare. Half day, on account of the Veteran’s Day parade, which I sadly missed. Heard that the oldest surviving WWII vet was there. Richard Overton. 107 years old. From Bastrop County, Texas, born in 1906. From the Great War to the Depression to the Pacific Theater to television to the civil rights movement to a man on the moon to Watergate to the oil crisis to the moral majority to the dot com era to 9/11 to a persistent world wide web to the recession to the present day. ...

0. Completed the entire “Web Fundamentals” Track on Codecademy 1. Completed the “Ruby in 100 Minutes” Tutorial 2. Completed the “Ruby” Track on Codecademy 3. Completed the “Ruby Primer” Course on RubyMonk 4. Completed Terminal Basics 5. Complete through Exercise 11 “Moving a File” of the “Learn Code the Hard Way” Book 6. Completed the JavaScript Track by Codecademy 7. Completed “Try jQuery” by CodeSchool 8. Completed all of “jQuery” by Codecademy This was the necessary prework ahead of MakerSquare. I’m looking forward to the day when I can comfortably and clearly explain everything that I have learned through these sites. For now, though, it’s lots of sketching, experimenting, doc reading, and staring thoughtfully at irb. ...

The stops on my roadmap to developerhood

Programming a drone is easy! Install Node.js and get the ar-drone module. All you need to do then is to execute the following code with node. That will make your drone take off, move around, do a flip and carefully land again. Seriously, that’s all! var arDrone = require(‘ar-drone’); var client = arDrone.createClient(); client.takeoff(); client .after(5000, function() { this.clockwise(0.5); }) .after(3000, function() { this.animate('flipLeft’, 15); }) .after(1000, function() { this.stop(); this.land(); }); ...

I love inject. To be more specific, I love Enumerable#inject. I find it easy to read and easy to use. It’s powerful and it lets me be more concise. Enumerable#inject is a good thing. Jay Fields’ Thoughts Facts. I’ve seen this thing in action before, but really started to scrape the surface today. It seems to be a good example of Ruby is about, namely making coding more friendly for people & allowing multiple ways of doing things. 

When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. so create. Why the Lucky Stiff, via Twitter, via Smashing Magazine

Finally learned enough jQuery to update my website from “copied-and-pasted jQuery that sorta works sometimes” to “works gooder all the time.” Small steps. 

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So: the technical reason we started counting arrays at zero is that in the mid-1960′s, you could shave a few cycles off of a program’s compilation time on an IBM 7094. The social reason is that we had to save every cycle we could, because if the job didn’t finish fast it might not finish at all and you never know when you’re getting bumped off the hardware because the President of IBM just called and fuck your thesis, it’s yacht-racing time. http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2013/10/22/citation-needed/ via Infovore