Quote on New Schematic

The Carmack Method

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 15:15:15 +0000

Eventually working around high-productivity professionals like John Carmack made me realize that if you want to excel, then you have to work hard and focus the whole time.

I remember Carmack talking about productivity measurement. While working he would play a CD, and if he was not being productive, he’d pause the CD player. This meant any time someone came into his office to ask him a question or he checked email he’d pause the CD player. He’d then measure his output for the day by how many times he played the CD (or something like that – maybe it was how far he got down into his CD stack). I distinctly remember him saying “So if I get up to go to the bathroom, I pause the player”.

'We did what we always do...'

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 22:40:37 -0500

We did what we always do when there’s a problem without a clear solution: we waited.

from “Toward Go 2”

Quote for 2016-07-21

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 19:30:04 +0000

In 1996 Keith Shafer and several others proposed a solution to the problem of broken URLs. The link to this solution is now broken. Roy Fielding posted an implementation suggestion in July of 1995. The link is now broken.

src

Quote for 2016-07-18

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 19:14:27 +0000

…making positive outcomes the easiest and default approach creates positive feedback loops

src via this tweet

Quote for 2016-07-08

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 18:05:55 +0000

PowerPoint is just simulated acetate overhead slides, and to me, that is a kind of a moral crime.

Alan Kay, src

Quote for 2016-06-05

Sun, 05 Jun 2016 16:13:04 +0000

This book is dedicated, in respect and admiration, to the spirit that lives in the computer.

I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.

Quote for 2016-03-15

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 13:48:55 +0000

Good software is approachable. It can be understood completely in independent, easy pieces. You don’t need to understand everything before you can understand anything.

Good software is consistent. It lets you take what you’ve learned about one part and extrapolate it to the rest. It doesn’t self-contradict. It is parsimonious, avoiding superfluous elements.

Good software explains itself. It has affordances for learning and discovery. It is role-expressive and minimizes hidden magic.

Quote for 2016-01-09

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 16:01:17 +0000

It has been extensively documented that programmers are willing to put in long hours of effort in order to save ten minutes of “unnecessary” labor. This is known as optimization.

src

Working on an open-source contribution

Quote for 2015-04-01

Wed, 01 Apr 2015 20:07:55 +0000

It’s strictly an 8-to-5 kind of place — there are late nights, but they’re the exception. The programmers are intense, but low-key. Many of them have put in years of work either for IBM (which owned the shuttle group until 1994), or directly on the shuttle software. They’re adults, with spouses and kids and lives beyond their remarkable software program.

That’s the culture: the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups. It may not be sexy, it may not be a coding ego-trip — but it is the future of software. When you’re ready to take the next step — when you have to write perfect software instead of software that’s just good enough — then it’s time to grow up.

Quote for 2015-03-08

Sun, 08 Mar 2015 16:47:22 +0000

Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand.

src

Quote for 2015-01-13

Tue, 13 Jan 2015 17:49:01 +0000

XML is like violence - if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it.

Nokogiri project page

Starting a new project today that will heavily involve, you guessed it, XML.

Quote for 2014-12-18

Thu, 18 Dec 2014 18:25:07 +0000

The key point is that there was no programming or learning involved to create the behaviors. The connectome of the worm was mapped and implemented as a software system and the behaviors emerge.

“A Worm’s Mind In A Lego Body” http://i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/7985-a-worms-mind-in-a-lego-body.html via http://interconnected.org/home/

Quote for 2014-08-24

Sun, 24 Aug 2014 23:17:43 +0000

But after 1.0 there is no finish line, there is no bottom of the 9th inning. There are more bugs to be fixed. There are new releases ahead. The march continues, because software is not a product, it is a process.

Mostly a reminder for myself.

http://www.jessesquires.com/apples-to-apples-part-two/

Quote for 2014-05-13

Tue, 13 May 2014 15:50:46 +0000

The Template::Service module provides a high-quality template delivery service, with bells, whistles, signed up service level agreement and a 30-day no quibble money back guarantee. “Have a good time, all the time”, that’s our motto.

http://template-toolkit.org/docs/manual/Internals.html#section_Outside_Looking_In

Quote for 2014-03-12

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 06:30:27 +0000

Engelbart’s law of technology prediction says that all technology predictions overpredict what technology will do for you in the short term and underpredict what technology will do for you in the long term.

–David Maynard

Meta laws.

(Busted: Yes, I was reading Fast Co. Yes, I’m sorry.)

Quote for 2014-02-05

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 16:35:31 +0000

Open up a terminal and type:

$ cd /home/somedir
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer

That’s it! Now your http server will start in port 8000. You will get the message:

Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 …

Now open a browser and type the following address:

http://192.168.1.2:8000

You can also access it via:

http://127.0.0.1:8000

If the directory has a file named index.html, that file will be served as the initial file. If there is no index.html, then the files in the directory will be listed.

Quote for 2014-01-24

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 22:29:39 +0000

Although the protocol is optimized for use as a payment scheme it is suitable for the transfer of larger amounts. The protocol is also suitable for use as an access control or resource allocation mechanism. With modification the protocol could be made to provide anonymity guarantees.

W3C proposal for a micropayment transfer protocol…from 19 years ago.

Quote for 2013-12-20

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 06:00:34 +0000

“Leaning in” is not the answer to our larger cultural problem and the unrealistic expectations the tech world sets for both men and women. Leaning in is an option, certainly. But, for most of us, “leaning in” will keel us all over into burnout. It will lean us all into lives we’re still inexplicably unhappy about living, always seeking the next way to “lean in” and “get ahead”, no matter what physical or emotional toll it may take. No matter what drugs you have to do. Never mind that you’re falling apart and haven’t had any time for yourself all week in between working and your commute back and forth to Palo Alto.

What Sheryl Sandberg ignores is that whatever we’re leaning in to is an arbitrary boundary that will lead us into nowhere. To “lean in”, as she describes, or as society has taken it to mean, is to push harder in the workplace and to keep going despite the fact that our laundry hasn’t been done in weeks and our apartment is hardly lived in.

And, personally, I feel that pushing into other people’s bullshit boundaries and arbitrary organizational frameworks is a waste of my time.

An Open Letter to Sheryl Sandberg from a Twenty-Something Woman in Tech | Techendo - Tech Life. Culture. News. (via slavin)

Quote for 2013-12-16

Mon, 16 Dec 2013 07:30:43 +0000

HOWTO: Open Your Work from Sublime in Chrome with a Key Command

In Sublime Text, go to Tools > Build System > New Build System. A new tab will open in Sublime Text named untitled.sublime-build, with the following text in it:

{
“cmd”: [“make”]
}

If you use a Mac, replace it with the following:

{
“cmd”: [“open”, “-a”, “/Applications/Google Chrome.app”, “$file”]
}

Save the file. Name it Choose Browser.sublime-build. Sublime Text should be smart enough to put it in the right place for you, but if it doesn’t, save it to the following locations:

Quote for 2013-12-09

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 23:58:24 +0000

[I]nstead of constantly griping about having to type Hirb.enable, I found how to automagically load it in the Rails console:

1. In your home directory [ ~ ], type subl .irbrc

2. Paste in this bit:
if defined?(Rails) && Rails.env
require ‘hirb’
Hirb.enable
end

3. Save and enjoy*.

*Confirmed working with OS X 10.6.8 and [Rails] 4.0.2

Yes, my OS is old and janky - stop laughing.

via Poop’s comment at http://tagaholic.me/2009/09/07/hirb-tips-for-rails.html

Quote for 2013-12-03

Tue, 03 Dec 2013 06:30:46 +0000

XML is like violence - if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it.

http://nokogiri.org/

Quote for 2013-11-25

Mon, 25 Nov 2013 06:30:46 +0000

This one is hard to find out there so here it is. If you have an uncommitted change (its only in your working copy) that you wish to revert (in SVN terms) to the copy in your latest commit, do the following:

git checkout filename

This will checkout the file from HEAD, overwriting your change. This command is also used to checkout branches, and you could happen to have a file with the same name as a branch. All is not lost, you will simply need to type:

Quote for 2013-11-19

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 06:31:02 +0000

I saw the best minds of my generation… writing spam filters.

Neal Stephenson, Solve For X

Quote for 2013-11-16

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 06:31:12 +0000

The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different quality of text, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, or a ship name in Western texts.

http://html5doctor.com/i-b-em-strong-element/

This is news to me.

Quote for 2013-11-14

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 06:30:53 +0000

The gist pointed out that Hash.new, with its default values, is good for implementing Fibonacci sequences. So I decided to check:

fib = Hash.new do |hash,key|
k = key.to_i
hash[key] = case k
when 0 then 0
when 1 then 1
else hash[k-1] + hash[k-2]
end
end

This recursive (and memoized!) definition means that you can do fib[18] and get back 2584, plus you get the Fibonacci numbers from F0 (fib[0]) to F17 (fib[17]). Recursively defined Hashes are useful auto-memoized structures.

Quote for 2013-11-08

Fri, 08 Nov 2013 16:38:27 +0000

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();
});

Quote for 2013-11-07

Thu, 07 Nov 2013 22:21:15 +0000

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.

Quote for 2013-11-05

Tue, 05 Nov 2013 14:02:28 +0000

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

Quote for 2013-11-02

Sat, 02 Nov 2013 20:29:04 +0000

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

Quote for 2013-10-31

Thu, 31 Oct 2013 21:17:59 +0000

…Ruiu posited another theory that sounds like something from the screenplay of a post-apocalyptic movie: “badBIOS,” as Ruiu dubbed the malware, has the ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers and microphones to bridge airgaps.

Ars Technica

Quote for 2013-10-30

Wed, 30 Oct 2013 01:21:00 +0000

The Ruby ‘case’ expression is a powerful beast: a multiway ‘if’ on steroids.

Programming Ruby

No joke, I almost leapt off the couch when I first saw these in action.