'Customer’s Wife: “Because the world STILL doesn’t revolve around you, dear.” *to me* “His mother has a lot to answer for!”'

"Since MongoDB uses BSON, a binary form of JSON, to store its documents, a JSON mapper is a perfect mechanism for mapping Java objects to MongoDB documents. And the best Java JSON mapper is Jackson. Jackson’s parsing/generating interface fits serialising to MongoDBs documents like a glove. Its plugins, custom creators, serialisers, views, pluggable annotators and so on give this mapping library a massive head start, making it powerful, performant, and robust."

"I wrote Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for adults exclusively, and it always distresses me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean; I know this by my own experience, and to this day I cherish an unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again this side of the grave. Ask that young lady—she will tell you so."

"The basic shape of the clothes hanger hasn’t changed much in over a hundred years: a flattened triangle with a hook. They’re perfectly serviceable for jackets and button-up shirts but fail miserably when it comes to T-shirts and crewneck sweaters, stretching and deforming their collars. Why hasn’t someone redesigned the hanger already?"

"I've said that the difference between an expert and novice is not the detail they notice, but what they choose to ignore. For example, when I do a toxicology consult, I focus less on the exact subspecies of mushroom the patient has ingested, and more on ensuring it is not one of the few that kill humans...I ignore the day to day frustrations, bureaucratic hassles, and conflicts in my work life. People leave, projects end, and no one remembers the details of last year's urgencies....What really matters is happiness at home."

"In Objectivist-C, each program is free to acquire as many resources as it can, without interference from the operating system."

"As I realize that open source is going to define my professional life (and likely my personal one as well), my tolerance for assholes gets smaller and smaller. Unlike Rusty, I won’t simply stand by and allow these people to run amok. I will call out antisocial behavior, enforce professionalism in the communities where I have the power to do, and leave the communities that cannot at least offer civility."

in the bad analogy front: 'Journal publishers, however, are less than thrilled: They contend that they provide a valuable service by curating what research merits attention and what does not. Through open access, the government is exploiting the journal publishers’ work without compensating them accordingly, argues Allan Adler, a lobbyist for the American Publishers Association. Taxpayers fund national parks, for instance, but "they still have to pay a fee if they want to go in, and certainly if they want to camp,” Adler says.'

of Marlon Brando, “Fan-Tan”: 'Goodreads review: “I figured, ‘Hey, at least there will be pirates (check), booty (both kinds) and maybe a little fun.’ But I never expected the main character to piss all over a guy’s face for fun (page 54), the ridiculous pidgin English spoken by minorities ... or a totally gratuitous Cleveland Steamer (page 226)..."'

'Russell said this is his “I wish I knew when I was younger" list and I think that’s an enriching way to look at it. The more experience you have, the more different types of projects you tackle, the more lessons you’ll be able add to a list like this. So when you read this list, and when you make your own, you are stepping through years of accumulated experience and more than a little frustration, but in each there is a story worth grokking.'

"If you can’t produce concepts quickly, then you’re working at the wrong fidelity. If your wire-framing serves only to deliver a grayscale version of what you’ve already decided you’re building then you’re wasting everyones time."

good overview, though I think he's much too hard on naming things

"The lesson of Reagan is that, whatever his politics and legacy, there was always only one of him. Even with all his theatrical experience, he never essayed a dual role. So, for what it’s worth, my advice to Mr. Romney is this: Since the evidence indicates that you lack the skills to simulate what you're not, you should stick to typecasting and go with what you’ve got and who you are. It’s not just your best option, sir, it’s your only one."

I don't know anything about Skyrim, but:
[Retailer]: “Sir, what did you yell to him before grabbing him?”
Tall Man: “Promise you won’t laugh?”
[Retailer]: “Okay.”
Tall Man: “FUS RO DAH!”

"That chick in the ass pants by the onion dip is the finest thing I've seen since Tibet."

interesting: in Pg it seems to make sense to specify all non-trivial text fields as 'TEXT' rather than impose an arbitrary upper limit on VARCHAR -- though I think if you're creating cross-database code some platforms don't allow you to index/regex search on TEXT fields the same as VARCHAR fields

"...a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds."

a very, very small primer -- but it'll get you a long way

videos from the 2012 conference

nice overview of HTML5 technologies, what they mean and which are ready to use

reaction to potential upcoming JS language changes and what they mean:
"JavaScript did something right and it’s strange to me that we would want to change the language in a way that will appeal to a shrinking population of people we have yet to reach...It is my belief that the lack of semantics and features in JavaScript has attributed strongly to its success. Of course, I have no proof. But Alex [Russell] has no proof that adding classes will attract Java programmers. Nobody knows exactly why the language has done so well or definitively what would attract more. All we can do is try to make it better for the people already using it."

"JSCheck is a testing tool for JavaScript. It was inspired by QuickCheck, a testing tool for Haskell... JSCheck is a specification-driven testing tool. From a description of the properties of a system, function, or object, it will generate random test cases attempting to prove those properties, and then report its findings. That can be especially effective in managing the evolution of a program because it can show the conformance of new code to old code. It also provides an interesting level of self-documentation, because the executable specifications it relies on can provide a good view of the workings of a program."

I almost hate linking to things like this because the concerns are so trivial, but still...

innnnnteresting: "Vert.x is a framework for the next generation of asynchronous, scalable, concurrent applications, which aims to provide an alternative to Node.js for the JVM. It allows developers to write their application using JavaScript, Ruby, Groovy, Java or even mix and match."

In Pittsburgh May 11-20; I'd go but Ella's a little young for this...

it's getting more and more difficult...

"pathod is a pathological HTTP/S daemon, useful for testing and torturing HTTP clients." with little language for generating responses per status code, pausing for time, etc.

this is a nice little history of modern JavaScript wrt its ubiquity (current and future) and therefore why you should pay attention, including server-side developments: "In fact if you stand back and squint you could be forgiven for mistaking the HTML 5 ecosystem for an entire operating system. Whose system language is JavaScript."

I remain a Postgres snob

'duh', sort the output of du -h --max-depth=1; note that I had to use '--max-depth=1' vs '-d1', not sure what the version of 'du' he's using is, mine is from coreutils 8.5

"Laconic is a lightweight approach to generating DOM content in JavaScript." -- kindasorta like what jswartwood put together (in ~15 minutes) a little while ago

"Chanko provides a simple framework for rapidly and safely prototyping new features in your production Rails app, and exposing these prototypes to specified segments of your user base....you can release many concurrent features and independently manage which users see them. If there are errors with any chanko, it will be automatially removed, without impacting your site."

yow! "Or maybe you'll simply be less likely to get E. coli and die. This whole passage is all my balls, and it exists, especially in that litany of adjectives right there at the end, simply so Douthat can get snotty about a lot of the imaginary liberals who are running around in his head. (Which reminds me, Jonah Goldberg, the true master of this form, has a new book coming out, too.) What's the obverse of this? The essential Christian qualities of Wonder Bread? He's a lot more conspicuously even-handed in his denunciations when he's discussing the fallout among Catholics from the sexual-abuse scandal than he is about the deleterious salvific effects of the designer-arugula crowd."

kind of a "it gets better" for people who are just weird

Raymond Chandler: "The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have. I think your proofreader is kindly attempting to steady me on my feet, but much as I appreciate the solicitude, I am really able to steer a fairly clear course, provided I get both sidewalks and the street between."

on updates to JavaScript is this great selection describing the spectrum of tradeoffs when building many things, not just a language, and IMO describes implicitly the tension between the 'too much' and 'too little' abstraction folks: "But then why any language feature at all? Why isn’t assembler good enough for everyone? Or C? Or C++?...Turns out the answer is “human frailty”. Or put a different way, the process of cognition depends on very limited amounts of short-term stack space in our wetware, and computing languages are about making the computer hospitable for the human, not about telling the system what to do. Our tradeoffs in languages would look much different if we could all easily recall 20 or 30 things at a time instead of 5-10. Languages are tools for freeing creative people from registers and stacks and heaps and memory management and all the rest; all the while trying to keep the creative process and the engineering that goes with it grounded enough in the reality that it’s memory words in a Von Neumann architecture to create systems that are practical."

extending models rendering them, and creating/rendering collections

"I would like to submit to you, that – with the right language at one’s disposal – it’s possible to write programs that not just communicate their intent so well that the reader understands everything after having been read once, but also that the program is written in a way that is so engaging and fun to read that we want to read them twice...Can the Perl 6 language community can make this happen?"

On choosing what's important; long, worth it

"Another negative side effect of the neckbelts is the psychological damage that may be suffered by eyewitnesses upon observing a convulsing, headless human body spontaneously jettison fountains of blood as the adrenaline-maximized heart furiously pumps quart after quart from the neck wound, coating the car interior, the Chrysler statement continued....Neckbelt wearers are warned that a severed human head may remain alive for up to two minutes before blood loss, oxygen starvation and shock trauma cause it to lose consciousness."

'But some people in the media act like Washington is some autonomous entity that’s operating with no connection to the public. I had a woman stop me the other day, she said, “I’m very angry about Congress. What are you guys doing?” I said, “Who’s your Congressman?” “Oh, I don’t know.” “Well, see, I vote for me, I’m happy with me. What are you blaming me for the people you vote for?” '

some pointers on running your 3rd party javascript on an internet of browsers (very, very hostile environment)

how long before this is $15?

one more time...

The great master pointed at a pot of boiling water and said: “How many grains of rice should put in that pot?”

Paul Irish presentation on HTML5/JS tooling and such; not crazy content, but awesome viewer

Compare/contrast this with yesterday's valve/abash link...

one of the most powerful "come work here" posts I've ever read

love love love articles like this borne of real-world use ("in anger"); answer isn't so great, and they wound up moving the data to Postgres (!!) and Riak

"Yep, it looks pretty inexorable. Have you considered banging their wives?"

answer a few yes/no questions, pick your JS template engine!

on how increasingly automated yet complex systems make it more difficult to deal with problems that come up, focuses on airlines for the part I read

nice quick overview of AMQP concepts

another PHP hate, this time much slicker but tangential: "Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it's cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life — that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world — but man, does it work."

no way!

did you GET the memo?

goto doc for when I need to remember why PHP is terrible

useful to see where node's seams are and what's being done

step-by-step, including tests

cheat sheet for git (though pretty long for something with that name...)

pretty nifty ruby gem to implement object versioning; be interesting to see if/how they handle versioning of references as well...