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Sorry folks, comments here on Spun are now disabled - the spam got the better of me. I know, I know, there are plugins to help manage it, but I simply don’t have the time. Email me your thoughts on posts to ginatrapani at gmail.
Rasmus Lerdorf’s PHP5 talk at Yahoo! Open Hack Day covered how to squeeze the most performance out of your PHP pages. (This mailing list message from earlier this year covers how to use valgrind and KCacheGrind as well.) Very enlightening.
Microsoft invites hackers to attack Vista: “A short time later, Joanna Rutkowska obliged…Before a crowd of fellow researchers and hackers, she bypassed security measures and implanted a potentially undetectable piece of malicious code called ‘Blue Pill.’ The presentation, titled ‘Subverting Vista Kernel for Fun and Profit,’ was rewarded with a hearty round of applause.”
Programmer, Meet Designer: because “rarely is a person good at both programming and designing.”
While I think the result still looks very much like a blog and not as much as a magazine as I’d like (why must CMSes influence their output so much?!), this tutorial on How to use WordPress to run a magazine may come in handy some day.
To do: Pore through this great-looking Javascript Boot Camp tutorial.
My poor, old and few Firefox extensions are falling into disrepair. I’ll have to revisit these tutorials to get myself and them back up to speed.
Stone Soup was one of my favorite childhood stories, which makes a lot of sense. In essence it’s a metaphor for open source software: everyone offering whatever ingredient they have on hand to add to the soup that everyone can enjoy. The keys to delicious soup (and a successful OS project), of course, are the stone (idea), the cauldron (forum), the village square (visibility), and the cook (leader). Update: Here’s Wikipedia’s take, which also makes the copyleft association.
Placement of the “Mark all” links on the WordPress comment moderation page is giving me RSI. I couldn’t interface design my way out of a paper bag, but this one bugs the hell out of me.
Just noticed that Thunderbird has a new message filtering criteria: “From: email address in my address book.”
That, coupled with Thunderbird’s ability to add the address of anyone you send a message to automatically to your address book, opens up the possibility of filtering mail from people that you’ve communicated with before into “Known” folder, and mail from folks you don’t into “Unknown” folder.
(I’ve been jonesing for something like this for awhile; a helpful Lifehacker commenter pointed out that it’s possible.)
So to get this system going, first I had to populate my address book with all the email addresses I’ve sent mail to before. This one-liner on my IMAP server’s sent-mail file, cobbled together with a lot of help from this Ask Metafilter thread, does the trick:
grep "^To: " mail/sent-mail | grep "@" | \
sed 's,.* <*\([^ ]*@[^ >]*\).*,\1,’ | \
sort | uniq -i | sed ’s/,.*$//’ > correspondents.txt
(Mind you, this Python version is a lot more elegant, but it kept timing out on me. I have a big sent-mail folder.)
From there, import correspondents.txt as a new address book and set up your filter in Thunderbird.
Awesome.
(Also only interesting to me: The ~10k messages I sent from my personal email address in the last 2 years were to less than 2000 recipients, for an average of about 5 messages per correspondent.)
$ wc -l correspondents.txt
1823 correspondents.txt
Paul Graham: “Working on small things is also a good way to learn. The most important kinds of learning happen one project at a time. (’Next time, I won’t…’) The faster you cycle through projects, the faster you’ll evolve.”
“The Jolly Rancher/Fisher Price style of design needs to die. Now.” - a commentor on Greg Storey’s ripping critique of Technorati’s new design. I wholeheartedly agree. I don’t want my webapps looking like children’s toys.
I’m the Wicked Witch of the West over on the todo.txt mailing list, smacking down feature request after feature request with “No” and “No” and “quite frankly, no.”
Today I said:
Software can only do so much. Ultimately you want a human at the wheel.
I should have worded it differently. Software can do everything. But you don’t want it to. Software should only do so much.
Being a yes-girl, it’s hard for me to say no to people’s earnest ideas, shared in the spirit of helping others. But Torvalds’ and other great open source developers’ genius was in their ability to pinpoint the good ideas and weed out the bad.
In short, good developers are good editors.
Talk about the the paradox of choice: A list of over 100 RSS readers. Oy.
Just published a simple VB script that appends to a text file without opening an editor over at Lifehacker. The article spin is to use it to log your day’s activities, but it works well for any kind of thoughtless logging (todo’s, grocery list, gift ideas, brainstorming, readlater.txt, etc.)
There’s no feeling quite as sweet as when you discover code you set a sail into the public domain ages ago was republished and improved upon by others. Thomas Upton took my del.icio.us Prettifier Greasemonkey user script and modified it to make del.icio.us even prettier. Nice work, Thomas.
I just adore the Lightbox JS v2.0 photo gallery Javascript library. It’s flashy but usable, it degrades nicely sans Javascript, it looks search engine friendly AND it’s optimized for performance with pre-loading as well. I must hook this up; I’ve already got a couple places in mind.
[Some thoughts in preparation for an upcoming tech conference.]
I’m a lot more interested in exploring the ways that users can host, remotely access and futureproof their own data on their own hard drives with free software that uses open formats than yet another Web 2.0 app that requires yet another login and yet another place to store bits of yourself on the web.
Yeah, user-generated folksonomies and tagging and Ajax and syndication and mashups have their advantages and sure, I’m excited about the ways that a web browser can be so much more than a document reader. But do I want to live my whole computing life in a browser? Frankly, no. Do I want all my data hosted on other people’s servers all over the place? No.
Why?
I still prefer my text files and my own MySQL databases to anyone else’s, and I’m not sure why I’m so alone in that sentiment.
Do I have COBS (Cranky Old Bastard Syndrome)? Or are the money people just getting to the “gee whiz” bit of all these technologies so this crap is just springing up everywhere? Why don’t any of my compatriots seem as concerned about this as I am?
I suppose I’ll just sit back and keep writing my open source shell scripts and automating my backup plan and trying to resist another rounded-corner, drop-shadowed, yellow fade social thingamagig that I can give away my life to, in wasted hours and personal data.
Long live the Google text ad.
Citing the thesis of The Paradox of Choice, the 37 Signals boys say too many input boxes can paralyze the user to the point of inaction.
Options seem like a nice idea. But each one adds up. Once you realize the evil impact they can have, you start to look at them differently.
They use the embarrassing “Add Event” screen from Yahoo! Calendar as an example of a paralyzing web form, and even though I’ve used Y! Cal for years now, I couldn’t agree more.
My three favorite software interfaces are:
And all three have only one input box.
If just regular ol’ Google juice isn’t argument enough, Google Accessible Search is a good way to convince your clients their pages should be as semantic (read: textual and meaningful stripped of style, images and Flash foofery) as possible.