I’m not sure if that is a real term or not, but I have a rather specific meaning for it:
A completely useless feature added to a product because it makes a good demo.
Demoware
March 9th, 2009a new test for idiocy
March 4th, 2009(I wrote this a month back or so. I finished “Autisms’s False Prophets”, which was excellent. Go buy a copy for yourself.)
I’ve been reading “Autism’s False Prophets” by Paul Offit, as I’ve been recently quite interested in the anti-vaccination movement that seems to have infected Amercan culture (and elsewhere, too).
In reading random schlep on the interwebs, I’ve discovered a few new tests for idiocy. As they may be helpful to the rest of the world, I’ll share them here:
get this shit:
March 4th, 2009(Written way back when. You can listen to my interview here.)
I’m walking down the hall today, and I overhear a conversation between some PMs on my team and two other guys I don’t quite recognize. As I’m passing, I hear one of the guys has a kind of distinctive, slightly-scratchy voice. Sounds familiar…
Dear Internet Explorer marketing team:
March 4th, 2009Please stop.
Ways in which ‘Thomas’ appears the opposite of ‘smart’ to me.
March 4th, 2009(originally written the day after that article came out – I ended up posting snide comments on his blog, which was pretty dumb. I tend to do stupid things when I’m angry, and I’m not sure I did much good by telling the guy off on his own blog. Then again, in my slight defense, I was trying to prevent his blog from influencing people who don’t use git from being scared away. Of course, my nasty remarks probably pushed people the other way: “This is how the git community reacts to people who need help? What dicks.” So, a message to everyone – I don’t represent the git community, just my annoying little self)
When git first came out, it was hard. Really hard. Annoyingly hard. Linus made a decision, early on, to do the following for git:
- Make it fast
- Make it powerful
- Find other people to make it easy
And since, early on, it was just what he built (plus a few contributions from others), he got #1 and #2 down pat, but completely punted on #3.
Read the rest of this entry »
meh
March 4th, 2009It’s been “one of those days” today, so I just wanted to check up on all four people who are subscribed to this blog (one of them being me, of course).
(Hi me!)
Anyways, I have like 10 drafts that I have never posted, so I’m going to go clean some of them up and post them in the next week or so. Should be better than trying to write new content, since I really don’t have anything intelligent to say otherwise.
mixing lifetime paradigms
March 4th, 2009(Began sometime in the middle of 2008, though we are still “struggling valiantly”)
A coworker and I have been struggling (valiantly, I would say) to solve some rather hairy lifetime-related issues at work this week. A sizable portion of our current work involves the interop between managed (C#) and native (C++/COM) code, which, well, doesn’t work out all that well in sufficiently complicated scenarios.
Not that this is an easy problem to solve, mind you. The problem is one of semantics.
ssl errors in chrome
February 6th, 2009Chrome has, quite possibly, the best ssl error page I’ve ever seen:
The page you see in chrome when visiting an https page with an invalid ssl certificate.
- “https” is crossed out. That’s genius. That’s miles better than just color (especially for the colorblind), and it immediately communicates to me that the webpage has told me something (https) that chrome has discovered is wrong.
- Lots of red all around – good stuff.
- Only one link – “Help me understand”
- Calls attention that you shouldn’t proceed especially if you haven’t seen the warning before for this site.
Kudos, chrome developers.
Stalker feed!
January 14th, 2009Earlier this evening, my friend Kendall sets her facebook status to:
Kendall wishes she could make the “news feed” tab say “stalker feed” instead. It would amuse her.
Ask and ye shall receive: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/40507.
“The Legend of the Seeker”
January 13th, 2009Ok. Here’s the deal.
When I was in middle school, I read the first four or five of the Sword of Truth novels. Before this, I had read Eddings (the Belgariad, Mallorean, Elenium, and Tamuli), Brooks (Shannara), Brian Jacques (the Redwall books), and a few others. But the Goodkind was a bit, well, different.
(Spoilers ahead, for both the books and TV series, so if you care, stop reading!)