noah's mark

Demoware

noah — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:11:39 +0000

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. Let me first say this: I reject as false that there is some type of dichotomy between features that look good [...]

a new test for idiocy

noah — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 04:17:43 +0000

(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 [...]

get this shit:

noah — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 04:04:47 +0000

(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… One [...]

Dear Internet Explorer marketing team:

noah — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 04:02:10 +0000

Please stop. IE will, of course, continue to be the default browser in Windows. I do appreciate that the IE team continues to make small attempts at making the browser suck a little bit less, which I can appreciate in that I have had to use IE at times, since most companies don’t want to [...]

Ways in which ‘Thomas’ appears the opposite of ‘smart’ to me.

noah — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 03:51:10 +0000

(original article) (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 [...]

meh

noah — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:39:03 +0000

It’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 [...]

mixing lifetime paradigms

noah — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:31:06 +0000

A coworker and I have been struggling (valiantly, I would say) to solve some rather hairy lifetime-related issues at work this week. A sizeable 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

noah — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:43:58 +0000

Chrome has, quite possibly, the best ssl error page I’ve ever seen: “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 [...]

Stalker feed!

noah — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 05:25:30 +0000

Earlier 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”

noah — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 06:18:27 +0000

Ok. 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 [...]