August 2009
7 posts
“I don’t consider languages without anonymous lambdas to be powerful enough for...”
– Yehuda Katz, Software Development Badass
“But with blast shield down, I can’t even see! How am I supposed to fight?”
– A fencing participant at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, upon having their helmet knocked over their face.
3 tags
_why must I cry?
Feel free to play the video below for dramatic effect while reading this post.
So if you’re in any way connected to the Ruby development community, you’ve heard about the sudden departure of the enigmatic and eccentric _why from the whole of the internet, deleting his web sites, code repositories, and other works overnight. Especially among my esteemed colleagues in the local Ruby...
3 tags
jQuery, XML Parsing, and XML Namespaces
I recently ran into a fun problem as I was using jQuery to parse an XML document that contained namespaced nodes. I first tried something along these lines: $(xmlDoc).find("namespace:tag").text();.
FAIL. This shouldn’t work since : is a special character in jQuery selectors. So as per the instructions in the Selectors documentation, I escaped the colon in the tag...
3 tags
Competing Against Free (Health Care Edition)
Incendiary comments and misinformation have been flying from the left, right, and center as the congress and President Obama try to extend health insurance to those 46 million Americans who lack health care coverage, as well as improve the quality and efficiency of the health care system. Notwithstanding the ludicrous claims by some that Obama and the Democrats intend to institute a forced...
3 tags
A Mac is more expensive than a PC?
UPDATE: I should say that while the content of this post hardly breaks new territory, this is my on the record response to some friends of mine who routinely mock my Apple fanboy status and ask why I overpay for hardware.
Over the last few months, Microsoft has been airing ads touting the value of PCs as compared to ‘expensive’ Macs. I applaud the effort from a marketing...
Breaking UI conventions comes with a price →
As sort of a follow on to my last post, this article takes a look at over-design as a mistake made by many iPhone applications:
Why make things look, feel and work complicated and why do designers like to re-invent the wheel? The answer is simple: they want the application to be different; look different and stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately, a different look isn’t necessarily helpful...