Ramkumar Shankar

nostrich:

Bygone Bureau picks the winners for the arguments that matter most. Love this.

My biggest gripe with modern programming is the sheer volume of arbitrary stuff I need to know. My current project has so far required me to know about Python, Django, Google App Engine and it’s datastore, XHTML, CSS, JQuery, Javascript, JSON, and a clutch of XML schema, APIs and the like.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for all of it, but it just doesn’t seem like what I was promised when I followed SICP for the first time. It just feels like I spend most of my time scouring through documentation and trying to remember umpteen different sets of syntax and class names rather than actually thinking in code.

Back in ye olden days, most programming tasks I performed felt quite natural and painless, just a quiet little chat between me and the compiler. Sometimes longwinded, sometimes repetitive, but I just sat and though and typed and software happened. The work I do these days feels more like being a dogsbody at the tower of babel. I just don’t seem to feel fluent in anything much any more.

We talk about ‘flow’ quite a lot in software and I just have to wonder what’s happening to us all in that respect. Just like a conversation becomes stilted if the speakers keep having to refer to their phrasebooks and dictionaries, I wonder how much longer it will be possible to retain any sort of flowful state when writing software. Might the idea of mastery disappear forever under a constant torrent of new tools and technologies?

This was a comment by jdietrich over at Hacker News. And here is the post that started the discussion. Be sure to read the follow on post as well. The comment I quoted captures my sentiments as well. In our aim to write libraries, frameworks and APIs, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get into any sort of ‘flow’ when writing code. The analogy of speakers having to keep referring to their phrasebooks is a very apt one. The last fun programming project I did was a university project. And part of the reason why it was that fun was perhaps because I didn’t have to spend hours poring over documentation to learn class names. I wrote a module in C to read and decode a text message. The reading I had to do was about the SMS standard. Importantly I was still thinking in code the entire time.

Is modern programming geared more for assemblers than creators? Where do you stand? What is your preferred language/framework for development?

What do you get every 2-3 years? A new Overkill album! This one is called Ironbound (very nice cover there), and it’s killer stuff. If you haven’t been very pleased with their last couple of albums, this should set your mind at ease. Blitz hasn’t sounded this good in awhile, and the rest of the band is as energetic as ever.

Apple tops the list for the 3rd year in a row.

Staying on topic of my last post, this is the why piracy works edition.

The Brads – a comic about web design » Why DRM Doesn’t Work

Just got Burnout Legends for my PSP during the half-price sale. I haven’t had this much fun smashing other vehicles in quite awhile.

Sergey Brin’s Online Resume

Very nice.

I’m trying this next time.

The Fatal Flaw With Google Buzz’s Edit Button [Gizmodo]

Swedish Binary (via fuckyeahcomputerscience)

Text to receive the symptoms!

fuckyeahcomputerscience:

chachaholic:

i like coding in notepad++ too. but when im feeling geeky, i use vi =p

A lesser-known genre of metal? Seen in a record store in Camden Town today.

1. What’s the one thing you would have done differently as a mom?
2. Why did you choose to be with my father?
3. In what ways do you think I’m like you? And not like you?
4. Which one of us kids did you like the best?
5. Is there anything you have always wanted to tell me but never have?
6. Do you think it’s easier or harder to be a mother now than when you were raising our family?
7. Is there anything you regret not having asked your parents?
8. What’s the best thing I can do for you right now?
9. Is there anything that you wish had been different between us―or that you would still like to change?
10. When did you realize you were no longer a child?

timoni:

dwineman:

Me: (tries to visit a local restaurant’s website via iPhone)
Restaurant website: I require Flash. Fuck off.
Me: I just want to know how late you’re open.
Website: Nope.
Me: But I’m on my phone. Don’t you have a little “HTML Version” link up in the corner or something?
Website: I’m ignoring you.
Me: What if I’m on my phone because I’m out, looking for a place to eat? Didn’t that ever occur to you?
Website: Fuck entirely off.
Me: (gives up, switches to computer)
Website: Oh! Hi! What can I help you with today?
Me: What are your —
Website: Hang on, I’m loading the music.
Me: Really.
Website: You’ll love it. It’s “Girl from Ipanema” arranged for steel drum and keytar.
Me: No, you don’t have to —
Website: Loading…
Me: All I want is —
Website: I SAID DOT DOT DOT.
Me: (drums fingers on desk)
Website: There we go. Isn’t that nice? It’s… what’s the word. Ethnicky.
Me: What are your hours?
Website: Take a look at our menu! It’s a PDF of a screenshot of a scan of a Word document printed on a dishtowel. With fonts!
Me: I don’t care. What are your hours?
Website: Don’t worry, the menu loads in a new window so the music won’t stop. Can I show you some broken images?
Me: What. Are. Your. Hou. Rs.
Website: I… I don’t know.
Me: (goes to Denny’s)

Goodness this is so true.

So very true.

A brief history of pretty much everything

Valentine’s Day

This sounds like great news. If you haven’t tried Aardvark yet, you really should.

Nolan’s Cheddar makes you strong

Until you display webpages properly (instead of complaining they have stopped responding), I’m going back to Firefox. Good thing I still have Feedly over there.

lee:

mimisaurus:

catharsis:

(via fuckyeahcomputerscience)

From Lucien, 6, in the mezzanine drawers at Ace Hotel Portland.

[acehotel]

Dick Brass [Microsoft’s Creative Destruction]

Why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, has failed to bring us the future.

stevenf.com

Read it. It’s awesome.

Skype, you’re next.

There are many issues you could have with the iPad. No multitasking, still no Flash. No camera, no GPS. They all fall away the minute you use it. I cannot emphasise enough this point: “Hold your judgment until you’ve spent five minutes with it”. No YouTube film, no promotional video, no keynote address, no list of features can even hint at the extraordinary feeling you get from actually using and interacting with one of these magical objects.

Such a refreshing read. And that’s not because he really seems to love the iPad, but simply because it’s an honest candid take on Apple’s new product.

iPad About [Stephen Fry]

fascinating

First, when you dial your own Google Voice number, we now begin playing your voicemails without the need to press 1 anymore. Since listening to voicemail is the most common reason people call their own numbers, we thought it made sense to save you an extra step.

And you really begin to wonder why it never made much sense to carriers earlier. They require a heck of a lot of key presses from me before I can get to my voicemail.

[Google Voice Blog]

It’s all in the presentation. I have an account on google reader. I added my feeds, but I never bothered going there eventually. Enter Feedly. It organizes your favourite sites in a great magazine-like start page. And it quite simply rocks as a way to track and share news.

Available as an extension for Google Chrome and Firefox.

swissmiss | You Dropped Food on the Floor. Do You Eat It?

So Google finally has a proper deb package of Google Chrome for linux. About time too! Prior to this, I’ve seldom used Chrome, only a couple of times on Windows preferring instead to stick with Opera there. And I never bothered with Chromium.

Anyway, I’ve been using the Linux beta for a couple of days now and I must say I’m really impressed. There are many nice touches, some of which remind me of Opera at times.

• Speed!
• No separate downloads window. Downloads show in a new tab like Opera.
• The ability to “pin” a tab. I love how my most used tabs can be pinned and they take much less space.
• More screen real estate for webpages. Ok, I liked this from the first time I tried Chrome.
• Extensions! I somehow always felt Firefox extensions slowed down my browsing experience, so I never bothered with them. But unlike Firefox, Chrome extensions feel unintrusive and lean. I remember the Delicious extension on Firefox doing way too many things I didn’t want it to. All extensions on Chrome just add a simple button next to the address bar. However, there are some really great extensions and I do not notice any slowdown in the browser. Among the recommended extensions: Feedly, Google Mail Checker, Delicious Bookmarker. And they all work very well.
• The little status bar at the bottom when you hover on a link. Again un-intrusive and neat.
• The bookmarks bar which conveniently pops up when a new tab is opened.
• Despite the themes, it integrates nicely with GTK.

It’s my primary browser for now. At least until Opera 10.5 or Firefox 4. :)

I’ve had Docky installed for a couple of months now. Sure, a dock à-la mac at the bottom of the screen looks pretty. I mean really pretty:

Yes, it gets noticed all right. Especially with those weather updates. However, there were just too many inconveniences I had to put up with just for a pretty dock. Eventually, it just wasn’t worth it. A dock (like Docky) in its current state just does not fit in my workflow.

I’m not sure how different the dock in OS X is vis-à-vis Docky. I have also tried AWN, but I found it inferior to Docky. So anyway, for the purposes of this post, I’ll just use Docky as an example.

More clicks to do the same thing

The dock works great as a launcher. However, when it comes to window management, the limitations start to show. If I have 2 or more windows of the same app open, I need an extra click to get to what I want.

One click to see the list, and the other to select what I need.

Lack of information

It gets worse when a particular window needs your attention, and that happens frequently in IM apps. The app icon in the dock bounces but it’s not immediately evident which window needs your attention.

Turns out you again need an additional click to find out.

I don’t like scrubbing

So you autohide the dock. I don’t want it floating over my apps. That’s well and good. But when the dock comes back up, I have to go through the length of the dock (possibly to get the labels to appear) and find what I need. With the panel, you know where to go and you just do.

Similar icons

This may not be Docky’s fault, but if I have to documents open in OpenOffice Writer, both icons are the same in the dock. There is no way to distinguish one from the other. I need to hover the mouse to get an idea of what that icon represents and again, that is additional work I don’t really want to do.

I’ve been thinking how to present more information to the user to find things faster in the dock, while maintaining its ease of use and simplicity. And it still needs to look cool I suppose. I’ll try to post some ideas once I get more time to think through them.

What’s your take on docks? How different is the Mac OS X dock from the variants on linux and windows? I’d love to hear any feedback on this.

Great video

Disconnect for a while. Read a book. (14 brilliant minimalist ads)

(via @smashingmag)

More proof of the awesomeness of shell scripts

One creepy (but totally awesome) music video. I love the message, and everything it stands for.