tags: code
2003
August
- 2003 Aug 17
- notes on remotedotcomments
Making Blogger and remotedotcomments play nice. The dangers of not quoting properly.
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September
2006
September
- 2006 Sep 23
- coding, practicing medicine, and a brief word on blogorrhea
I stumbled upon this blog post about how most of the time spent developing code is actually spent rewriting rather than actually writing, which actually fits the aphorism about how most of writing in general is rewriting. But the thing that he discusses is that this is a function of the fact that most developers can’t immediately grok what code is supposed to do just by reading it, and a lot of them end up trying to rewrite what has already been written, which, in my estimation, is a glorious waste of time.
· Read more… - 2006 Sep 29
- installing typo 4 on dreamhost
I struggled with this for awhile, abandoning it midway through, but I finally got it to work. Most of the instructions for installing typo 4.0.1 on dreamhost by Aiden Bordner worked for me, except you need to edit
· Read more…db/migrate/051_fix_canonical_server_url.rbas described by Chris H.
2007
March
- 2007 Mar 30
- the lesser of two evils?
What my psychiatrist noted is that maybe this whole unrelenting fatigue thing is simply the fact that I’d managed to vanquish most of my anxiety and now lack the impetus of fear to keep me awake and toiling. Seriously, I’m not having any more visceral symptoms of anxiety and my depression is much better controlled.
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April
- 2007 Apr 11
- versioning
The Old New Thing discusses the different macros you have to set in order to ensure library compatibility in Windows.
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May
- 2007 May 15
- there is clearly something wrong with me
Man, that was an incredible waste. Three hours down the drain just to get a stupid RSS widget to work in MySpace. I wish that Myspace would just let me crosspost to their blog engine, but noooo.
· Read more… - 2007 May 31
- disinformation (itunes 7.2 and itms)
At the risk of sounding like a raving, gibbering Apple fanboy, I’ve got to ask, what’s up with all the FUD? First there is the paranoia about Apple tracking you through your DRM-less $1.29 downloads, and now there’s this big deal about no longer being able to convert DRMed AACs to DRM-less MP3s (discovered via boingboing.net.)
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June
- 2007 Jun 25
- baffling (how i learned to stop worrying and love the gui and high-level languages)
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not a developer. The extent of my hacking history lies in the good old 8-bit days when I was hand-coding machine language programs into BASIC DATA statements. I learned, of all things, Pascal (which happened to be the programming language tested on the AP Computer Science test) and tried to muck around with C and C++, but eventually gave up with that and ended up learning Perl instead.
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November
- 2007 Nov 9
- backwards compatibility with ms-dos
Yikes! Programming for Windows definitely has some harrowing pitfalls.
· Read more… - 2007 Nov 12
- play
Not sure where exactly this entire weekend went. My mind feels like it’s been liquified, and I’m not sure if I’m coming down with something, if I’ve grown allergic to my parents’ dog and my sister’s dog, if I’m suffering from really severe caffeine withdrawal, or if I’m quite possibly losing my mind.
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December
- 2007 Dec 27
- Dreamhost, htaccess, and routes.rb
I have never been able to get my
· Read more….htaccessfile to properly redirect requests from different blog engines. For example, Simplelog tacks on either/archives/or/past/to its URLs, and Typo tacks on/articles/to its posts. That's one of the things I like about Mephisto: it doesn't add what I feel are superfluous tokens to the URLs. (Although I am still trying to figure out how to get rid of/archives/from the monthly posts.) - 2007 Dec 28
- simplelog to mephisto
migrating from Simplelog to Mephisto
· Read more… - 2007 Dec 30
- recapitulation of the ontogeny of computer languages
Steve Yegge's rant about huge code bases and how Java exacerbates the problem is definitely circulating the internets. Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror chimes in and agrees wholeheartedly.
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- 2007 Dec 31
- teaching a computer to read your mind
The crux of the eternal static versus dynamic typing debate is just how much are you willing to let the computer (or more accurately, the language implementers) decide what you mean. Those who favor static typing tend to favor explicit direction over implicit intuitive understanding, and strictly-defined categories and hierarchies rather than free-for-all tag webs and interconnections. The static typist immediately recognizes that the computer (specifically, the compiler or the interpreter) is a non-intelligent entity that must be told exactly what to do, or else you're liable to saw your own foot off. The dynamic typist, while not delusional about just how intelligent the computer is, is willing to have a little more faith in the language implementers, believing that they will do the Right Thing™ with the input that is fed to them.
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2008
January
- 2008 Jan 26
- version targeting: the new bugaboo
Jeff Croft brings up [version targeting][0] again, and casts it in the old "The Right Thing™" and "Worse is Better" debate.
· Read more… - 2008 Jan 27
- version targeting: render unto microsoft what belongs to microsoft
I agree that Microsoft should have to deal with their own backward-compatibility quagmire without burdening web developers. The author brings up the IE-dependent components of Windows and other legacy, propietary software solutions (for example, the emergency department at one of the hospitals I work at uses an IE-dependent computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and charting system) and these are less trivial to upgrade to standards-compliance than a web site would be.
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March
- 2008 Mar 2
- alternate solution vis-a-vis version targeting
I looks like the version targeting debacle is still very much a heated topic.
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April
- 2008 Apr 25
- fixed
While I had stay at work all night until the morning, I really didn't do much besides get Mephisto up and running again. This all started because I got sick of the Scribbish theme (which is, nonetheless, a great theme—I dig the hAtom support). I tried to install the Clarity-Orange theme but because Safari irritatingly always decompresses files, I ended up with a folder instead of zip file.
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2015
October
- 2015 Oct 20
- List Manipulation
I am amused (because I am a weirdo) by how common the paradigm of manipulating lists is in computer programming, specifically, the need to separate the first element in a list from the rest of the list.
· Read more… - 2015 Oct 20
- Unwrapping Nodes with Nokogiri
I learned a lot about the Nokogiri gem (used to parse and manipulate XML and HTML) when I wrote a script to download all my FriendFeed posts.
· Read more… - 2015 Oct 23
- Revisiting Logo
I was trawling around the WayBack Machine's archive of Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror because he had changed his permalink style sometime between 2007 and now, and I stumbled upon this old post about Logo (and Processing)1.
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November
- 2015 Nov 19
- Oblivious to Deprecation
So I ran across an old post about the differences between Cocoa and Carbon12.
· Read more… - 2015 Nov 19
- Reverse Engineering Life
This XKCD post (mentioned [previously]) really got me thinking too much about the analogy between genetic code and computer code.
· Read more… - 2015 Nov 19
- Ruby-like Languages
I don't code professionally, but I've been a programming dilettante since I was like eight years old #nerdalert
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