I have decidedly mixed feelings about the book Beautiful Code, but one of the better chapters is Tim Bray's "Finding Things". In it, he outlines the creation of a small Ruby program: counts = {} counts.default = 0 ARGF.each_line do |line| if line =~ %r{GET /ongoing/
I believe very strongly that a blog without comments is not a blog. For me, the whole point of this blogging exercise is the many-way communication of the comments -- between me and the commenters, and among the commenters themselves. As I said in How To Advertise on Your Blog
What do you think the single greatest invention in computer science is? Besides the computer itself, I mean. Seriously, before reading any further, pause here for a moment and consider the question. I've talked before about how young so-called modern computer programming languages really are, and it bears
A number of people whose opinions I greatly respect have turned me on to Yelp over the last six months or so. Yelp is a community review site, and a great way to discover cool new places in whatever neighborhood you happen to be in. I've enjoyed using
In the last three years, I've gone from carrying a 512 MB USB memory stick to a 16 GB USB memory stick. That's pretty amazing. According to the storagereview.com archives, hard drives with 16 GB of storage were introduced sometime around the beginning of 1999.
Although I rather like Windows Vista -- I think the amount of Vista nerd rage out there is completely unwarranted -- there are areas of Vista I find hugely disappointing. And for my money, nothing is more disapponting than the overall fit and finish of Vista, which is truly abysmal.
One of the most impressive hacks I've ever read about has to be the Black Sunday kill. Since the original 2001 Slashdot article I read on this [http://slashdot.org/articles/01/01/25/1343218.shtml] is 99.9% quote, I'm going to do the same.
I seldom pause to answer criticism of my blog. If I did, I'd have time for little else in the course of the day, and no time for constructive work. But occasionally I'll encounter a particularly well written critique that gives me pause, such as Alastair
Have you ever used Craigslist [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist]? It's an almost entirely free, mostly anonymous classified advertising [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_advertising] service which evolved from an early internet phenomenon into a service so powerful it is often accused of single-handedly destroying the
I can't remember when, exactly, I discovered Clay Shirky, but I suspect it was around 2003 or so. I sent him an email about micropayments, he actually answered it, and we had a rather nice discussion on the topic. I've been a fan of Clay'
As we continue to work on the code that will eventually become stackoverflow, we belatedly realized that we'd be contributing to the glut of username and passwords on the web. I have fifty online logins, and I can't remember any of them! Adding that fifty-first set
Here's a list of every function beginning with the letter "A" in the PHP function index: abs() acos() acosh() addcslashes() addslashes() aggregate() aggregate_info() aggregate_methods() aggregate_methods_by_list() aggregate_methods_by_regexp() aggregate_properties() aggregate_properties_by_list() aggregate_properties_by_regexp() aggregation_info(