Quotations
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I can't question that [the App Store] is probably the best mobile application distribution method yet created, but every time I use it, a little piece of my soul dies.
If it's easy to make all your calls conform to the RESTful verb architecture, then that's good, I guess. But if not, then just use a POST as an RPC call, keep it as simple as possible and be done with it. And don't spend another minute worrying about being RESTful or not.
OAuth came out of my worry that if the Twitter API became popular, we'd be spreading passwords all around the web. OAuth took longer to finish than it took for the Twitter API to become popular, and as a result many Twitter users' passwords are scattered pretty carelessly around the web. This is a terrible situation, and one we as responsible web developers should work to prevent.
The statement that the password anti-pattern "teaches users to be phished" should be rephrased "has taught users to be phished"
— Me, on Twitter
Download size has been an issue in the past. [...] In the early days Macromedia did studies adding null kilobytes to Player downloads and measuring the dropoff rate in completed installations. The more time people have to hit that "Cancel Download" button, the more will do so.
My Universal Feed Parser was conceived as a weapon against what I considered the gravest error of XML: draconian error handling. Recently, someone asked me to implement a switch that makes it not fall back on lax parsing in the case of an XML wellformedness error. I said no, not because it would be difficult to implement, but because that defeats its entire reason for being.
Maybe git is the monads of version control
There are two kinds of people who try to learn Haskell: the people who give up because they can’t figure out monads, and the people who go on to write tutorials on how to understand monads.
Without a discovery process, machines must be told about resources ahead of time and will only be able to interact with resources that they already know. This is the same as only starting a conversation with people you already know, even though with little effort you should be able to talk to new people with a common language.
(It's probably just me, but every time I stumble upon some thread involving people from the so-called "security community", it's like watching a Jerry Springer episode.)
If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as we've come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC2 that can live with us on the edge, not be run by third parties.
DjangoCon 2008. Venue: Gooleplex, San Francisco Bay Area. Dates: 6th and 7th Sept. Official post will be on djangoproject.com soon.
Question: how do you upgrade servers when you need to pass new information between them? It's a fool's game to try to upgrade both servers at the same time. So you need a communication protocol that is not only backward compatible (a new server can speak the old protocol) but also forward compatible (an old server can speak the new protocol). Protocol Buffers provide that because new additions to the protocol can be ignored by the old server.
It looks like the first ever Django conference will take place in early September in the San Francisco bay area.
— Me, on Twitter
Historically the project policy has been to avoid putting replication into core PostgreSQL, so as to leave room for development of competing solutions [...] However, it is becoming clear that this policy is hindering acceptance of PostgreSQL to too great an extent, compared to the benefit it offers to the add-on replication projects. Users who might consider PostgreSQL are choosing other database systems because our existing replication options are too complex to install and use for simple cases.
— Tom Lane
A printer driver is a folder with one ".ini" file, and a couple of ".dll"s and that's it. It is not a 50 MB download. It is not an IE Toolbar, and Side Pane. It is not half-baked photo software. It is not a splash screen when your computer starts. It is not a tray icon.
"Digital Manners Policies" is a marketing term. Let's call this what it really is: Selective Device Jamming. It's not polite, it's dangerous. It won't make anyone more secure - or more polite.
Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft's success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria.
You may find that there are plenty of job listings where the job requirements are described as, “must be expert with Photoshop and Illustrator…” or something long those lines. Ignore those job listings; they’re placed by inept and sick companies looking for decorators, not designers.
OpenID is a new and maturing technology, and HealthVault is frankly the most sensitive relying party in the OpenID ecosystem. It just makes sense for us to take our first steps carefully.
This is the new blog-spam. [...] 'web design company' takes the highest ranking comment from reddit, and posts it on the site that the original comment is based on. [...] Neat eh? They get to have links on a site that won't get blog-spam filtered, because the comment is 'relevant', since the comment originates from a comment thread about the site.
There is a reason why Flickr eventually killed Yahoo! Photos and why it was decided that Google Video be relegated to being a search brand while YouTube would be the social sharing brand. The brand baggage and the accompanying culture made them road kill.
The fatal flaw of deletionism is the mindset of deciding what someone else should find interesting
There are two [Wikipedias]: One is the public-facing reliable-enough-on-average encyclopedia that people read every day, which makes for nice fluff pieces in the media about "these new Web thingamajigs that the kids are building, aren't they neat?". The other is the insular behind-the-scenes bureaucracy, which reads like an improvised performance of the collected writings of Clay Shirky.
XML is better if you have more text and fewer tags. And JSON is better if you have more tags and less text. Argh! I mean, come on, it's that easy. But you know, there's a big debate about it.
Static typing in OO languages isn't the solution to software complexity, rather it's an enabler of it. Static typing is like giving a drunk a bunch of breath mints and saying "Don't drive drunk. But if you must, use these breath mints in case you get pulled over."
There was a time when you could whip out a parser in lex and yacc, stitch together a naive VM and throw it over the wall and you'd have a new scripting language. Those days are coming to a close and in a few years (if not months) you won't be able get traction with anything unless it does direct threading, is register based, has generational GC, does peephole optimizations, does trace-folding, does type-inferenced inline caching, etc.
Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple's standoff with Adobe (ADBE) that's kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos.
Maglev has begun to publish glowing performance numbers well in advance of actually running anything at all. They haven't started running the RubySpecs and have no compatibility story today. You can't actually get Maglev yet and run anything on it. It's worse than Vaporware, it's Presentationware.
If we see good usage, we can work with browser vendors to automatically ship these libraries. Then, if they see the URLs that we use, they could auto load the libraries, even special JIT'd ones, from their local system. Thus, no network hit at all!