Quotations
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I don’t do test driven development. I do stupidity driven testing... I wait until I do something stupid, and then write tests to avoid doing it again.
— Titus Brown # 25th February 2007, 2:44 pm
The upshot is that HTTP does not have everything that REST indicates should be present, and there is the additional problem that while HTTP is the first, and best, implementation of REST, the two are not the same and yet are often confused.
— Joe Gregorio # 17th February 2007, 5 pm
OpenID is particularly appealing to OLPC, because it can be used to perpetuate passwordless access even on sites that normally require authentication [...] With an OpenID provider service running on the school server (or other trusted servers), logins to OpenID-enabled sites will simply succeed transparently, because the child’s machine has been authenticated in the background
— Ivan Krstić # 17th February 2007, 12:42 am
We don’t yet accept OpenID identities within our products as a relying party, but we’re actively working on it. That roll-out is likely to be gradual.
— John Panzer, AOL # 15th February 2007, 11:33 am
The bright side: web spam is an evolutionary force that pushes relevance innovations such as trustrank forward. Spam created the market opportunity for Google, when Altavista succumbed in 97-98. Search startups should be praying to the spam gods for a second opportunity.
— Rick Skrenta # 15th February 2007, 11:15 am
Please, fanboys, don’t send me dumb notes averring that Apple’s failure to police this use of its mark will lead to the end of its ability to stop manufacturers from producing rival MP3 players and calling them iPods. That’s a fairy tale that trademark lawyers tell their kids when they want to reassure them that they’ll have a healthy college fund.
— Cory Doctorow # 12th February 2007, 2:05 pm
Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.
— Tim O'Reilly # 8th February 2007, 8:08 am
If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.
— Steve Jobs # 7th February 2007, 2:26 am
There’s an unfortunate side-effect to altogether eliminating the sub-domain name from your site URLs [...] Every cookie you may want to set for that site will automatically “bleed” down to *all* sub-domain-based websites you might want to add later.
— Már Örlygsson # 6th February 2007, 12:01 am
As ICD head analyst Walter Dickweed put it: "Releasing a new kernel on Superbowl Sunday means that the important ’pasty white nerd’ constituency finally has something to do while the rest of the country sits comatose in front of their 65" plasma screens".
— Linus Torvalds # 4th February 2007, 10:33 pm
If you found a hole in software that millions of people use, and is very high profile, you can sell that to the highest bidder for perhaps one or two million dollars.
— Jacques Erasmus # 4th February 2007, 7:06 pm
Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.
— Bill Gates # 2nd February 2007, 6:01 pm
At some point in the past rolling out an application to 300,000 people was the pinnacle of engineering excellence. Today it means you passed your second round of funding and can move out of your parents garage.
— Joe Gregorio # 1st February 2007, 11 am
Flickr users are marked as such in the Yahoo user database. What this means is that the account is permanently protected from deletion, even if you cancel your SBC-Yahoo DSL and even if you never check your Yahoo Mail (if you elect to have one). Both free and pro accounts are protected. And your Yahoo signon name will not be displayed anywhere on Flickr -- your existing Flickr username will stay the same.
— crawl on MeFi # 31st January 2007, 10:27 pm
Two hosts are considered equivalent if both host names can be resolved into the same IP addresses [...] Note: The defined behavior for equals is known to be inconsistent with virtual hosting in HTTP.
— java.net.URL documentation # 31st January 2007, 9:13 pm
It’s still a privacy concern. If, for example, I work at and post from Microsoft all day and my identicon is that of the MS Proxy Server then I would be able to identify other mefi users who are my co-workers because our identicons would match.
— vacapinta # 29th January 2007, 4:12 am
Web Services based on SOAP and WSDL are “Web” in name only. In fact, they are a hostile overlay of the Web based on traditional enterprise middleware architectural styles that has fallen far short of expectations over the past decade.
— Nick Gall, VP Gartner # 27th January 2007, 1:55 pm
We’re the largest domain registrar in the world, and my view is, for $8.95 its not okay for somebody to come and use our services to harm other people.
— GoDaddy spokesperson # 26th January 2007, 10:20 am
The basic concept here is given the ongoing dramatic drop in the price of bandwidth and hardware, they cost very little. I looked at the bandwidth bill for Wikipedia, for instance, and it is actually substantially lower in the last year than the year before, despite traffic growing by a factor of 4.
— Jimmy Wales # 25th January 2007, 2:02 am
Which is the real explanation of where the name XMLHTTP comes from- the thing is mostly about HTTP and doesn’t have any specific tie to XML other than that was the easiest excuse for shipping it so I needed to cram XML into the name (plus- XML was the hot technology at the time and it seemed like some good marketing for the component).
— Alex Hopmann # 24th January 2007, 8:48 pm
We have a unique opportunity with phishing and OpenID. OpenID can make the possibility for bad things to happen from phishing that much worse. However, having an OpenID means you create a more intimate relationship with your OpenID provider. You go there everyday. You will more likely know when something is wrong.
— Scott Kveton # 24th January 2007, 3:02 pm
You need to lay out the user interface components visually, by hand, with total control over where they go. Automated LayoutManagers don’t cut it. A corollary of this is that you can’t move a UI layout from one platform to another and have the computer make everything fit. Computers don’t lay out interfaces by themselves any better than they can translate French to English by themselves.
— Jens Alfke # 22nd January 2007, 9:41 pm
The way you make users understand your program model is with metaphors. When you make things look, feel, and most importantly, behave like things in the real world, users are more likely to figure out how to use the program, and the app will be easier to use. When you try to combine two very dramatically different real-world items (email and appointments) into the same kind of thing in the user interface, usability suffers because there’s no longer a real-world metaphor that applies.
— Joel Spolsky # 22nd January 2007, 9:26 pm
I can also sum things up for you even more succinctly:
—users are task oriented, driving to complete the goal the
quickest way possible
—users pay more attention to the content area than the browser chrome
—users don’t understand how easy it is to spoof a website
— Mike Beltzner # 19th January 2007, 5:33 pm
As software architects, power consumption is now squarely in our camp to manage. There is plenty we can do to improve the quantity of power our data centers consume. [...] This is not just a hardware problem any longer.
— Dan Pritchett # 16th January 2007, 8:20 am
Five things you may not know about me: 1. My PIN number. 2. The root password for my computer. 3. Where I put the front door key. 4. My sexual peccadillos. 5. What I’ve got in my pocketses.
— Jeremy Keith # 15th January 2007, 11:44 am
The JavaScript alert(), confirm() and prompt() functions in Firefox, Opera and MSIE (but not Safari) will truncate the message after any null character. So an unsuspecting programmer who inserts user-provided text into one of these dialog boxes opens up an opportunity for the user to rewrite the bottom of the dialog box.
— Neil Fraser # 13th January 2007, 12:28 pm
Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing, although they are most certainly siblings. The days of lazily referring to “Mac OS X” as “OS X” are now over.
— John Gruber # 12th January 2007, 10:29 am
Apple doesn’t give a damn. Steve Jobs doesn’t build platforms, except by accident. He doesn’t care about your thriving metropolis. All you independent Mac developers: you’re all sharecroppers, and your rent just went up. Way up.
— Mark Pilgrim # 12th January 2007, 9:51 am
In fact Django reminds me a bit of the character in Airplane who always answers the “what do you make of that?” question literally... “Why, I can make a hat or a brooch or a pterodactyl...”
— Scott Gilbertson # 10th January 2007, 11:17 am