The link:

Predictions for 2012

The meat:

I have none to offer.

People who really know what is going on are not going to prognosticate in public. Secrets will be held, profits will be made.

Posted from San Diego, California, United States.

The link:

Amazing Kickstarter Project Twine: Cheap and Easy Internet of Things

The meat:

The sensors, so far, include an temperature sensor and an accelerometer – with external sensors planned, including magnetic and moisture sensors.

I had imagined nano-particle magic dust… but we’ll have to wait until IPv6 for that. This is a great concept, but the devices are a bit bigger than I’d like. The day is coming and this is a great start.

Posted from San Diego, California, United States.

The article:

The MicroPHP Manifesto

The meat:

Finding lightweight libraries that don’t pull in lots of additional code dependencies is much harder than it should be. Mostly I think that’s attributable to PHP devs being more interested in framework-specific development.

I’m seeing more and more of this “framework-specific development” out there. There are job listings for Symfony coders, Cake coders, Drupal coders (hah), but in the end, isn’t it all PHP with the occasional template engine thrown in? Don’t get me started on template engines for PHP, I think Smarty and the others have left the building with js engines kicking ass and taking names.. More on that later.

Posted from San Diego, California, United States.

The link:

Quality Coding Takes A Break For The Holidays. But Why?

The meat:

For the time period I looked at (the last 24 months), January through September is relatively flat and in line with the average flaw density. Then, there is a big bump in flaw density in October and November. Things begin to settle down once we go into December. The jump in application flaws is easy enough to spot. But what could cause this?

As a commenter points out, this probably has to do with deliveries schedule for Jan. 1. Seems like October and November are big push months with a lot of testing/debugging. December is polish and deployment.

Posted from San Diego, California, United States.

The link:

A Case Against Using CoffeeScript

The gist:

I make far greater use of the debugging tools in pure JavaScript because my brain can stay in the exact context it’s been in the whole time, in the code I wrote–not to mention I can copy/paste my code into the console to see if it works better right then.

Beautifying a language to make it more readable only to suffer the consequences of obfuscated output that is nearly impossible to debug is a recipe for disaster. I’ve been down this road too many times and it amazes me that people just don’t get it. Bytecode is a different story without the leaky abstraction.

Posted from San Diego, California, United States.

The link:

Leaving JSPs in the dust: moving LinkedIn to dust.js client-side templates

The story:

Javascript templating using dust.js. The server only serves up JSON and the CDN-loaded template engine (dust.js) pulls apart the data to fill in data for the browser to render. Moving more towards thick clients. I like it.

Posted from San Diego, California, United States.

I’ll start posting links to the single most interesting thing I read per day. So expect this to peter out in a couple weeks as all my other blogging efforts have…

So for today, check this out:

A Missive on Native Client

And here is the money paragraph:

At that stage, what they have is a fixed platform that they own (NaCl), which is sufficiently powerful enough for regular developers to target and migrate any old code to (e.g. just rebuild your desktop Qt app), and access to the local machine is suddenly gated through them entirely (e.g. they become the new Microsoft, except multi-platform). In such a strong position, the usefulness and overall purpose of the otherwise seemingly lingering Chrome OS[7] should now be clear.

Wow. Suddenly a lot of things start to make sense. I doubt Google could pull a fast one like this over the entire developer community, but look how far they’ve already come. Wow.

 

Posted from San Diego, California, United States.

I get asked multiple times per day how I got so many followers or if I’m famous or generally what’s the deal with my follow count. I think it’s around 315k right now, I don’t bother checking anymore. So here’s my story:

In the early days of Twitter, I didn’t get it. I finally got talked into setting up an account and started tweeting… It was interesting, but the more people I followed the more interesting it seemed to get. I wrote some scripts to start scraping, indexing and following people. There was no daily rate limit, just the 1.1% ratio. So my script would go crazy, almost doubling my followers every day.

Around 20k followers later, the “1k follows per day” rate limit went into effect. This made things more difficult. My new direction was to create a profile of a user that would follow back – the simplest case of this is a user that has around a 1% ratio but has never tweeted. My bots would crawl, index and filter based on a list of criteria. If there was a match, follow. Do this 1,000 times per day. Every day.

At 100k followers, I started getting people following me in small numbers – a couple hundred a day. I wrote scripts to follow these people back, plus follow new people and keep a database of who I was following and who was following me. Also in that database I stored basic info about the user – when they joined, their last tweet, following ratio, etc.

At 250k followers, the number of people following me each day started exceeding 1,000. I could no longer follow back as many people that followed me. I changed my scripts to stop following new people altogether and just follow people back. I still record statistics in a database, but I only use it to dump deadbeats – those that haven’t tweeted in X days. I also started actively unfollowing based on a set of criteria, but have a whitelist in place for those people I always want to follow.

It was around this time I started auto-DM’ing people that followed me. I’ll write another post on why I auto-DM even though I despise people who do just that.

AND NO, THESE SCRIPTS ARE NOT FOR SALE.

Posted from San Diego, California, United States.

Steve Jobs, Hero

He didn’t just create new industries, he destroyed them. Steve Jobs has had a deep impact on me, forever changing the course of my life. When my family got an Apple ][e, I was hooked. I remember the day I first saw the Macintosh and my jaw dropped to the floor. There have been many other moments in my life that I remember with distinct clarity, realizing what I was looking at was the way of the future. It was almost as if Steve was living five years ahead of everyone else. Being taken away at such a young age is a tragedy and the world will suffer for it.

I’ve seen two of his keynotes, one of a demo of Aqua which literally brought me to tears. I’m glad I got a chance to see him in action, but am kicking myself for not talking to him when I had the chance. I was on the show floor of Macworld Tokyo, in Apple’s sprawling booth, and I look to my right to see Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller just standing there. They were taking in the scene of the booth and nobody was paying them much attention, just the two of them. I felt like I didn’t want to invade his privacy so held myself back. The same thing happened when I bumped into Jony Ive, but that’s a different story.

Oh, how I wished I could relive that moment. To at least thank him for the wonderful impact he’s had on my life. Steve Jobs will me missed immensely.

First off, you need the mini DP to dual link DVI adapter, not the regular mini DP to DVI, to get a decent resolution on the Cinema Display. Second, you need the Macbook Pro EFI Firmware Update 2.2. Third, you guessed it, you need a MBP with a mini DP.

So all this sounds like a no-brainer, but here’s my story:

1. I bought the latest MBP and a mini DP to DVI adapter and the resolution sucked.
2. Found out I had to get the dual-link DVI adapter (I can still use the single-link with my 24″ monitor). I was very worried by all the trash being talked on the Apple store about this adapter being flaky and dying suddenly but I ended up getting it anyway. I need my 30″!
3. Everything worked perfectly. Woot!
4. Upgraded to Lion. Boom. Cinema Display Dead.
5. Brought MBP and dual-link adapter to an Apple Store. The genius plugged it into their monitor in the back room and it worked “proved with a photo” so I was told to bring in my Cinema Display because it was likely a power issue. My old MBP (late 2008) could still power it so I had my doubts. Anyway, suckage… the CD was dead to me.
6. Lots of bitching and moaning in public forums to no avail and jumping out the window seemed mighty tempting.
7. MBP EFI Firmware update comes along and “includes fixes that resolve issues with Apple Thunderbolt Display compatibility”. Sounds close enough. Install. Bam. Cinema Display Alive.

Long story short, I spent way too much time on an issue that nobody would acknowledge or help with or even let me cry on their shoulder about. I was in deep trauma for months. And now it is over! If this post helps someone, I’ll have done my job here.