momo

Social Capital - They Meet. One of the songs off of Social...

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 09:55:28 -0700

Social Capital - They Meet. One of the songs off of Social Capital’s first EP, “Acquitted”.

http://www.socialcapitalmusic.com/

"[Today] is Paul Revere Day, so wear your Keep The Ride Alive T-shirts with pride to commemorate the..."

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 12:59:48 -0700

“

[Today] is Paul Revere Day, so wear your Keep The Ride Alive T-shirts with pride to commemorate the midnight ride of Paul Revere and the power of an individual: “On April 18th, 1775, Paul Revere and other riders set out to warn the American farmers and villagers that the time had come to fight for our freedom.

As individuals, these riders combined to help launch the American quest for independence- an independence that gives each of us opportunities and the freedom to engage in our own personal rides that can make a difference.

So on April 18th, we salute Paul Revere and the others who fought for our freedom, demonstrating the power of a single individual. To them we owe not only gratitude for our freedom, but also the responsibility to KEEP THE RIDE ALIVE- as a reminder of our own potential as individuals.”

Happy Paul Revere Day!

”

- by Colleen.

Today is a great day, where over 350 people across this country (and in 7 other countries) are wearing a Keep The Ride Alive t-shirt to honor the midnight ride of Paul Revere and the power of an individual.

Whether or not you’re wearing a shirt, take a moment to tell someone about what Paul Revere did 234 years ago today and how one person can make an impact!

(via iseffcom)

I’m wearing my KTRA tshirt today!

I’m a little weird when it comes to technology: I will...

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:18:09 -0700

I’m a little weird when it comes to technology: I will almost always refuse to buy into the latest and greatest gadget/website/whatever if I think its too trendy. I guess I have a little bit of a contrarian streak in me. Occasionally, something awesome comes along that makes me change my mind.

Like back in the day when everyone was first getting an iPod, I got a Creative Nomad Jukebox instead. Looking back at it now, it was a pretty irrational choice: sure, it was a bit cheaper, but the jukebox had a crap tiny screen, was way clunkier, and had really crumby syncing software. Eventually, the iTunes music store came out, and I couldn’t hold out any longer.. getting music from anywhere else was too much of a pain at the time.

Today my friend Ian showed me this: http://www.appstorehq.com/dominicanspanishwordoftheday-iphone-1295/app . There’s a fricken iphone app that will give you a Dominican spanish word of the day. How awesome is that?! I haven’t lived in the DR for almost 8 years now, so my Dominican slag is getting mega rusty… I almost didn’t recognize the word in the screenshot! Maybe its finally time for me to get an iPhone?

If the opposite of con is pro then is the opposite of congress, progress? Or did I just blow your fucking mind?

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 10:19:35 -0700

dlifson:

kaytee:

I know this is supposed to be clever and witty and whatever. It is not anything more than etymologically ignorant.

Pros and cons is a modern abbreviation for the latin pro et contra, meaning “for and against.” While the prefix pro- bears the same meaning, contra- is not the same as the prefix con-, which means “with.” The root or suffix of the word, gress, means “to go,” so these words literally mean “to go forward” and “to go together.” Clearly, these two words are not opposites.

So there… your Latin lesson for the day.

Related story: A few years ago, my team inherited a service that handled file uploads via form POSTs. It signalled errors to the frontend using two urls that were passed in with the upload: progress and congress. If an upload was processed correctly, the browser would be redirected the url passed in via the “progress” parameter, and failures were redirected to the url from the “congress” parameter.

My teammate knew the etymology was all wrong, and as a result absolutely HATED these names (years later, he still teases the author of that code about it). When we finally replaced the upload handling code, these params were renamed to successRedirect and failureRedirect…. though I’m pretty sure we still accept congress/progress for backwards compatibility.

I wonder how many geeks in the state of Washington tried to get...

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 09:38:00 -0700

I wonder how many geeks in the state of Washington tried to get this vanity plate only to find it was already taken. I was a little jealous when I saw it..

"This isn’t beat up the geek, big guy, this is the internet establishment! You put me in front..."

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 19:23:13 -0700

“This isn’t beat up the geek, big guy, this is the internet establishment! You put me in front of a judge and he’ll take YOU down. He’ll throw the kindle at you!”

- Dialog from yesterday’s episode of Dollhouse. Best episode of the season so far!

sotd: placebo - battle for the sun this is the title track off...

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 10:16:41 -0700

sotd: placebo - battle for the sun

this is the title track off of placebo’s next album due out this june (avail for free download on http://www.placeboworld.co.uk). I like it.. a little darker/edgier than the placebo I remember from when I used to listen to them on college.

as a techie aside, here’s yet another band with a hard to use form on their website. three steps on the same page, the next steps are dimmed out and dont activate til you fill out the previous ones, and some lame js animations. seriously guys, just keep it simple: I want your mp3, you want my email address.. just let me give it to you!

I really hope they know what they’re doing… (source:...

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:29:49 -0700

I really hope they know what they’re doing…

(source: http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/usfd/page3.pdf)

Seattle Sounders FC won their first ever MLS game yesterday...

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:13:37 -0700

Seattle Sounders FC won their first ever MLS game yesterday (3-0!) in front of 32,523 fans. Definitely going to try to make it to a few games this season.

(via seattlest)

sorry, couldn’t resist :P

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:37:54 -0700

sorry, couldn’t resist :P

my first try at bracketology

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 10:28:41 -0700

my first try at bracketology

Write good code now, improve it later.

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 10:22:22 -0700

dlifson:

marco:

Jack Cheng quoted Adam Wiggins’ Order of Operations for writing code:

Make it work.

Make it elegant.

Make it fast.

Make it secure.

I disagree. The biggest problem is that this ignores reality: once it works, how likely are you to go back and make it elegant, fast, and secure? If it’s for personal use, how likely are you to care? If it’s for work, how likely is your employer to be willing to devote resources to “clean up” something that already works? Even the best developers, and the best employers, are pretty bad at this.

You should be writing elegant code very early in the process. There’s always room for improvement, of course, but there’s never an excuse to write sloppy code, even if it’s only running once and you’re the only person ever seeing it.

“Make it fast” can arguably be a lower priority for simple optimizations and constant-time reductions. But algorithmic complexity needs to be considered from the beginning.

And saving “Make it secure” for last seems like a disaster. Imagine how you’d feel, and how you’d even begin to tackle this problem, if someone handed you a pile of another programmer’s code and said, “Make this secure.”

Write good code the first time.

I disagree with Marco, unless the problem and solution are already perfectly defined (which is rare). In a world of fast changing requirements, you want to be in a prototyping mindset. Make it work. See it, use it, tweak it. You’re not going to get the interactions perfect the first time. This goes back to 37signals’ Getting Real idea - don’t waste time doing lots of planning, just start building. Only after the requirements have stabilized do you want to commit to production quality.

My guess is that Dave and Marco have different ideas of what it means for code to be elegant. To me, elegant code is simple, readable, and meets the current requirements. This should be a developer’s default style. Ideally, “make it work” and “make it elegant” is just one step.

This usually doesn’t mean that you have to spend tons of time planning or designing to produce elegant code. When starting a new task, in many cases you can think about it for a few minutes, maybe talk it over with a teammate, and then start coding. Write simple code that reads clearly. Do this over and over as you add features (refactoring and improving as you go) and eventually a nice design will fall out.

If you’re writting to ship to production, secure and “fast enough” need to be part of the requirements. If your code isn’t either of these, you aren’t done yet.

If you’re just coding up a prototype, there’s a decent chance that your code will eventually grow up into a real product (whether you like it or not). Being sloppy in an attempt to get your prototype done faster will only slow you down in the long run. Naturally, a prototype wouldn’t be a prototype if it took as long as the real thing… the corners you cut to build a prototype should be in requirements and features, not in readability or simplicity of the code.

Amazon's 2.7 Billion Dollar Question

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:40:47 -0700

Amazon's 2.7 Billion Dollar Question:

Good article on amazon reviews and helpful votes.

(reblog from jingc)

"The Lust of the Irish […] Erin Go Braughless"

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:03:29 -0700

“The Lust of the Irish […] Erin Go Braughless”

- today’s marquee on the Lusty Lady, Seattle.

awesome.

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:40:29 -0700

awesome.

dailyprincentonian confirms they're a bunch of wimps

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:37:00 -0700

Think we’ve got it bad? U. Chicago has it worse

Yea, we had huge Core requirements, midterms all the fricken time, short reading periods, and enough work to think that taking more than 4 classes at a time was insane. But guess what: WE LIKED IT.

(link from iseff)

now on tumblr

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:00:32 -0700

update for rss readers - just updated my old feedburner feed to point to my new blog on tumblr. content will be more or less the same, just shorter and (hopefully) more frequent posts.

user_id = 1

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:24:00 -0700

Ian:
me: i signed up :P
Ian: fucker!
i havent yet!
you just stole user id 1
me: YES
Ian: mysql> update users set id = 3 where id = 1;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.04 sec)
me: dick!

sotd: metric - gold guns girls

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:28:00 -0700

preordered the new Metric album yesterday — really excited for it to come out in a few weeks. I was surprised to see that ilovemetric.com uses an all-flash checkout pipeline. Html pretty much nailed the simple form usecase over a decade ago, seems like using anything else is just making your life harder.

check out “Gold Guns Girls” on hypem.

“is it ever going to be enough?”

starting from scratch

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:56:55 -0700

sometimes is a good thing.