This month
Unlimited Novelty: "Can you solve this problem for me on the whiteboard?"
Le blogueur.
My attitude is if I'm a good Ruby programmer, and you're trying to hire me when the supply for Ruby programmers is low and demand is high, that before you even talk to me you've spent at least 10 minutes Googling for my name, looking at my code, and figuring out who I am, rather than spending an hour subjecting me to a series of ad hoc programming questions in areas I may or may not specialize in. That 10 minutes of Google will tell you a lot more than asking me to come in and scribble stuff on a whiteboard.
Le commentateur.
I take your point about the interviewer asking appropriate questions for the interview. But it sounds to me like you're telling me your skills as a coder don't extend to making your ideas and plans understood without handing someone actual finished Ruby code, written on a laptop. If that's the case, then I can't work with you.
Je suis plutôt de l'avis du commentateur : quand on embauche un développeur, ça n'est pas pour travailler avec un sociopathe qui ne voit la vérité que dans son code. En même temps, c'est un Rubyiste, donc c'était à craindre.
January 2012
The Myth of Chiburi? | [ kenshi247.net ]
You knew the old Mozilla, meet the new Mozilla « david ascher
*in this case* you gotta love semanticsWhile I love Firefox, this makes me happy, because in my mind, Mozilla is about making the internet work better for everyone, not just Firefox users, and in this case being browser-neutral is the right strategic play.
lorempixel
December 2011
Facebook fixes bug that can let adults view childrens' private photos | Technology | guardian.co.uk
sans bretelles, sans les mains"Facebook's programmers are experimenting with new features and are testing them out on the live site without, in this case at least, the code being properly reviewed with privacy in mind," Cluley said.
November 2011
Opera Dragonfly - Style profiler preview
As a real world example of how big the impact can be on performance, I made a test with the full HTML5 specification downloaded locally and ran the profiler. I noticed few of the most expensive selectors had ":link" and ":visited". I changed these to instead be "a:link" or "a:visited" (in this case they were equivalent in terms of which elements matched). This trivial change makes the engine use a cache, and bought the selector matching time down from about 14 seconds to about 11 seconds.
The Copyright Industry – A Century Of Deceit | TorrentFreak
It is said that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. In the case of the copyright industry, they have learned that they can get new monopoly benefits and rent-seeker’s benefits every time there is a new technology, if they just complain loudly enough to the legislators.
Where is my user? Part 2, Browser Geolocation | Neogeo ramblings with a Python twist
But the W3C saw, or was made to see, the writing on the wall and built a set of standard APIs into HTML5 for just this case and most modern browsers have picked it up. The draft for the spec is http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html if you want to read it through or need further info. The API is pretty marvelously simple. This implementation changes the URL to return latitude and longitude when they are available, which we can use in our Django view. Plus, the same code works on mobile devices (at least the iOS ones I carry) with no changes.
LukeW | UI16: The Business Case for UX
Return on behavior: what is the value of a customer engaging in a desired behavior? We can tie behaviors to financial returns. Look at opportunity and how it maps to behaviors and their expected value. We can build strategies and design to improve the return on behavior.
iOS Apps: Puzzle Agent
October 2011
The case for piracy – Blog – ABC Technology and Games (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
When it comes to copyright theft and piracy, many people assume there's just one side - the side of truth, justice and copyright owners. Beyond that there are parasitical thieves. When most governments come to legislate on the matter, their response is usually one of listening to what big corporations and lobby groups say and nodding in agreement. For the general public, years of being bombarded by cross platform marketing campaigns have ingrained people with various "Piracy bad. Copyright good" slogans.
home office shelving 1
September 2011
Collaboration Matters! - IBM launches new Social Business Digital Library - features case studies, testimonials, Lotusphere sessions and industry insights
August 2011
Best free data backup software. Hard drive backup and recovery freeware. Hard Disk image freeware.
Wordpress – Désactiver les commentaires sur tous les articles | Korben
July 2011
Tokyo University: Spring Forward to a Fall Start Date? - Japan Real Time - WSJ
Change is never easy, but in this case, it would also come with some real challenges. There is the crucial question of how a change would affect the recruiting schedule, as the current system revolves around an April start date.
Bricoleurbanism » Demolition of Tianjin’s old city
Mass demolition of old districts is something of a “normal” thing in China, but to people who imagine that the large-scale destruction of historic city centres is a thing of the relatively distant past, the fate of Tianjin’s old chinese city serves as a sobering case.
June 2011
How to Burn SRT/Sub Subtitle Files to DVD on Mac
Sherlock Holmes and the King's Evil By Donald Thomas
Jonah Lehrer on Buildings, Health and Creativity | Head Case - WSJ.com
subjects in the blue environment generated twice as many "creative outputs" as subjects in the red one.
May 2011
23,000 BitTorrent users to be sued for downloading ‘The Expendables’
April 2011



