PUBLIC MARKS with search hard-core

This is not about teaching Python - the programming language. This tutorial will not magically transform you into a Python ninja. I am assuming that you already know the basics of Python. If you don't, then stop right now. Go read Zed Shaw's brilliant free book Learn Python The Hard Way first and then come back.

I decided to take all the blog posts, Twitter messages, and Flickr images I made this year, combine them, typeset them, and then get it printed in a hard-bound book. I wrote a bit about the reasoning here.

It's funny how you don't hear so much about service mashups these days, despite their undeniable coolness. I'll assert that it's because developing for Web data in the browser is bloody hard work, especially when there are NxN arbitrary API mappings to know.

Yep, comments seem a bit of an anachronism nowadays. I think I’ll probably turn them off on my blog too, when I get round to deploying the new version I’ve half-finished. I miss the long-form responses though. Tweet responses can be hard to follow with the character limit forcing over-simplicity. That’s one of the nice things about Google+, although it’d be nicer still to make more of a return to personal blogs.

Hi, Paul. Actually, I tweeted about "Move the Web Forward" on Blue Beanie Day the moment I saw it, and I linked to it from Facebook and Google+, but carry on with the character assassination. I tweeted about it without knowing who was behind it (doesn't matter), and without being *entirely* clear what it was about (you have some copy problems I would have been glad to help with). I was pleased to discover this blog post as I thought, "Ah, now I can reach out to the people behind that site and help them publicize it more" but then, a few paragraphs in, I saw your shitty little whiney character assassination of me (quoted above) and thought, oh, well. Why do you do this to yourself? Why do you create something nice and then shit on someone else? What kind of behavior is that? You did the same thing when you complained about A List Apart even though we've reached out to you for *three years* asking you for content and input. Calling something on the web crap is always a childish move, particularly when that thing is open and your feedback and content have been solicited for it many times. I gather you have some unexplained grudge against me. Or against the young dude in Ireland who created some web standards buttons for fun. If you think my help of his project is how I earn my living, you need to get out of the cubicle more. I'm usually polite to everyone, even very rude people, but you're being both whiney *and* a dick, which is a hard combo most people to pull off (fortunately most people don't try). Your project looks cool and could benefit from outside help, but I won't be helping because you are an asshole. You are, I think, the only asshole I've met in 20 years of doing web work. Fuck off.

People here are working very hard to stay cheerful and live a normal life, or rather to adapt to the new reality. And they're fighting back.

Git shouldn't be so hard to learn.

Though Git’s commands are incredibly useful, it’s hard for newcomers to make a good combination of Git’s commands to finish their own tasks, like shell commands. Recent Git’s command-line interface is well polished, but there is no command such as git undo-what-i-did, because things to be undone are varied for each situation. So that we have to execute a bunch of commands to do what we want.

Colors have a huge effect on readability. This is why you need to choose them wisely so that they not only create esthetically pleasing combinations but also make it easier for users to read the text. Text is an integral part of any site and we shouldn’t punish visitors for coming to our site by using hard to read color combinations.

working on in Mozilla's research group is dom.js: an implementation of the browser DOM in JavaScript. I've gotten much of the core DOM 4 document tree functionality implemented, and have started on DOM features defined by the HTML spec.

Update: You can swipe with two fingers to move forward/back a word at a time, and three for the entire line — but I find these gestures hard to use, especially on the iPhone. If they’re not perfectly horizontal they scroll the view.

Nous dit le type qui 5 minutes avant prétendait que quasiment tout était découvrable facilement sous iOS.

Of course, where there’s feudalism, there’s droit de seigneur. The price for security will be, probably must be, a loss of privacy, anonymity, and control to Amazon.  Right now, Amazon’s terms of service provide some contractual anonymity to users, but as a technical matter Amazon has total visibility into everything that happens on a Fire tablet.  That visibility is very likely necessary for security, and it is damn sure valuable for commercial purposes.  So it’s hard to imagine that it won’t be used for both purposes.