Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category
Saturday, May 17th, 2008
How's this for blogging on the cheap? Below is a paper I wrote for English 101 a while back. I've reworked it slightly (removed the silly Chicago citations), but it retains the stilted prose and mechanical structure of any good My First Research Paper. In any case, I'm fond of ...
Posted in Politics, Tech | 2 Comments »
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
Ubuntu 7.10 (codename "Gutsy Gibbon"), released last month, is for me the first really usable Linux, which is saying a lot considering I've made a serious attempt to switch to Linux about once a year for the last six years. The last 3 of those attempts have been with Ubuntu, ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Free software, Interfaces, Tech | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
Jeff Atwood discusses the way Mac OS X windows don't really have 'maximize' buttons, and he comes to the right conclusion: better to have overly large windows than to make users futz with the dimensions of their windows. He says:
...Apple's method of forcing users to deal with more windows by ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Tech | 1 Comment »
Monday, July 16th, 2007
In response to a challenge by Aza Raskin to come up with a better way of tabbing in Firefox---in particular a solution that scales better the more tabs you have---I produced this mockup in Javascript. Be clear that, because of the way the tab previews are done, the performance is ...
Posted in Interfaces, Tech | 5 Comments »
Saturday, July 14th, 2007
Raganwald argues that link-voting sites (Digg, reddit, et. al.) hurt the web by locking comment threads into proprietary databases, depriving the web of some of its vital webness. I would agree, except:
I've always found Digg and reddit comment threads function as contests to see who makes the best joke, and ...
Posted in Tech | 2 Comments »
Monday, June 11th, 2007
More bullshit performance claims from Apple?
So Apple, out of nowhere, has released Safari for Windows. Among the reactions today, Joel Spolsky jumped the gun, complaining about how Apple Safari for Windows loads very slowly, only later to retract---apparently, Safari for Windows stopped loading slowly for Joel after the first ...
Posted in Tech | 1 Comment »
Thursday, June 7th, 2007
In a post on user search behaviors, Jeff Atwood links to this report on how quick users are to judge websites. Ironically, upon viewing that report, a full minute passed before I noticed the left column did not consist of Google ads but rather of intra-site links, and in fact, ...
Posted in Tech | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007
I concur with Ken Arnold that stylistic choice in languages should be stamped out at the parser/compiler level. In fact, the two programming languages I have on the drawing board, Pidgin (an educational language) and Animus (a more Lisp-ish Python), both do just that. Animus is strict for the reasons ...
Posted in Programming, Tech | No Comments »
Monday, June 4th, 2007
How bits represent information and form the basis of computing.
An installment in a series of posts on basic computing concepts for beginning programmers.
As the general public has come into daily contact with computers, people have been disabused of their former notions that computers 'think' and 'know' things. Sadly, for most ...
Posted in Learn Programming, Tech | No Comments »
Saturday, May 26th, 2007
Why natural language in programming languages is a fool's game.
The main purpose of a formal language is that it is free of the ambiguities found in natural human languages.
While naturalistic language may give off signals of familiarity and thereby boost a programming language's approachability, the gain is more than offset ...
Posted in Learn Programming, Tech | No Comments »
