Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category
Monday, May 21st, 2007
This last week I've been getting familiar with Vim. I've dabbled a few times in the past, but this time I'm finally feeling comfortable enough to stick with it. I was quite annoyed with having to hit ESC all the time, but a neat tip is to set this in ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Learn Programming, Tech | No Comments »
Sunday, May 20th, 2007
A while ago, I proposed a website for funneling donations from 'content consumers' to 'content producers', and it turns out others have a similar idea and are doing something about it but framing the idea as 'tipping' rather than 'donating'. Nick Szabo, who wrote the best early assessment of why ...
Posted in Free culture, Tech | 2 Comments »
Friday, May 4th, 2007
From the creator of JSLint, Douglas Crockford, here's a series of Javascript video lectures. It just so happens I've been spending the last four months working in Javascript for the first time, and I wish I'd seen these lectures before I started.
The first thing Crockford tells you is that all ...
Posted in Learn Programming, Tech | No Comments »
Friday, May 4th, 2007
Title translation: 'Don't tell me you find this difficult to understand purple monkey dishwasher (version 3)'.
Preston Gralla on O'Reilly Net complains that Linux package names are preventing wider Linux desktop adoption. While I find his claim that Linux will never get there extreme, I do agree this is a significant ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Tech | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
Dmiessler makes a good point I'd been meaning to make myself: the axiom against 'security through obscurity' is often taken too far. First of all, any kind of cryptography, whether the algorithms are publicly known or not, always ultimately relies upon 'obscurity' in the form of an unrevealed piece of ...
Posted in Tech | No Comments »
Monday, March 26th, 2007
I don't have to be Aunt Tillie to crave a simpler desktop computing experience. Whether I'm using Windows, OS X, GNOME, or KDE, my current work flow gets tangled as I juggle several open folder windows, half a dozen instances of Firefox with 30 tabs between them, a text editor, ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Tech | No Comments »
Monday, March 19th, 2007
Continuing a discussion of desktop UI from the previous post. Be clear that most of what follows applies equally to Windows and the Linux desktops; my point is that Apple popularized these ideas and the others----misguidedly----still follow Apple's lead.
Compared to Microsoft, I don't especially begrudge Macs for their existence, and ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Tech | 5 Comments »
Sunday, March 18th, 2007
The Linux community is often accused of being poor at catering to non-expert users, but this is a misdiagnoses. Contrary to myth, the community is not full of old Unix beards demanding the rest of us master perl before they give the rest of us the time of day. Surely, ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces, Tech | 1 Comment »
Saturday, March 3rd, 2007
How does one make sense of Java's version history for learners? The full story is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history, but here's the brief version:
First be clear that that there is only one Java language---one set of syntactical rules for how to write Java code. This set of rules has grown a few ...
Posted in Learn Programming, Tech | 3 Comments »
Sunday, February 18th, 2007
Here's the first of a series of posts I'll write about interfaces.
The use of icons in GUI's is usually a misapplication of the truism that, 'simply having users point at the very thing they want is the simplest and most intuitive kind of selection'. The problems are that:
Pictographs do not ...
Posted in Interfaces, Tech | 1 Comment »
