Categories
Programming Languages

Practice…but not typing

A post by Karl Martino reminded me of Jeff Atwood’s We are typists first, programmers second. Atwood was responding, in hearty agreement, to a post by Steve Yegge, who wrote I was trying to figure out which is the most important computer science course a CS student could ever take, and eventually realized it’s Typing 101. The really […]

Categories
RDF SVG Web

Tweaking makes perfect

Not long ago, Tim O’Reilly posted a discussion thread about the importance of practice, and one of the participants in the thread, my long-time editor, Simon St. Laurent, reiterated his interest in practicing this year—both on the trumpet, and in his coding. I never left programming the way I left trumpet. I simply stopped playing trumpet after […]

Categories
SVG

State of SVG

Earlier in December, Meitar Moscovitz at Sitepoint wrote an article on SVG optimistically titled SVG is the Future of Application Development. In it he references not only the future capability of SVG, but XHTML and RDFa, too. The writing was a breath of fresh air after so many technical pundits have declared all three to be […]

Categories
History JavaScript

Battle of the Bulge

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. On this anniversary of the World War II Battle of the Bulge, Jules Crittenden provides a comprehensive summary of the battle, as well as a book and other references, and photos. The photos are especially compelling, as they lack of romanticism of so many WWII photos in books and in other […]

Categories
Web

Shock, Awe, Economics, and the Web

Battered into a fetal ball by waves of bad economic news, only surfacing to watch an occasional crash and bash flick, such as Iron Man, I discovered my own personal bailout via Naomi Klein’s book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”. Oddly enough, it wasn’t something that Klein wrote (though she has many interesting points […]