I was visiting a marketing software company with a renowned professor when he said something that both startled and intrigued me: “Programmers,” he said, “are arrogant.” He’s right. We are. My mind flashed back to earlier this morning when I was reading comments on Hacker News about a supposed fork to a popular programming language. [...]
In the past few days I’ve come across posts of several programmers switching back to VIM (in most cases, specifically to MacVim). As some have pointed out, this seems predominantly in the Ruby community, which tends to be fad-driven. I’ve thought about giving VIM a shot. But I won’t end up doing it. The trouble [...]
I’m teaching beginning programming using C# to university business students (CIS) in the upcoming Fall semester. It’ll be doubly fun, as I’ve never used C# until about a month ago. Sure, I’ve used plenty of other languages, but for some reason, never anything from .NET. (Partly it’s because I’ve used a Mac as my primary [...]
I was experimenting with my own version of the CSS3 Awesome button, when I noticed one of the commenters share the base64 encoded version of the semi-transparent PNG image they were using as a substitute for a gradient. I was using a smaller image, and want to run a conversion of my own (it saves [...]
For years, I’ve kept a personal (and unfortunately, unwritten) list of books I think every manager, programmer, and [insert category here] should read. A book every programmer should read The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. Every programmer I hired was required to read this book. It’s a great resource for people managing programmers too. [...]
I was surfing John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, and he linked to an article on programming and journalism. The article itself didn’t do anything for me, but the way John described the link connected some synapses for me. (I wish I could recover what it was—something about exposing government APIs to journalists.) Utah does pretty well [...]
The Senate Site asked about a good way to quickly post a gallery of images. I’m a programmer, so I answered the query by rolling my own solution. (If your only tool is a hammer…) I happen to like Litebox, although it requires a bit of manual setup: moving specific files to the web server. [...]
Do you want to know how to integrate Mantis and SVN? I did, but could never manage the right Google query to return a page written for someone unfamiliar with customizing Mantis. (I’m still learning SVN too.) This is the documentation I wish I’d had. This process is easier if you know Bash or some [...]
CAPTCHA (an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) has been on my mind ever since Phil Windley suggested a graphical CAPTCHA would make a good web service. I thought there might be those willing to pay to use it. Well, it’s been done. There is a need for [...]
I’ve been working on a Javascript project where it’s necessary to create input elements (radio buttons and checkboxes) dynamically. With a functional DOM, it takes only a couple of lines of code, and works fine in Firefox and Safari. Too bad IE isn’t as DOM compatible as it claims to be. After several searches, I [...]
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