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EzGraphson Retrospective: Writing an O'Reilly Book

Also see https://www.igvita.com/2013/09/29/retrospective-high-perform... for a more disciplined approach to amassing data related to writing a book.

EzGraphson Sistine Chapel

That is a great quote. I used it in the dedication section of a book I wrote recently. Bach is fascinating on many levels - lots of C.S. types quickly appreciate the structure/counterpoint in all of his instrumental music. But because so much of his music was written for a worship context, a whole additional dimension can be seen where he uses musical devices to comment on or support words being sung.

EzGraphson The slow death of purposeless walking

Should be "rare occasions" I think. Great quote.

EzGraphson Ask HN: Best Way to Distribute an Independently Developed Games

How about Steam?

EzGraphson How did ancient Greek music sound?

It is at least heavily weighted towards speech like the previous comment mentioned. This is difficult for modern folk to understand. In Anglican chant, the term "Anglican Thump" is used to describe a common problem where singers race in the initial section of the chant up to the cadence and then stop to pound out the last few notes in metered time.

EzGraphson How did ancient Greek music sound?

The timing in most modern music is metrical rather than driven by speech. Gregorian chant (or other forms of chant) are closer to what much ancient music was like in my understanding . This is also why a lot of poetry of the time is not characterized by huge amounts of metered syllabification and rhymes and the like (though some are cited in the article). I am basing this a bit on the idea that Jewish chant that later impacted the early church a few hundred years later is somewhat reflective of musical practice of the time.

EzGraphson ECMA-404: The JSON Data Interchange Format [pdf]

Would have been nice if a standard format for hyperlinks were added. This lacks the elegance of pure JavaScript but it would make it possible to create strict RESTful APIs that don't violate HATEOAS or includes links as some sort of extension.

EzGraphson WebStorm Tricks and Tips: Live webinar Thursday, October 24th

John Linquist's videos give a simple direct introduction to AngularJS and showcase the capabilities of WebStorm:

https://www.youtube.com/user/johnlindquist

They were helpful to me as demonstrations of building simple Angular Apps from the ground up and compelling enough that I bothered to shell out a few bucks for the IDE (the first one I purchased in years).

EzGraphson A Capella Science - Bohemian Gravity

Not generally a fan of videos posted to HN, but thought this was worth making an exception...

EzGraphson Play 2.2.0 Released

Highlights: http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.2.0/Highlights2...

EzGraphson How The Art of Computer Programming was ruined for me

We've moved from a world where I can put my hands on a book, glance at the copyright page, feel the paper, see the condition, to one where every version of a work, from annotated to abridged, can be lumped together as a fungible commodity.

Yes - really a rather profound change. The entire way new books are produced has changed as a result as well. Print-on-demand in particular can result in you literally having a "one-off" edition of a book. The benefit is quicker integration of corrections. Am not sure we really fully understand some of the negative consequences...

EzGraphson VNC client in 200 lines of JavaScript

An interesting article, but many posts titled "Create <awesome program> in <small number> LOC" are misleading if they are highly dependent on underlying libraries. The logical end of this style of article would be something like "How to do X in one Character" and make a call to some external package.

EzGraphson “Castrol Rocket” Makes a Bid on the 400 MPH Mark

Googled around and found more details at http://www.castrolrocket.com/.

EzGraphson SDL 2.0.0 is out after many years in development

From the About:

"Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D. It is used by video playback software, emulators, and popular games including Valve's award winning catalog and many Humble Bundle games."

http://www.libsdl.org/index.php

EzGraphson Show HN: Sketch, connect and simulate gears and chains

Reminds me of Mindstorms:

http://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful...

In the intro of the book Seymour A. Papert describes how gears provided an early concrete framework that made understanding abstract mathematical concepts presented at a later point much easier to visualize and apply.

EzGraphson PeepCode: Leveling Up

And in consistent PeepCode style, this announcement comes in a blog post with a unique design :)

https://peepcode.com/blog

EzGraphson Pluralsight acquires PeepCode

Congrats Geoffrey and Company!

PeepCode's screencasts and other materials are great. They are extremely focused high quality productions that merit more than a single watch to appreciate all the insights. Wishing you all the best with the acquisition and future work!

EzGraphson Database Design Mistakes

"Now, for reasons I can’t explain, people just love GUIDs in database designs."

Yeah - they seem kind of silly and meaningless, so instead you use sequential integers. After all, they work nicely with object-relational frameworks like ActiveRecord, they are sequential, and they are more "human readable". And then one day you have a subset of data that you need to migrate from one environment. And when you try, you end up with some clashing records created in the target environment. No big deal, you will just increment all of your sequential integers so that there are no clashes. Oh wait, there are foreign keys - need to update those as well. Which reminds me, what is going to happen when ids in the target system catch up the the ones imported. OK we can change the sequence to cause it to start adding records after the one imported. Hey, this is really kind of complicated. There must be an easier way...

Hmmm... about those GUIDs? They completely eliminate an entire class of problems that occur when migrating data across environments (a very common scenario in some quarters).

If this type of scenario never will arise for you, then GUIDs may not make sense for your application. Hopefully this does explain why some "people just love" them.

EzGraphson San Jose State suspends online courses

Online courses may not actively discourage collaboration, but they certainly do not force it in the same way that is possible in a traditional classroom. Don't get me wrong, I am a huge supporter of online courses. But a teacher staring you down, asking you a question, or encouraging you to work on a project in a small group is much more attention-grabbing than many online teaching mechanisms available.

EzGraphson JavaScript Isn't Scheme

The main reason the comparison between JavaScript and Scheme is helpful is that it breaks the connection between JavaScript and Java. The first thing many Java programmers do when trying to write JavaScript is to try to create a class hierarchy (rather than using prototypical inheritance) using idioms from Java. Although possible, it ends up awkward and confusing in most cases. Understanding that functions are first-class and seeing functional idioms fall out from there is a big paradigm shift for Java devs.

Obviously JavaScript isn't Scheme using the author's "top 10 defining characteristics of Scheme." Crockford's analysis is on track - and John Resig and Bear Bibeault highlight the same idea by introducing functions are really fundamental to the languages more than objects (in "Secrets of a JavaScript Ninja").

The language's history does imply the comparison as well. Eich's original mandate was to "write Scheme for the browser" but he was later directed to give his language a C-like syntax and to ride on the coat-tails of the hype surrounding Java.

"JavaScript isn't Scheme" might not be accurate for folks schooled in the finer points of Scheme. It is very useful to those who cut their teeth learning Java.

EzGraphson Spectacular: a BDD framework for CoffeeScript and JavaScript inspired by RSpec

Does this provide any advantages over Jasmine for JavaScript BDD called by Karma (formerly Testacular) as the Test Runner?

http://pivotal.github.io/jasmine/

http://karma-runner.github.io/0.8/index.html

EzGraphson The Recomputation Manifesto

Your TL;DR should read "...source code and a virtual environment that allows the process to be repeated..."

From the article:

"There has been significant pressure for scientists to make their code open, but this is not enough. Even if I hired the only postdoc who can get the code to work, she might have forgotten the exact details of how an experiment was run."

also

"The only way to ensure recomputability is to provide virtual machines"

To that end, the site http://recomputation.org/ is mentioned as a repository for recomputable experiments.

Point being: source code alone does not specify the process or workflow in which it was used.

EzGraphson Show HN: Minified.js – a fully-featured, 4K alternative to jQuery and MooTools

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network.

Use of these (to serve static content) reduces your server traffic/load and gives a faster response times to users in different geographical regions.

EzGraphson Reasons to avoid code comments

In fairness, a good article with actionable, specific observations (and the inline with my vague recollection of recent consensus). Still, posts with titles like this make me think:

- As a rule of thumb, rules of thumb are useful in many common situations.

- As another rule of thumb, titles which are stated in fairly absolute terms generate more interest.

EzGraphson How to permanently delete a Facebook account

If a user deletes their account using one of these forms, can a new account be created with the same username ?

EzGraphson Oh, My Hand: Complaints Medieval Monks Scribbled in the Margins of Manuscripts

I have often thought of that - and considered writing a time travel story that included an ancient ending up in a modern grocery store or some such place and be paralyzed while meticulously reading each label (out loud).

One of these days...

EzGraphson Oh, My Hand: Complaints Medieval Monks Scribbled in the Margins of Manuscripts

Once you are done you will be all warmed up for Hebrew / Aramaic Old Testament - and writing from right to left might exercise another set of muscles ;).

EzGraphson Oh, My Hand: Complaints Medieval Monks Scribbled in the Margins of Manuscripts

Reminds me of Samuel Barber's Hermit Songs (based on anonymous Irish poetry):

http://www.listeningarts.com/music/art_song/sounds_and_texts...

EzGraphson Unsure if I understand TransactionAwarePersistenceManagerFactoryProxy

I kind of preferred the original title on HN that quoted a comment:

"And this, dear children, is why Java should stop taking drugs."

EzGraphson Our web development workflow is completely broken

Most web development workflows emerged in an era of monolithic, server-side driven application development. Lots of server side code (as well as navigation logic and session state), relatively small amount of browser side code. In recent web app development, client side now has a larger proportion of the code and complexity. Developers tend to make incremental changes to their workflow rather than "starting from scratch" seem to miss the shift that has taken place.

One of the best examples of an efficient workflow (at least in theory) that I have seen is the Play framework, along with a browser plugin that causes the browser to refresh every time source code is saved (http://www.jamesward.com/2013/05/15/auto-refresh-for-play-fr...).