aurynn

Wow. This just crystallised a bunch of thoughts bumping around in my head, on why this argument goes around and around all the time.

Thank you! This was a great comment.

Wow, first PC laptop I'd actually buy.

Buying for Amnesia. Don't want to play Psychonauts (didn't enjoy it the first time), and I own all the rest.

And I own all the music, too. ... Wow.

This happened to me. T-Mobile Galaxy S, Samsung and T-Mo dropping the ball on updates, the GPS, etc., etc..

I have an iPhone 4S now, after trying out a Nokia N9, and I've never been happier.

Charlie Stross brought this idea up on his blog recently; what does a post work-for-pay world look like? What would you do if you had a home, food, and health care as a basic right?

Could we even get there with our current basic cultural value being that if you don't work, you have no value?

I'd use this. Does it work with node.js?

Well, Postgres can shine here if you can do a fair amount of processing inside of a stored procedure. The sproc takes care of lifting, the client can be (fairly) limited in the transformations it applies, and the network latency of repeatedly going to the DB is lessened.

This is, naturally, very application-dependent.

As an owner of an N9, this makes me kind of sad.

I wrote a longer comment on another thread, but what this really makes me feel is that, instead of utilising a great design paired with WP7, there's just another indistinct me-too device to be drowned out by the iPhone.

It's sad, because the people who were behind the N9 really seemed like they understood what Apple was on about, how and why the iPhone was like it was.

Nokia may not have gotten all of it, but they were catching on, and with this release, I fear that spirit may have been lost.

Please pass on my remarks to the design team - I'm very impressed with their work, and I do wish that they continue their excellent designs.

I truly wish that Nokia had gone behind the N9 with everything it deserves. I feel it's the first time that Apple has actually been challenged in design, in integrity towards an ideal, in making something that exemplifies that internal drive. After seeing the WP7, even knowing it was coming, I know that their lovely design work was cheapened by that release. It's still good design, but it lost something tangible and wonderful, that sense of being something different and better. By shipping WP7, it became something that exists secondary to another goal, instead of a goal unto itself. Cheapened, as though a device that exists not symbiotically with the software designed to run on it, but any random garbage that can be sold with it.

It lost its soul.

MeeGo Harmattan isn't as polished as iOS - it's got a lot of first-generation performance issues, definitely requires some babysitting to keep it running well, but it's miles ahead of Android.

It feels like the Harmattan team at Nokia really understood good UI and good design, and wanted to build a product around those ideals.

The N9 is also a really slick piece of hardware. Someone designed and loved this thing, and wanted it to be amazing. It doesn't have any weird bulges or outcroppings like all the Android handsets; the appearance of it is minimalist; even the camera module on the back looks like it fits the style. I always found the Android cameras to be just another annoying outcrop, never fitting with a cohesive design.

The N9, and Harmattan, have that cohesive design. It's a royal shame that it's the best phone no one will ever use...

This is why I bought the N9. It's damn slick, in every one of these facets.

Though, syncing is still a major pain point.

Given I'm writing a talk about Twisted and event loops for KiwiPycon, this is super useful. Thanks!

That is a surprisingly clever and evil hack.

I use an Android as the carrier I was on in Canada (Wind), like T-Mo, doesn't get the iPhone, and Android was the best smartphone available.

That said, I'm not a big fan of the phone I got (a Samsung Galaxy S), and Android's UI inconsistencies and lack of a culture of UI excellence really, really, really drive me up a wall. Going to switch to iOS as soon as the iPhone 5 comes out.

Yes, but I'm in the process of moving off google-hosted things, so I'll need to figure out a new topology for this...

Interestingly, I find having that low-level access to be more restrictive. Suddenly, a thing that I just want to work (in this case, the music player) requires that I think about how I'm going to put files onto it, what the best way to synchronise those files is going to be, whether or not I have to mount it myself, if I ought to write scripts to manipulate it, the feeling that I need to write scripts to manipulate it, else why have all of these programming skills?

When really what I wanted to do was just listen to music while I'm walking around, and have a limited amount of worrying when it comes to getting music onto the device. (IE, it Just Works territory) My behaviour is now circumscribed in other ways - my attention is split between things I really want to work on and this malaise of I ought to be crafting better tools to work with my music player.

"You can just set up rsync once!" is kind of a non-argument response to this - an Apple gadget, in this case, I set up nonce. Plug it in, it initializes, and syncs everything. Now I can listen to music where-ever I happen to be, and I don't have those circumscriptions to my attention.

If my Apple device annoys me sufficiently that I really want to have that level of control, there's a myriad of devices out there that automount as USB devices, that I could set up all sorts of nifty on-insert rules and script to high-heaven.

My favourite font for coding, that which I use everywhere I can, is monofur. Reading it is like visual candy.

It also looks really good on Linux - the AA seems to work out quite well.

Edit for hey, reading the article that mentions monofur is a good idea too. :)

Personally, I much prefer glossy screens, both the glass-covered screen on my Macbook Pro as well as the polished LCD on my old Aspire netbook. In general, the higher contrast and more vibrant colours are a net win, and I find my eyes less strained looking at the display.

Interesting article - I really liked the updated example at the very end, demonstrating a new pattern (for me) for handling exceptions that get thrown by wrapping the DB inserts in their own function.

OOh, that does sound like fun. I've been toying with how to write a grammar generator on Node.js, lately - something in the vein of PyParsing.

I think I cheated and used an existing regex library - it's been a while.

As far as the 6 months, it was my first major, major project and required so much learning and research on just how to structure code that it took a long time to craft. It didn't help that the design was so complex that debugging it was a chore. :)

Hence the V2 rewrite that took a couple of days.

I wrote a parser and lexer by hand. Building the mental abstractions to figure out how a syntax tree should be constructed and walked was amazing. It gave me the tools to visualize how code is structured, how to avoid poorly structured code, and how program flow actually works.

The first revision took me around 6 months to implement, and the second about 3 days. Worth every moment of futzing around and hacking and designing.

The language is getting rewritten (this time with an actual grammar!), and I'm finding it still has a mountain of useful things to teach me about programming. I can't recommend it enough. :)

That was mean. I had hope, for just a moment..

Spyware what?

I like it for the single point where all my games are, so I don't have to remember where I downloaded to, or where the keys are in my inbox, or even where I put install media. I just download the client, sign in, and all my games are right there.

It makes the DRM quite tolerable, and it supports indie developers, and it's ultimately the most convenient option for me.

Hopefully there'll be a steam key. Braid, Machinarium and Osmos I already have, but the bundle is worth it for Revenge of the Titans, that looks like so much fun

This will also be very useful for those of us with iPads, who want to code on the go. :)

I bought an Aspire 1410 recently; it's more of an ultraportable than a netbook, though.

I have to say I love it. Just the right size, capable, and decent Ubuntu support.