chrismear

Oh man, another '.DD'. I don't think I've even figured out the difference between BDD and TDD yet.

Strongly seconded. And don't do what this site did, and only list the alternative languages in the language that is currently selected:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrismear/3330007381/

I enjoyed this recent post from Dan Benjamin, introducing meditation:

http://hivelogic.com/articles/an-introduction-to-mindfulness...

In particular, this line:

"One final thing to keep in mind; you absolutely do not have to be a Buddhist to meditate in this way, and this practice won’t turn you into one, either."

Which isn't to knock Buddhism in the slightest, but just a reminder that it's possible and useful to consider the practice of meditation as a separate thing from the Buddhism, or mysticism, or whatever-else-ism that it's often packaged up with in popular consciousness, and which might put off some people from trying it.

I'm not sure this is Time Machine. I know that in VMware Fusion, at least, there's an option to turn your monolithic disk image into a set of smaller individual files. If you turn this on, then Time Machine only has to backup the smaller part-image file that's changed.

I know I've definitely seen Time Machine re-copying entire 10 GB virtual machine disk images before, with Parallels and VMware Fusion images, before I discovered this feature.

This makes about as much sense as claiming that before people figured out how to write and before linguists started codifying systems of grammar, all language was just unstructured simplistic animal utterances.

Here's a good five-minute segment from Howard Goodall's 'How Music Works' series, talking about the human universality of the pentatonic scale:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpvfSOP2slk

That strikes me as an obvious and not particularly noteworthy solution.

Disclaimer: I have a Physics degree.

I've encountered more than a few people who take issue with the "us programmers are special flowers, we need weird working hours and no interruptions" line (as they see it). Everyone else gets their job done under normal conditions; why can't the programmers? This may just be more of that.

If you're interested in these topics, I highly recommend a couple of books by philosopher Daniel Dennett: 'Consciousness Explained' and 'Freedom Evolves'.

His way of reconciling determinism with free will goes something like this. Assuming determinism, then we are living in one of a huge number of possible universes. As limited intelligences, we have no way of figuring out exactly which history we live in, and so no way of accurately predicting the future. That's the free will we have -- the ability to 'play the game' and participate in this deterministic world, using our limited knowledge to try and understand what's going on; and how we can affect it, within the rules of physics.

Yes, this means that we don't have total free will in an unlimited fantastical sense; and, from the point of view of an all-knowing being who knows which history is the real one, all our actions are predetermined. But for all practical purposes, our participation as information-seeking, decision-making agents embedded in this elaborate ball game gives you all of the usual qualities that we worry losing with the loss of 'real' free will -- culpability for our actions, for example.

Even if you're not convinced by Dennett's position, the books do give useful ways of thinking about these problems, and go a long way towards removing the baggage that has accumulated around concepts of 'free will', 'determinism', 'responsibility', 'consciousness' and so on, so that one can reason about these ideas with more pragmatism.

Interesting experiment. I'm a purist at heart, though, and all this talk of accreting followers as a business process makes me ache a little. I still think this is the best way to go: http://increaseyourtwitterfollowers.com/

This. Also, the media computer.

Standard counter-argument: someone's still got to take away the trash.

Actually, one of the benefits of Git over, say, Subversion, is that it's much easier to hack away on multiple things, and then arrange a series of sensible, self-contained commits from your messy working directory.

It's not necessarily a great way to work at all times, but it's a handy facility to have. Personally I use it most in the early, somewhat experimental stages of a new feature or project, when I find it useful to mentally separate experimental hacking with organised committing.

For most things, though, I try to focus on one thing at a time, and here Git's quick-'n'-easy branching and merging helps out. Whenever I start something new, even if it's just fixing a minor bug, I'll create a new branch just for that work, often naming it after the ticket number in our issue tracking system. Then your being in that branch is a constant reminder of what you're supposed to be working on.

Ryan Tomayko has written a good article on these aspects of Git here: http://tomayko.com/writings/the-thing-about-git