chrismear

Can we squeeze bear/bare (the verbs) in there?

I agree that for a novice a trivial example doesn't inspire them to learn more. But an experienced programmer who just wasn't familiar with this concept might appreciate more a stripped-down example like this that demonstrates the essentials of the idea. And in general, different people have different learning styles.

I've found that the concept of anonymous functions is the biggest hurdle to get over -- closures seem to follow as a natural extension of that.

I explained this to someone recently in the context of event handlers in ActionScript/JavaScript, starting with the idea that when you do:

  something.onclick = function(){...};

you're passing a function around just like it was any other value.

Then I moved to an artificial example of a 'magic function-making machine':

  function giveMeAnAdder(baseNumber) {
    return function (i) {
      return baseNumber + i;
    };
  }

with a couple of examples of storing and using the functions that giveMeAnAdder returns.

Then I pointed out that, normally, local variables in a function disappear when the function returns, so how does my adder 'remember' what baseNumber is? And the answer is that the anonymous function is actually a bundle of a function body and the local context, and we call this a closure.

Belvedere is particularly mind-bending:

http://www.andrewlipson.com/escher/belvedere.html

Well, I certainly applaud anyone wanting to delete a hundred comments...

With a decent error page, you can at least give ordinary people a link back to the home page.

The more they produce, the more I can't help but feel that Boston Dynamics must be stopped at all costs.

I thought this a while ago with Basecamp. Although I'm sure they use it internally to manage their own projects, since they don't do client work anymore they're not using it for its primary use case, which is collaborating with clients.

It's not as huge a gap as with Haystack, to be sure, but anyone who's tried to get non-webhead clients to grok/use Basecamp will know what a struggle it can sometimes be. People have been asking for years for the app to have more help/guidance that's geared towards client end-users, rather than the agency account owner.

As for Haystack, I sort of see it as a (reverse) extension of their job boards, which seems to have been pretty successful for them despite not being something they themselves use very often.

It's slang from Cambridge University (and maybe elsewhere, but that's where I encountered it) for a student studying mathematics. Related: 'NatSci' (pronounced natskee) for someone studying Natural Sciences (the course that covers all the traditional physical and biological sciences); 'CompSci' (pronounced compskee) for people studying Computer Science.

I was totally expecting this to be something about automatically-persisting document interfaces.

OAuth is great, but the app doesn't actually say what it's going to do with my Twitter account. Developers especially are wary of handing over access to their accounts (OAuth or not), so it might be good to summarise what your app will post before making the user authenticate.

Actually, the double slash is useful for at least one thing. You can use it in web pages to make relative URLs which preserve the protocol, but change the server.

Suppose you have pages on a server www.example.com that reference images on an asset host assets.example.com. Usually, you would use a full URL in your HTML to reference your images:

http://assets.example.com/image.png

This is fine if all your accesses to www.example.com are done over HTTP. But what if you want to use HTTPS sometimes? Unless you change those URLs to use the HTTPS protocol as well, the browser may give the 'mixed secure and insecure content' warning.

If you specify the image URLs as relative URLs in the form:

//assets.example.com/image.png

then when a user visits http://www.example.com/ their browser will fetch the image from http://assets.example.com/image.png . But when they visit https://www.example.com/ their browser will fetch the image from https://assets.example.com/image.png .

Without the double slash, this kind of relative URL would be indistinguishable from the more common relative URL which just means a different path on the same server:

/assets.example.com/image.png

"Who would build something like this?

Just as in the early days of the mouse and windowed GUI, a system based upon 10/GUI's principles would likely be best suited to a systems builder capable of full vertical integration."

I wonder who they're thinking of.

It might actually reduce clutter, since plenty of apps are now individually adding rotation options to their settings. Having a system-wide setting would simply consolidate all of these in one place.

MUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING FOR REAL MEN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yH_j8-VVLo

Huh, that approach would never have occurred to me. Very elegant.

This is cool, but I won't truly be happy until someone's implemented Conway's Game of Life in Conway's Game of Life.

I think perhaps it was a play on 'chichi', meaning 'affectedly trendy':

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chichi#Adjective

Of course, it's not too tricky to configure, say, Apache to block access to all the .svn directories:

http://www.subversionary.org/martintomes/preventing-access-t... http://blog.samdevore.com/archives/2006/05/01/hivelogic-prev...

It's the former. Sure, it's not a problem if your code is already open-sourced, but plenty of people are working on things that aren't. And aside from code, you may have private data stored in your repository, such as API keys, or even just configuration information about your site setup that might help attackers.

I find this quote confusing. I can accept that gratis sex is better than paid-for sex, but then it's a pretty banal analogy to make -- in simplistic terms, anything is 'better' if you can get it without paying for it, software or otherwise.

On the other hand, if it's trying to make a case for libre software, then it's must be talking about libre sex. And I'm really not clear on what that entails.

Drawing people's attention to a vote and promoting yourself isn't vote rigging in any sense. Vote rigging is tricking people to vote for you, or directly manipulating the voting mechanism.

Badly.

Probably something really sinister, like the ability to route your phone calls to you, or something.

From the article:

"The app isn't running in the background; it's working server-to-server."

So presumably all they've done is a deal with AT&T to access the cell-location data for a subscriber, and using the app to tie that into their Loopt identity. Nothing special going on inside the iPhone OS.

I cannot for the life of me understand what this person is talking about. I've read it twice now.

Isn't this less about being 'horizontal' or 'vertical', and more about the fact that we display information on flat areas, and about different disciplines relating to segregation of 'in-progress', 'pending', and 'archived' material?

If I have five pieces of paper relating to a task that needs to be done, but which I'm not working on right at this moment, I'll stack them up simply because that leaves more space for the task I am working on right at this moment. Now, that stack may be 'horizontal' on the desk, or it may be 'vertical' in a filing cabinet. But it's simply a space-saving measure.

His main problem seems to be that when he files pending stuff away, he forgets to look at it again. But this isn't about vertical versus horizontal thinking -- it's just about bad document management. If you just have a monolithic filing cabinet that contains both ancient archived documents, and material relating to pending tasks, then yes, you're going to get confused and forget about things. If, on the other hand, you have one file as an archive, and one file that you know is for pending material (or an in-tray; or just a special pile on your desk), then you'll remember to check it.

Not that I'm condoning the behaviour of the Twestival organisers, but I find it hard to sympathise with the venue, given that they continued reserving the date for 'months' with no contract and no deposit paid. They took a risk on a clearly flakey client, and it didn't pay off.

As someone who's pretty happy with iTunes, I'm genuinely interested to find out what I'm missing out on. What do these other management applications do that can't be done using the tools in iTunes?

I admit, my usage isn't particularly sophisticated. I typically use the browser (with genre, artist and album columns) to drill down to music, or the full text search to quickly dig out something specific. I also have quite a few manual and smart playlists.

In fairness, it's given an aside in the Hockey Puck Mouse section.

Maybe this is the issue -- I've seen these things explained the other way around.

My experience is in Ruby (specifically Rails), with Test::Unit (usually used to espouse TDD), and RSpec (recommended for BDD-style development).

With TDD, I follow the pattern of using real objects for almost everything (only mocking out API wrappers, etc.), setting some initial values, poking a method, and then testing that some final values are as they should be.

With BDD, I end up mocking and stubbing almost everything, and then writing a test that checks that my object under test calls the right methods on other objects.

I like the BDD school for its focus on testing one class in isolation, but often when writing BDD-style tests I just end up echoing the (eventual) implementation in test-form, line by line. It's entirely possible I've got utterly the wrong end of the stick, but I can't shake the feeling that it seems a bit redundant at best, and of little added value at worst.