fish2000

Relatedly: what is with MSDN bloggers always referring to themselves as 'junkies'? A "script junkie" probably won't steal their mother's VCR and pawn it so they can get more scripts to stick in their arm. It's kind of a bizarre convention.

A novel answer to that question could be the basis for a startup, in an of its own right, I should think!

My friend Christian wrote this library -- I would recommend that you take a look at the "halfviz" demo to get a sense of its upper bounds: http://arborjs.org/halfviz/#/date-with-destiny

Christian's site, with some of his other work, is at http://samizdat.cc/

The article says that one of the potential military applications would be the ability to disarm or redirect a weapon as it reenters the atmosphere -- Having taken the same topical look at the article that you have, I am not sure why you think that is a categorically bad thing to implement, from any standpoint. I mean, you could make the case that having that capacity will make the fingers that rest on the big red buttons all the itchier... if you wanted to be all ad hominem about things. I for one think that gapingly general fiat mandates like the one you propose are just as potentially damaging as any weapon.

SQL gives some people the howling fantods. I think a large part of the programming-nerd population looks at it and sees it as a kludgy chimera like JCL, or an inscrutably unfunny INTERCAL variant. Maybe they've been forced to use a shitty ORM leaked abstractions on a project of theirs which they had to clean up; maybe someone slipped them the hot SQL injection, back in the days of CGI; maybe their parents were tragically trampled to death by an elephant while a nearby dolphin laughed. Regardless of motiation, you have to concede to whom it riles that SQL is not the most likeable language/model/framework/paradigm out there.

Personally, I actually love SQL. You asked me, nothing satisfies like nested right inner joins. But that's not who I am. I have needs. Sometimes, what I need is a schemaless eventually-consistent document-oriented persistent data store, because I am aggregating data from multiple web service APIs whose field names and structures change around like they were samples on a Girl Talk record. CouchDB ain't SlouchDB... I can dance to that.

I can tell that some of my buddies are embracing databases from the ranks of the quote-unquote NoSQL movement because these databases' aesthetics are not at all like SQL. That's the catch with NoSQL -- it's a really pointless thing to talk about because it's not a thing; it is an un-thing, a classification of everything in the contemporary database world that is not SQL. It's the kind of classification that makes the most sense in the emotional context of how people feel about SQL.

This is sometimes true.

I think that Parallel is more interesting as an instant server-farm for "taco bell programmers" -- q.v. http://teddziuba.com/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1818816 for the HN discussion -- as per Mr. Dziuba's definition.

Like, async spidering with parallel is a one-liner, but comparatively, have you seen how much absurdly syntaxed pycurl boilerplate you need? It's crazy. I for one will take the simpler method any day.

Ah, the grass is always greener.

The adobe tools mentioned are excellent for what they do, but they are never without interface quirks that can range from mildly irritating to bizarre -- I have consistently found the Edit Styles box in InDesign to work counterintuitively in small ways, like forgetting that I checked 'preview' or overwriting my edits if a dropdown has been incorrectly fiddled with.

Adobe stuff also completely lacks decent version control. "Version Cue" is pretty clunky and has no conception of diff-ing. If I make edits to the story in an InDesign file and replace 3 FPO images with real ones, why can't I have a repository I can browse, in which I can see an awesome and self-explanatory visualization of these changes? Maybe you need InCopy servers for something like that but I don't think that's a feature they have.

Contrastingly, with the latest XCode preview, versioning was almost seamless and very nice to work with. After installing the XCode preview, I was able to check out a project from GitHub, run it, edit it, and commit the changes, with a lovely two-pane view of the diff in question when committing, showing additions and deletions. I didn't have to think about it at all -- it was only "almost" seamless as I had to manually do 'git push', which I'm sure they'll fix that in the final release.

You can do scripting with JavaScript inside the Adobe apps, but it's slow and the API takes some considerable getting-used-to. Some things most programmers would consider scriptable are not: I'd love to be able to bust out a regex or some conditional logic when building a Photoshop automation, for example; the current interface for that feels condescending and ridiculous if you're coming from TextMate or emacs.

Always greener. I'm just sayin.

I love me a good arithmetic/algebra review -- but in the end, I am not qualified to rub elbows with the geniuses of Mensa, as I lack the essential requisite domain-specific kitten/mitten training.

References aside, I certifiably lack enough legit brains to step to Mensa's gatekeepers. But now I'm curious -- has anyone got any anecdotes of Mensa gatherings that defied stereotypes? Such as for example those alluded to in Mr. Onstad's synopsis of Mensa here: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=03222005

it's especially calming if you haven't lived near any of them.