jimray

I dug up Apple's reorg announcement from 1997, where Steve Jobs was officially brought on as an "advisory" role to then-CEO Gil Amelio.

http://web.archive.org/web/19990128084705/http://product.inf...

Obviously, Apple and Microsoft are different companies and looking back 16 years with the benefit of hindsight is a bit unfair.

And yet, even in the announcements, you can see a difference. Apple's is shorter, more direct, bereft of details but not trying to be everything to everyone. Most important is an emphasis on getting back to basics, whereas Microsoft is promising "one strategy, one Microsoft" and then immediately rattling off a laundry list of "core products". When every one of those products is core, it's clear nothing is.

I completely agree with your point, but that's not a problem of renters, per se.

If the city of San Francisco (where my wife and I live) made a committed effort to build a stable stock of rental property that allowed families of 3-5 to rent for less than $3k a month, I guarantee you'd see more families sticking around instead of fleeing to points north or east. Instead, you get mostly young, single (your "bowling alone" category, less likely to show up at those city council meetings) splitting 3 bedrooms four ways and paying $4k for the privilege of all sharing one kitchen and one bathroom.

I'm optimistic that all of the new housing being put up in SOMA will help alleviate this but there needs to be some complementary regulatory structure to help keep those community types (which are often what the young singles become in 5-10 years) around. Otherwise, SF is quickly on a path towards being a place where only the rich, the young, the single, and the poor (via subsidized housing) can afford to live. The middle gets squeezed.

Not to be too glib, here's another impressively depressing stat: 56% of Americans don't have a problem with the recent NSA tracking revelation and a significant plurality would be happy to see it expanded[1]. What do we do when our representative government truly is representative?

[1]http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/most-americans-suppor...

Mule Radio (I work there, you may know us as home of John Gruber's The Talk Show) donated $1000 to the EFF to help fight this patent. You can, too.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/help-save-podcasting

On another note, it's nice to see Nathan Myhrvold getting called out as the patent troll he so clearly is, despite the bogus persona of a modern renaissance man he so carefully cultivates.

Just wanted to say thanks for such an insightful, nuanced response.

Ease off on the rhetoric. I'm not accusing anyone of anything, I don't think anyone did anything illegal and, for what it's worth, I thought the Times' lawyering was dumb and hamfisted at best.

But there was a right way for scroll kit to handle this and there was the wrong, easy way they chose. They could've said "Have you been blown away by features like The New York Times' 'Snowfall' or Pitchfork's cover stories? We'd like to show you Scroll Kit." And then put together their own demo video with their own work without a smarmy "it took us an hour to do what the Times did in months".

It's classless and low. But they got the publicity they wanted and seem to have a fan in you. Hoo ray.

So, the ends justify the means and it's all good because at least his startup got some publicity? Even if the "publicity" turns out to be a net win, what a terrible way to conduct yourself.

I'm not a lawyer and my understanding of fair use seems to be about as poor as everyone's.

What Scrollkit did, though, was tacky, plain and simple. They built an impressive product but are using someone else's work to try to promote it[1]. Is that illegal? I doubt it. But it's tasteless. And the smarmy "we did this in an hour" attitude is not only off-putting, it stretches the truth to the point of breaking. Anyone who's followed a "build a blog in five minutes" demo knows there's more to building something than just scaffolding -- Andre Torrez probably [said it best](http://notes.torrez.org/2010/12/learn-to-program-in-24-hours...).

There are plenty of ways they could have demonstrated their product without resorting to this kind of shallow mimicry. "Have you been blown away by the incredible work like the New York Times' 'Snowfall' or Pitchfork's cover stories? Want to build something similar yourself? We'd like to show you scrollkit." And then do a demo video with your own photography and reporting. Tells the same story without the shiteating grin.

As it stands right now, though, they just look like they're jumping on a trend using someone else's work.

[1] Disclaimer: I have friends who work at the Times, including ones that worked on Snowfall.

And the aggregate affect of a crowd full of people instagramming just about every moment of a concert means I basically watch live shows through the screens of other people's phones these days. Throw in a dozen crummy LED flashes going off for most of the show and the experience is pretty much killed for me.

If there's one development in concert-going over the past decade that I really loathe, more than the consolidation of ticket sellers, the subsequent rise in ticket prices, the steady increase in the cost of beer, my own age and sore back after 4 hours, everyone else's insistence that they need to photograph (or worse, VIDEO) a show has got to be the top of the list.

And while I appreciate your edge case here that Timehop provides, most of those photographs are just being uploaded to Facebook to show off how vastly interesting they are to everyone who's not there. Cultivating other people's FOMO.

Ok, enough of my old man kvetching. I genuinely do think it's cool that Timehop let's you relive those little moments as much as I genuinely regret the loss of my enjoyment of living those moments at the time they are happening.

This was exactly my big gripe with the story, particularly Swisher's insistence on writing it as "rags to riches" (even using that very well worn cliche verbatim). The fact is, Systrom, like Zuckerberg, was practically guaranteed success in life, starting with his $30k/year prep school. This isn't rags to riches, it's well-off to obscenely rich, or if you prefer, how to go from the 1% to the .1%.

Not that it isn't a story, it sure ain't Horatio Alger, though.

Yes. The authors like CBV's and make a strong case for why you would want to use them.

Like you, I found CBV's to be wanting, particularly generic views, and all but gave up. A combination of updates to the official docs with 1.5 and this book made me reconsider and I'm glad I did.

Reading the utterly passive tone of the OP, with Webkit somehow "emerging" out of KHTML all on its own, nary a mention of Apple, makes it pretty obvious this move is mostly about politics.

Made by Sandwich Video http://sandwichvideo.com

They do the best (and most imitated) promotional work for tech companies going.

This is so well stated. It's something I (age 34, married, no kid(s) (yet)) think about a lot. I live and work in a city (San Francisco) and in an industry (web developer) where being 10 years older than the median age of my neighbors and colleagues feels like a liability. I feel like I've just figured a few important things out and I'm already past my prime.

"Delightful" is the trend word I'm waiting to die

Fair warning: 2 Scoops definitely assumes some familiarity with how Django works, specifically models, views, templates, and forms. It won't introduce these concepts to you but will help you use them better.

The official Django Tutorial is still a great starting place for getting your head wrapped around that stuff -- https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/

Hot dog.

I've been working on a small side project the past week or so using the 1.5 RC and following along the best practices recommended by 2 Scoops of Django -- https://django.2scoops.org

If you haven't already, I highly, highly recommend picking up the 2 Scoops book. It's got some great, proscriptive advice and is an easy-to-follow roadmap that helps answer a lot of "what is the right way to do this?" kinds of questions. Setting up your settings files for multiple environments, using CBV's, understanding the new User Model features, writing tests, recommended 3rd party tools, securing your setup -- these things are all a lot more clear to me.

And it's actually really well written, not just a bunch of recipes. Their explanation of mixins, for instance, is one of the clearest, most concise I've ever come across. Well worth $12 and a few hours of time to read through it.

That was my first thought as well. And then I started wondering why they are automating so much setup on OS X itself instead of using something like Vagrant for dev stuff.

I find OS X to be pretty frustrating to work with natively. I've long tried to keep things like Postgres and Python consistent, but even a 10.x.y update can break things. Even with homebrew and postgresapp, it's challenging to keep the system from breaking. I'm currently running 10.7 precisely because I didn't want to rebuild my setup on 10.8 (I've since started using Vagrant much more aggressively to help solve this).

I realize that part of the point of boxen is to help set a baseline but it seems like a Vagrant box that mimics the actual Github stack would make more sense.

I get what you're saying. I think your response captures one part -- the id, if you will -- of a pretty common refrain I've heard about this article amongst my other nerdy, SF dwelling friends.

And in that respect, you're right and certainly entitled to that opinion and entitled to express it however you'd like.

While her piece has a lot of problems, not the least of them being a tortured metaphor about gold miners, there is still certainly a kernel of truth to what she's saying. The city is growing at a boom-town pace and infrastructure is not keeping up with that growth, which affects everyone, longtime residents who make less money than young tech workers with higher salaries especially.

Where I'll emphatically disagree with you is your "solution" -- it isn't to turn every resident of San Francisco into an engineer. Much of the attraction of cities is the diversity of people who live in them, which mean ideally they are places that can support poets and programmers. San Francisco, even with its recent influx of tech workers, is not nearly the industry town that the valley proper of San Jose, Mountain View, Cupertino, and Palo Alto are. This is a good thing. This is why people choose to live here and commute there. This is why we have those buses.

This was a frustrating article to read because dealing with the massive, largely tech-fueld growth really is an issue worth exploring. But for all the problems this city has, Google buses ain't even close to the top of the list. Here are some that I think about on my walks home through the city:

* Why are there parking lots adjacent to public housing? Furthermore, why are blocks of public housing (walk up Turk from Market to Divis some time, just not at night) amongst the least dense in the city?

* How do we allow things like AirBnB to exist but not create loopholes in the housing code, which has the effect of further constricting the already tight supply of housing?

* What can the city do to encourage development in the Tenderloin to replace the far-too-many SRO's?

* The high-rises going up in SOMA are great and will hopefully provide housing for the influx of young, mostly single, tech workers. What's the city going to do about encouraging more single-family residences, say, between Van Ness/Masonic and Geary/Market?

* How does Western Addition avoid becoming the next Hayes Valley?

> I don't really know the history of Django but I'd wager it took a lot of inspiration from Rails.

Not exactly. Django mainly came into existence as a formalization of a lot of helper functions that The Lawrence Journal-World newspaper found themselves building over and over again when they built web apps. Adrian Holovaty, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, and Simon Willison created Django separately from Rails, even if it wasn't released publicly for a while (and then got kinda stuck at 0.96 for a while after that).

It's like Newton and Leibniz with calculus or Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace with natural selection; there were a lot of similar problems to be solved in the web dev space in the early '00's, particularly around accessing databases, structuring URLs, and handling authentication, it makes sense that a few similar approaches would show up around the same time.

If you're really interested in the history, this "Snakes and Rubies" video is worth watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb9KDt9aXc8

(I should mention that I tend to personally prefer Python to Ruby, very much like Django, consider Adrian Holovaty a friend and we both once worked at msnbc.com at the same time.)

It takes a highly developed sense of cynicism to see a transparent effort to curb child labor as an attempt to hurt their competitors.

Furthermore, Apple has publicly committed to bringing more manufacturing to the US, which isn't exactly pool of cheap labor.

There are plenty of Apple's business practices worth criticizing. Making a forthright attempt to end child labor in the third world is not one of them.

I'm not sure "deserve" is the right way to consider it, more like "what is the social value of billionaires?" Or, why isn't the marginal tax rate on $1B+ 100%. I don't have much to offer in the way of an answer, just something I regularly ponder.

Furthermore, and I'd say far more indefensible, what is the social value of billionaires who inherited their net worth. Or, why aren't estate taxes on estates over $1B 100%.

Using em instead of px for media queries is definitely a bit of a mindmelter at first. However, if you're truly interested in building a responsive site, not just hitting a few target devices(1), I definitely recommend spending a little bit of time getting comfortable with the idea.

Mostly, it forces you to consider the context of your media queries, not just specific resolutions or device capabilities. This helps to future-proof your code for new devices and build for difficult-to-test for contexts, like users who always have a browser zoom level set higher than you expect.

This article really helped sell me on the idea and show me the way:

http://blog.cloudfour.com/the-ems-have-it-proportional-media...

(1)I realize this sounds judgmental, I don't mean for it to be. There are plenty of perfectly valid reasons to "just hit a few target devices" using responsive design techniques instead of building a "truly responsive site".

Perhaps a better title for the series would be "Getting Started with Django in the Real World"

Because in the real world, you need to know things like chef, vagrant, ubuntu, apt-get, pip, virtualenv, heroku, ssh... if you want to do anything beyond building a demo app that only runs locally. I use all this stuff every day and I'm looking forward to going through this tutorial.

I'm also quite excited about the prebuilt VM that targets Heroku as my colleagues and I were just about to do this ourselves to retool our deploy process. This'll be an awesome start, thanks!

This is a great story and inspiring and hits all the right "feel good" buttons.

BUT.

Isn't the story really "how blind people use the accessibility features of iOS"? Accessibility, specifically Voice Over, is a core component of iOS and pretty straightforward for developers to implement. The new Flickr app, for instance, seems to offer many of the same accessibility features shown in the video, though their implementation could use a little work. The Instagram guys should be commended for adding the accessibility hooks but, really, that's all they did. That's a day's worth of work.

Can anyone speak to how Instagram works for the blind on an Android device?

Here's my first ever tweet. There's a separate JS file for every month of tweets. The JSON object itself is named according to the month.

  Grailbird.data.tweets_2006_12 = 
  [{
    "source" : "web",
    "entities" : {
      "user_mentions" : [ ],
      "media" : [ ],
      "hashtags" : [ ],
     "urls" : [ ]
    },
    "geo" : {
    },
    "id_str" : "547413",
    "text" : "counting down the seconds until 5",
    "id" : 547413,
    "created_at" : "Sat Dec 02 00:57:17 +0000 2006",
    "user" : {
      "name" : "Jim Ray",
      "screen_name" : "jimray",
      "protected" : false,
      "id_str" : "35623",
      "profile_image_url_https" :   "https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1234214846/avatar_normal.jpg,
      "id" : 35623,
      "verified" : false
    } ]

The CSV data is much more basic

  547413,2006-12-02 00:57:17 +0000,counting down the seconds until 5,

I got mine this weekend. It's a solid implementation, a great 1.0 and something Twitter and the engineers who worked on it should be proud of.

When you click the "get my tweets" button, it kicks off a process in Twitter land somewhere. A few minutes later, you get an email with a link to a zip file.

The file contains a full archive of every one of your public tweets, including @replies you've made, but not DM's or replies to you or follower/following information, etc. It's just your public tweets. The tweets themselves are stored as CSV and JSON. Which is actually pretty cool because it means you can build your own apps, or archive apps like Thinkup can ingest your tweets, if you're so inclined.

As the article states, you can explore your archive via a web app that all works client side in a browser, based on Bootstrap, natch. The app works quite well. You can search your archive quickly and easily. It points to the canonical URL of the tweet on twitter.com. There's some pretty basic visualization of your tweet archive.

The javascript that runs the app is all minified so it's kind of hard to explore. The application is named "Grailbird" which I thought was kinda clever ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivory-billed_Woodpecker ).

On a personal note, it was pretty great (though often cringeworthy) to be able to roll back through 6 years of tweets. I found the very first tweet that the woman I'd end up marrying every replied to. The tweets that led to friendships and career changes.

It's a solid first step. Nice work, Twitter.

I lived in Seattle for 7.5 years, moved to San Francisco September 2011.

My only regret is not doing so sooner.

Seattle is a wonderful town (and it really is a big town more than a city) full of wonderful, if slightly insular, people. It's beautiful, there's great food, you can hike and kayak if that's your thing.

If you're a developer that doesn't work for Microsoft or Amazon, though, the geek community is definitely lacking. There are plenty of professional nerds but much fewer people working on exciting side projects.

I found it much harder to meet people, nerds or civilians. It's the sort of place where people settle in, where people have grown up, where people aren't necessarily looking for new friends. All of which is fine, I just found it a bit off-putting.

Seattle doesn't really do urban density (granted, SF has plenty of room to grow, literally, here). Some of that is intentional, mostly it's just aggravating. It doesn't seem to want to be a city. Portland, which is smaller, manages to do many of the "city" things (like public transportation and urban planning) much better.

And, man. Don't forget the weather. Those months without the sun age you.

I loved my time and life in Seattle. SF feels more like home, even if I have to wait another year for Sonic.net to roll out fiber.

Any particular reason why? South appears to be under much more active development.

Jim here, I work at Mule Design, host a show on Mule Radio and had the pleasure of working with the fine folks at Black Pixel on the app.

> I had never heard of Black Pixel before. Now I know that you (or at least one of your developers) is rather of the lazy kind.

You know what? It was a bug. Bugs happen. We actually discovered it a few days ago but, the app store being what it is, we couldn't get it swapped out in time. We have nothing but the highest confidence in Black Pixel and would jump at the opportunity to work with them again.

No one involved in this is being lazy and your insinuation is not only wrong and rude it's completely unnecessary.