nertzy

I think you're reading it a bit too extremely.

His point is that you always try to reproduce the bug before you assume you understand it.

His comments don't say anything about what to do if you're unable to reproduce. He's just suggesting in which order he thinks you should take certain actions.

It's altogether too easy to jump straight to a patch, submit it, and miss the forest for the trees because you never actually went through the use flow and realized you were patching a symptom, not the underlying problem.

LinkedIn lets you decide whether or not to have a public-facing profile. That profile is fully indexable by search engines. You can choose to turn it off.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

There is a reason that the common login process has evolved into what it is today.

While I wouldn't want to discourage trying new things, it's definitely worth it to read the other comments on this page and then decide if the convenience you'd be providing on login is more important than the prevented headaches when a user hits an edge case that is no longer covered.

My point is not to tell you "no, don't do it" because your particular site might be different enough from the usual site that this approach could work. Although I guess that is probably unlikely.

Geoffrey Grosenbach has a Ruby library for generating Sparklines: http://nubyonrails.com/articles/2005/07/28/sparklines-graph-...

And, as usual, Why the Lucky Stiff has a wacky minimalist one: http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/sparklinesForMinimalists....

Find a much more detailed article here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_...

Table layouts work well when it comes to visual display of web content. They don't work in the context of screen readers, helping to make content easily scrapeable, search engine indexing, and the rest of the ways the web are used which aren't purely visual.

How about installing a plugin to compensate for the lack of a feature on several disconnected websites all around the world? You can't really convince every single page out there to auto-link, but I'm sure you will come across a plaintext URL now and again.

I like how Safari handles it. Select the text, right-click, and select "Go to Address". I believe this works on any text in any Cocoa app as well. EDIT: I now see that Safari's behavior was mentioned in another thread before I posted.

I really like this idea for links in general.

My only hesitation is that someone might see it as a reason to create false accounts to game upvoting. Maybe a certain threshold of upvotes by users with high karma is what it takes to remove nofollow from an auto-link?

Allen Downey (the author of Think Python) was one of my CS professors at Olin College, and he always had a great and simple way to get his ideas across. Also check out his book on Synchronization for a fun look at the world of mutexes, etc.

There's a great story in how he ended up writing the Python book. He had already written "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist" but completely in Java. At some point someone interested in Python decided to rewrite his book (which is released under the GNU Free Documentation License) and use Python instead. Downey actually re-read this version of the book in order to learn Python, and now teaches a popular Python course.

Can you imagine reading your own words to learn something you don't already know? That's pretty amazing stuff!

I'm sorry, I don't follow... was this comment meant for a different article?

I have followed this technique to the letter several times when I need to get away from the computer and flesh things out more succinctly. It really does work wonders, because it keeps you moving along instead of getting hung up on some minor detail.

Ah, surely the Queen has finally discovered Game Genie and was finally able to beat Zelda for the NES, so she found it fitting to return the favor by honoring them.

Setting a CSS width and overflow-x:scroll on code blocks would fix the problem quickly.

Doesn't Internet Explorer have an option for this? I remember back in the dark ages when I used Windows that I would enable the multi-process feature.

This is a Mac-only plugin, so I think evince doesn't really apply.

Most Mac users would probably rather use the built-in PDF libraries, which form the basis of Mac OS X's graphics system. They are well implemented, fast, and work great without the mess of plugin chrome you get from Adobe Reader. And the output looks great.

It's all about preventing people from needing to context-switch into application-switching and file management just to view a document.

A lot of people would consider social engineering part of hacking.

Either way, a hacker doesn't feel the artificial limitation of rules. He had a mission to complete, and he had the passwords to help him complete it, so he took the simple path. Sounds like a hacker to me.

That said, the punishment does not fit the crime.

The problem is that companies with proprietary power adapters can charge a premium for them, probably earning a significant margin. It's not currently in a manufacturer's economic interest to support a standard adapter when that means their overall margin will be reduced.

Here's an idea: If Google determines that a particular ISP is throttling access to one of Google's properties, Google could post a message on the Google homepage aimed only at users from that ISP alerting them and giving them a phone number to call to contact their ISP to complain.

That may be true in the eyes of enlightened consumers, but there are a lot of people who cannot easily discern these different types of wine, and to them wine is a commodity.

Consider a commodity like steel. To most people, steel is steel. You can use steel from any supplier in any project that requires it. But to some people, particularly engineers and material scientists in very specific applications, the different makes of steel become more important.

So one person's commodity may be another person's brand. I think the point of the article is to encourage producers to work to shift the trend towards brand, to their advantage.

Reminds me of joelonsoftware's recent Architecture Astronauts post.

A relevant quote:

"The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don't solve an actual problem... they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try. Since 1988 many prominent architecture astronauts have been convinced that the biggest problem to solve is synchronization."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html

"This project is currently on suspension while I work on Shoes. Expect a new release, based on Shoes, some time before 2008's end."

from http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hacketyhack/

Given the amount of work he's put into shoes, I think he will easily be able to make this date.

I'm pretty excited, actually. There are a lot of rough edges on the operating system that affect me, one of which is the support for FireWire audio interfaces using the standard built-in Core Audio driver.

It's not a new feature, it's an existing feature, but for me the experience is painful. It's not sexy but it's smart and it's not like they were going to release a new feature-filled OS by next year anyway. Better to have a solid base on which to innovate even further later down the road.

I have a friend at UCI who got bitten by this.

The problem is that the financial burden of identity theft too often seems to hit the affected rather than the companies responsible. If UnitedHealthcare had to pick up the full tab for resolving the problem, then they might see the value in investing in a better system down the road.

The problem is that attention is a zero-sum game. If a person doesn't have the time to tag or manipulate his or her photos while producing more and more, what's to say that other people won't all have the same problem?

Are we to believe that for each person who generates 10X as much content there will be that many other "consumer" types that will pick up the slack?

The distinction is that anyone (and lots of people) have blogs. So having a blog is itself unremarkable.

So regardless of how their accomplishment is being presented, they did actually do something of great merit.

I guess the headline is unfortunate because rather than celebrating the technical advancement of hobbyists who share their ideas with the general public, we're having semantic arguments over whether this accomplishment fits a particular connotation of the word "replicate".

The license of the tools you use does not affect the license of the products you produce, so this is irrelevant.

I can use Photoshop to make a graphic, and then release that graphic as part of a BSD-licensed package without any trouble, since I own the copyright on that graphic.

Well... point release might be the wrong term. I usually think of that being the third number. I guess I meant "minor version release".

Hence, not a major overhaul. Perhaps a minor one. I usually take the first number to involve some large-scale shift in the architecture of the thing, the second number to be minor API changes, and the third to be bugfixes and security updates.

I think there are some lessons to be learned here for general users as well.

Just because the majority of people aren't on the autism spectrum doesn't mean that they should have to be subjected to distractions and confusing interfaces.

Sure, an interface for a six year old would be overly simplistic for the average user, but most of the tools out there fail remarkably in the other direction.

Wait a minute... if they hadn't deployed, it's not like they would have gotten those lost sales.

The only actual damage done was that the few bids that failed left their customers with a bad taste in their mouths. If they hadn't deployed when they did, they still would not have seen the money.

I'd take that even further and say that instead of nothing, there's too much you can do with Photoshop that you can't with paper prototypes and HTML mockups.

The ability to do drop shadows on text and use all sorts of fonts and apply a motion blur and lens flare and opacity and all that doesn't translate well to the Web.

It's very frustrating as a Web developer to have someone send an over-Photoshopped mockup that won't work well as a functioning website.