sammyo

Yep, someone here added a type check to Ruby, there are some functions through the codebase that check each argument but I've not seen any real life benefit.

I liked Joshua Bloch's point that during development there should be at least two-three different apps that excercise the api preferably developed by different developers.

In all recent browsers. For silly corporate reasons one box I work on is stuck at firefox 1.5 and this displays nothing.

Sorry to be old and reactionary : ) but the young folk that make theses arguments, or are even aware of these arguments are something of outliers. Have this young lady go back to her highschool and find 100 folks that are capable of running a company. 50? 5? Maybe one or two, or maybe a couple in that entire metropolitan area are ready for significant investment.

Nothing wrong with outliers, my grandfather started a groundbreaking business before he was 21 and worked for his own investment funds from his early teens. An he was an outlier. An amazing guy, built his first warehouse with castoff boards, he certainly was not getting a bank loan.

Miss Debenham's issues will be moot and she will be fine will do fine far far in the future, 2012 or so.

Adding another "sure, try to make it".

I hang with old ship guys and all of the 'underwater archology' ideas seem to be presented by folks with little real life experience with oceans. Sea water is incredibly powerful and corrosive. Just watch the shoreline, if not maintained someplaces you'll see a huge bolder up out of place and you think "it took a huge crane to put that there" but no, just a storm.

What? You can ride on I5? Even if it were allowed it seems really scary.

On this point: "it's too complicated, there's no order"

An important element of useablility that is often ignored and misunderstood is familarity. In many ways it just does not matter that MSWindows or Facebook is clunky, or violates important useability or is just wrong or broken. When the environment hits a critial mass of familarity the only way to co-exist with an entrenched community is compatibility. As galling as it is to use a windows file picker look & feel, it's what folks are familar. Changing the visual paradigms does happen (review the history of the web) but fairly quicky a new normalicy (see web pulldown bars) gets established. Show some examples and/or look for a design partner.

Went for a sail. Lots of dynamic problem solving in a very different domain. And fresh air.

Is 'commit count' the new 'lines of code' metric?

A bit similar to Medical experience, a deep familiarity with computer systems that many fine opaque may come across quite arrogant. Picture someone struggling with a setting and you fly by, "hot key to x menu, third tab, look for option Q, set it to baz", just seems obvious (although it took an hour of goolge-time to discover) but as you rush off the dazed user is still struggling.

"To iterate is human, recurse devine" -Anon

second (foo, I'm just not fast enough to post much around here ;-)

Looks good, but what happened to a small reference that fits on a single fan-folded card? Many 'cheatsheets' as good as they are, were they to be printed would be longer than the classic K&R C Language Reference.

You should consider linking to an outline/synopsis with a link to the pdf. This would make it more accessible to those(we) of short attention spans as well as the very busy.

Lol, I work on a Ruby app that is entirely internal and processes an incredible volume of information. The key here was the ease of adding a few key C modules.

Yikes, used for $500! Looks like a publishing model that is seriously being missed. I know a screenwriting book that sells for a couple hundred if it can be found. A lot of work to get the copyrights for a short publishing run but sure looks like it could be lucritive.

Depends somewhat where you fly. From one major city to another major hub airport no question. But across a couple states that are not major routes say a small town in Montana to Wyoming, it could be a significant differential.

If there happens to be excess inventory, the last minute bids can be quite good. That is a gamble, how big a gamble depends on knowledge of the high/low periods and any extra large conferences.

It's an art project but there are upside-down trees at MASS MoCA

http://www.massmoca.org/event_details.php?id=29

I think remember that the full time heads up guy (Steve Mann? MIT?) needed anti-nausea drugs to handle the constant visual disturbance of the display. Perhaps there are resolution improvements to the goggles. Learning to use a chording keyboard always seemed like it might make sense, just touch type and edit later. What about voice input?

Lemma: More coffee.

Derived from the theorem that a mathematician is a machine that transforms coffee into theorems.

Ok other thoughts. Go listen to some hard stuff. I loved a talk by Ron Graham about problems that would never be solved by computation. I remember feeling like I followed but all that remains is awe and images of infinite arrows.

Knowing I'll never be a mathematician but intrigued by topology, I thought about trying to write “Idiots guide to Algebraic Topology” as a way to push beyond mobius strips and klein bottles. I've made it through an intro and some insights seem sort of trivial, more along the lines of how to write down precisely an action like a twist. We know intuitively what a twist is, what a bounce is, getting it exact is hard work. But it relates to a lot of stuff we grasp as denizens of a 3D world.

Draw lots of pictures, get really good a graphing. Graham seemed to dash off quick graphs that gave quick insight, I expect he has incredible amounts of practice.

Reading some history of math has helped me.

I also think talking/arguing/chatting/ranting with peers that are very interested in topics in the general range will go along way.

During an aerobatic glider ride for the initiation of the first maneuver all I saw was the horizon rise then slowly drop below the edge of the cockpit. A few moments later the pilot behind me said to look straight up. Directly above me were cars on the highway. I had no sense of being upside down. Very cool. Later maneuvers were more visceral.

Standard mass production should bring the cost way down. As for theft, just make sure they are free for anyone that wants to have one, the biggest cost for a big program will be the planting labor. But it will not solve global warming in the period of any politician so it's unlikely to be funded at the level really needed.

If just the folks reading this forum were to write a snailmail letter to their congressman it would likely have a significant effect. The value of a non-form/non-crazy-rant letter is something like ntimes greater than an email, n being somewhere over 50.

There are huge areas away from the main coastal population centers, this is a really big continent. But you might have to live without easy connection to the grid, drill your own well, handle you own electricity generation, deal with some long distance wifi connectivity. But there are folks with their nearest neighbor several km away.

Quite cool but there isn't there just one rather obvious google service that is missing. Nudge nudge, wink wink? Wouldn't it be handy to run an internet wide grep with all the various search arguments and a nice filterable output?

Another Reimplementation Conundrum?

Change position. Reading this I noticed I was sitting in the 'good' position, but through the day I also lean a bit forward, all the way, to the side. I'd love an automatic desk that let me stand part of the time.

If you do like to sit straight, look for an older traditional 'secretary' chair with the pad that pushes the mid-back forward to keep the natural curve. Backs are NOT straight, there is a slight but vital curve that many chairs ruin.

I think you can buy this one now: www.jetlev-flyer.com

It's connected to a water source which limits about a 10M altitude, and the market seems to be focused towards a adventure tourist market.