seasoup

SVG performance degrades based on the amount of data that you are drawing. If you are rendering basic charts you will never run into any issues, if you are doing scatterplots with thousands of points or some other visualization with lots of separate nodes then you run into performance issues.

Canvas performance is limited by the size of the canvas, the larger the canvas, the more time it takes to redraw it.

SVG lets you tie into the DOM and DOM manipulation methods allowing for simple event interactions. Interactive canvas can be done but is more time consuming and difficult, though there are now canvas charting libraries that provide you with some basic "click" or even "hover" functionality.

Is there not room in the world for both paid and free software? Why must all software be free, and why must all devices accommodate free software?

The free software movement needs to make something as interesting and as compelling as what Apple built instead of just complaining about what Apple built. Make something beautiful and easy to use and people will use it.

On a personal level, I don't want free software for my phone. It's too much work for me. I want my phone to just work, I don't want it to have viruses, I don't have the time or inclination to hack around with it and I'm a developer, I don't care as a consumer if that means that "free" software is given the boot from a device to make this happen.

For my $:

Good design + No Viruses > Free Software

That's not true for everyone, and for them Apple isn't the right product.

Apple does well because it presents old technology in a way that is much easier for the masses to grok and use. I don't know why this offends geeks. I'm a geek and I love it when technology is presented in an easy to use way.

I hate TV remote controls, I know how to use them but I shouldn't have to have 5 of them and universal remotes out there are pretty much crap. I have one, but the Tivo remote is so much more intuitive for that interface that we've abandoned the universal all together. That's an example of an industry ripe for someone with the design and tech chops to come in and fix and then jrockway will be talking about how amused he is that fools are so excited by this old technology. :)

This thing paired with Siri would be awesome.

"Siri, what's the temperature at home?"

"Home is currently at 65 degrees."

"Siri, set home to 75 degrees."

"Temperature set to 75 degrees, it will take 15 minutes to reach this temperature."

Depends on what stack you want to develop in. For an MVP you could try:

Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3.1, HAML, SASS, jQuery, MySQL 5.5

It might not be the stack you end up with, but you'll learn enough building that to get started.

Start here with the free online book, it's as good of a place as any: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

He made many points, Javascript not having great tools and IDE's is only one of them.

It's a valid one though, the Javascript IDE's out there aren't very good. However, that's a function of community support, not language quality. Personally, I don't use an IDE for javascript or RoR programming, I just use Textmate.

I use Eclipse for Java programming, and I don't think I would want to program in Java without it. Maybe it says something about the languages themselves that they require an IDE to develop in.

>> There is no implicit type conversion between numeric, string or boolean types.

>Ok. This is a good thing. Auto conversion is bad.

One of the things I really dislike about developing in Ruby is that I can't do

value = 5 "The value is " + 5

I get bitten by this at least 10 times a day while developing, usually either when dumping to the log, or writing into html. I can fix the problem really quickly now, but every time I get an error:

"r" + 5 "TypeError: can't convert Fixnum into String"

I think, yes, yes you can easily convert a Fixnum into a String.

"r" + 5.to_s

It just means I have to sprinkle .to_s everywhere in my code. Ridiculous!

I read a bit more into Dart, its optional typing is very interesting. I might even like that if it were a change to Javascript itself.

Of course Javascript has problems, every language has problems associated with it. They all have strengths and they all have weaknesses.

From what I've seen, projects like GWT, Dart, and Coffeescript come out of communities of developers other then the web development community. GWT and comes from Java engineers as an attempt to not have to write javascript, Coffeescript comes from Ruby developers attempting to accomplish the same thing. Now Dart is another attempt by the Java community to not write Javascript.

The thing is, I never hear from the web development community that Javascript is broken, missing major features, and needs to be replaced. These are the people using Javascript every day. The people that say Javascript needs these features are people who don't use it that much.

The only problem I have with this sort of development effort is that it fails to recognize that Javascript is an awesome language unto itself and has no need of "fixing" by introducing a completely new language that is completely different.

Sure, it needs a few refinements here and there, but by and large Javascript is an incredible, flexible, and battle tested language. As a web developer with 11 years of experience, who has worked professionally with RoR, Java, PHP, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL, my feedback is just stop.

The world doesn't need another tool that obviates the need for engineers to learn Javascript to program on the web. Seriously, Javascript isn't that difficult. Just learn it, buckle down and spend a couple months writing Javascript and you'll be just fine.

If half the time spent writing Dart had been spent learning Javascript instead, then you would think in prototypes instead of classes, anonymous functions instead of one off objects, callbacks instead of um... not having callbacks, and dynamic variables instead of casting, casting, casting.

I'm not claiming Javascript is better then your language of choice, I'm just saying that as a language, it's awesome. It's not broke, and as a web developer I'm not looking for something to replace it.

People can argue with "boring", call it redundant instead and you'll get less harsh feedback.

There's already a language that runs on the server, runs in the browser and compiles to Javascript. It's Javascript!

What would be neat instead of filling out a bunch of questions and then getting results would be to list one question at a time and have it adjust your estimated totals as you complete questions. You could spin it positive by listing your savings, starting with $0 and as people fill in information, have it raise their savings based on the information they fill in. And don't require people to fill in all of their information, allow them to bail out at any time and go get the insurance. You could even have people enter their current rate and compare what you can get them against that, so they see themselves saving more and more. That would actually end up being kind of fun to fill out, and I would be enticed to enter more and more information to see if I saved more. If I do not save more, I would want an indication of why for that question I did not save more. You could contract with a game designer for this, since they have experience making things fun.

This seems to me to take up a similar space in javascript as velocity and freemarker do for Java. They attempt to make programming simpler for designers to work with and instead end up with a language that is too complicated for a designer and a completely new syntax for an engineer. Now, it takes more time for anyone to work with it.

For example, no need for var declarations. Well, wait a minute, how do I as an engineer scope a variable then? In javascript, scope is determined by functions when using a var and is global otherwise. Are all variables global? Or are they just in a namespace? Or are they all scoped as if they had var in front? Things like this will trip me up all the time and I will always have to refer to documentation.

For designers, mostly they don't want to work with functions and variables anyway, how big of a benefit is it that they don't need a var and there is only one way to declare a function? Learning this language seems like it would take the same amount of overhead as learning identical features in javascript. Why not just learn a subset of javascript instead?

You're probably worrying too much about scaling right now. Worry about supporting a few users with a minimum set of features first. Then go get those users. Then scale.

That said, node.js is awesome, and good for what you are looking for at least because it is very simple to set up and I hear it's quite scalable as well.

My problem with this announcement is they try and tell their customers what a good deal this is for them when it is obviously not good for them. It's a more expensive deal then what they currently have, if they had been upfront about it and said "our costs are going up due to content providers charging more for their content" or "in order to acquire more premium content for our streaming service we need to charge more" then I think people wouldn't have such an issue.

It's the worse deal + treating customers like they won't notice it that is the problem.

True, I was considering things like decreasing populations. Example, if you take all cities/countries on the planet with declining population and plot their current population, I would expect the reverse of Benford's law. Wish I had time to test this hypotheses :)

Seems to me that when you have a group of somethings that are constantly increasing in size it would be natural for the number 1 to come up in the first digit more often because in order to get to 2, you need to pass through 1 first and in order to get to 9 you need to pass 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 first. Therefore, you should get the distribution predicted by Benford's law. The way to test this theory, would be to run the numbers on values that are constantly decreasing. I'd expect the distribution would reverse itself.

If it proves itself true, then you could use it to test if a group of things is increasing or decreasing.

Do it. I took 7 months off after working for 5 years at megacorp and getting burned out. Take the time off to revitalize yourself. Don't do any coding or programming for a month at least. I went to China and studied martial arts for a month, then came back and spent time in the SF night life and Burning Man crowd.

Then I started working at a startup, which was much much better then working at megacorp. Much less politics, much more freedom to do what you want, and you have much more impact. Less soul sucking :)

Is this even enforceable? Once you've purchased something you can give it away with whatever offer you want. Can someone with a legal background comment on whether apple has any legs to stand on with this argument or if it's just blowing smoke?

api.jquery.com

This is the nicest documentation of any language I've ever used. The page loads, the cursor defaults to the search box, you type in what you are looking for and the browser hides searches that do not match and then you can use the arrow keys to go up and down then list to the one you want.

As for the problem trying to find "is" just type "is(" if you are looking for the method itself.

works for me.

The next company you get in, if you want to have as much say as everyone else you have to be in on the ground floor and get an even split of the equity, otherwise you will always just be an employee of the company. It sounds like this time around you have built up your abilities and confidence and the next time will be able to step up your game and have an even stake in the company.

This is probably closer to what you are looking for around object oriented programming. Javascript uses this.

Prototype-based Object Oriented programming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype-based_programming

To me the biggest benefit of ActiveRecord is the database introspection to dynamically create the objects attributes based on the columns in the database.

This doesn't do that in Java, it parses rails migrations to generate the java classes for objects with these attributes.

Why is this a problem?

We have a similar setup up where I work, but rails migrations doesn't manage the database schema, that is managed on the java side. Rails still gets all changes to the DB in its objects, but using this setup wouldn't work. I was all excited by the title too, still it's a good solution to their particular problem.

RoR or Python/Django would do. RoR is probably in more use then Python, but Python/Django is a solid technology. PHP is on its way out.

It's a start up the same way the 4-hour work week is a work week and the 4-hour body is a workout book :) In other words, brilliant satire!

I don't care so much about the all in one page, but having to roll over the image to see the text was too difficult. Took me a minute just to figure it out. Have the text below the image without having to roll over it. I also had trouble figuring out at the opening shot where to click. Took me forever to find the next button, I found it just in time. I almost left!

Check out the design books: The Design of Every Day things Designing the Obvious Information Dashboard Design

for a primer on UI design.

Wow, I'm surprised by all the developers on Microsofts side on this one. Google spends a lot of money developing proprietary algorithms for determining search results. Microsoft is then stepping in and taking advantage of the money Google spent by copying some of their results. It's rather like someone taking the results of a Consumer Reports list and publishing it themselves. It borders on illegal, and it's definitely shady.

But what I think is more important is all of the flak that Google has been catching for supposedly slipping in its quality of search results. If it's quality is so poor, then why is Bing stealing its results? It's a great method of striking back at the negative PR they've been receiving.

Anyone who writes a js library gets props in my book, even if I'll never use it :) It's a great way to learn about javascript.