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wreelon The Future of Markdown

I found that I've moved on to reStructuredText. It doesn't seem to be marketed as much as Markdown (the only reason I know about it is because of Sphinx) but I feel that it's a bit more capable. Simple tables are exceptionally easy and it handles URLs with parens in it just fine (a common pain when trying to link to Wikipedia articles with Markdown).

wreelon Is Android Only Surging Because Apple Is Letting It?

Every time I see iPhone/Android articles like these I think of this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/science/06tier.html?_r=1&#...

wreelon Simplicity Is Highly Overrated

I think you're side stepping the point of the article which wasn't that he was arguing for complexity in design but that the general public has a tendency to "worship false images" as Don would put it. That is the impulse when comparing two products side by side in a department store setting is to go with the one with more knobbies and twiddlies. Sure there may be one with simpler interface but the purchaser may equate that to "less capable".

It's all related to marketing.

A way that sellers of products that do have simpler interfaces get around this is either with lots of literature or very thorough product demos. People here may want to use the Apple brand as counter examples but that's wrong. Instead of complexity in the design of the product the complexity is in use. Demonstrated with lavish expos and advertisements. They're still selling you on capability.

But not every product manufacturer has accessibility to that kind of marketing prowess. The best you can hope for your widget in the department store is built into your product. And that means the product has to sell itself. In that case, as a designer for that widget, it would be good to know that simplicity is overrated.

- By the way. You should really pick up "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don.

wreelon Space Shuttle computer has 1MB of RAM

> But "bugs" in a 2,717 ft tower are unacceptable.

People have a tendency to overlook "bugs" in architecture because of the immutability of the medium. But once you start noticing that the HVAC is uneven on your floor, the hot water takes five minutes for ramp up in your office's break room and the conduit runs for networking are bizarre you start to understand that architects and builders run into design and implementation problems as well.

In fact they have their own word for patching. Renovations.

wreelon Right-Wing Flame War

That's a gross mischaracterization. Charles Johnson wasn't really a Liberman style anti-jihadist democrat. He really was part of the strong defense/small gonvernment style conservative base. His problem has been (for a very long time) the hateful religious right who he feels has too much influence with the GOP leaders.

Just because he's pro-science doesn't mean he's liberal per se.

wreelon [dead]

http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2009/10/14/3

> Tom Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that the conclusions of the IPCC reports are based on several data sets in addition to the CRU, including data from NOAA, NASA and the United Kingdom Met Office. Each of those data sets basically show identical multi-decadal trends, Karl said.

wreelon Coding Horror: All Programming is Web Programming

I think that both remarkably miss the point that the true measure of software is actualized value to the end user.

Who cares about platform or depth of technical knowledge? If some PHP hobbyist who knows nothing about mmap(3) delivers a site that works for people then he is a successful programmer.

But assertions like "You hope everything doesn't "move to the web"? Wake the hell up! It's already happened!" irk me.

That is disingenuous at best. Even the most ardent believer of "everything on the web" will fire up Photoshop for even the simplest of graphic requirements. There will always be a requirement for people to know the ins and outs of desktop programming.

wreelon Prototyping with the canvas element

Read step #2. The author is pitching the use of canvas as a rapid prototyping tool for common graphics requirements that come up in web design. There are a lot of interesting things you could do without having to do a lot of manual manipulation that would be required in a tool like Photoshop.

wreelon Processing + Javascript = Flash Killer

MTASC or haXe from Motion Twin are also good alternate .swf development compilers that you can integrate with your favorite development environment. I've played around with haXe with MinGW build tools on Win32 and was pleased with the results.