Team Coco
January 15th, 2010Dear Santa
December 15th, 2009
This year, I have everything I want.
Fireflies
November 23rd, 2009My friend made a cover of Fireflies by Owl City. It’s mostly a cappella and fully awesome.
Forward Compatibility with Ruby 1.9
November 19th, 2009Rails 3.0 is going to fully support Ruby 1.9. It’s a good thing, too, since 1.9 is much faster and has some important improvements. What that means is that, eventually, if not now, you’ll want to at least make sure your code runs in 1.9. A while back, I went through the differences between 1.8 and 1.9 with an eye for forward compatibility issues. I’ve picked out what I think the major gotchas are. Avoid these in your code and it should make moving to 1.9 a lot easier.
Kate
October 25th, 2009
“The best feelings are those that have no words to describe them” – Michelle Hammersley
The New York Times Thinks You’re an Idiot
October 14th, 2009
The only reason I could imagine for justifying this “clever” bit of JavaScript is that the New York Times thinks its readers are idiots. Selecting any word brings up this little question mark bubble. Clicking on that will take you to the definition of the selected term. To me, this means that they think I’m unlikely to know the definitions of the words in their columns and am incapable of looking them up myself. As a Mac user, I know that I can use ⌘⌃D to bring up the system’s dictionary widget without taking me away from my reading. I don’t know if other operating systems provide similar functionality but Google will surely define words for you no matter what platform you use.
It also suggests that I’m going to use this feature so often that it’s worth breaking the text selection features of my operating system and browser. When reading content on noisy web pages like NYT’s, I tend to select the content as I’m reading through it. On every other website, triple-clicking on a word will select the surrounding paragraph. On NYT, it will either a) quickly select everything, then deselect it or b) accidentally trigger the stupid dictionary lookup feature and transport me somewhere else. Neither of these things aids my ability to read the article.
SHA-1 Collision Probability
September 25th, 2009Git uses SHA-1 hashes of the contents of commits as their ids. I’ve wondered before what the probability is of a collision. According to Pro Git: (emphasis mine)
If all 6.5 billion humans on Earth were programming, and every second, each one was producing code that was the equivalent of the entire Linux kernel history (1 million Git objects) and pushing it into one enormous Git repository, it would take 5 years until that repository contained enough objects to have a 50% probability of a single SHA-1 object collision. A higher probability exists that every member of your programming team will be attacked and killed by wolves in unrelated incidents on the same night.
Good enough for me. The book also discusses what will happen in the event of a collision, but it’s less interesting.
Metonymy
September 8th, 2009Zamboni is a company that makes electronic ice resurfacers. Calling the machine a zamboni is incorrect. Using a company’s name in place of the name of the product is a very common type of metonymy that may seem like a corporation’s dream, but it can actually cause them problems. In 1965, the Duncan Yo-Yo Company lost it’s trademark on the term “yo-yo” because it had become the common term to describe that sort of toy. This fear of becoming a genericized trademark is why you see companies refer to their products with such silly names as “BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages.”
Here are a few examples of these. The wikipedia entry lists a few more. Can you think of any others?
Evening in SF
September 2nd, 2009
It was hot today, but it’s perfect now.
The Heat is Back
September 2nd, 2009Why is there an iguana in the playground? Because it’s a nice day, of
course.