“The best feelings are those that have no words to describe them” – Michelle Hammersley
Kate
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Author Archives: Dave Grijalva
The New York Times Thinks You’re an Idiot
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
Git 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
Zamboni 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
It was hot today, but it’s perfect now.
The Heat is Back
Why is there an iguana in the playground? Because it’s a nice day, of
course.
No-Tech Hacking
This video is from DefCon a few years ago. A friend showed it to me a few years ago. It’s really clever/awesome.
The Little Things
One thing I really enjoy about the Mac development community is that there are tons of really tiny apps designed to do just one thing really well. Instead of creating some monolithic do-everything-imaginable app, try breaking it out into a few smaller apps. The Unix shell is so powerful because developers have taken this approach for a long time. You can reduce complexity drastically while allowing the user to be even more flexible with their workflow.
I just discovered I Love Stars from Potion Factory, which is a simple app for making it easy to rate your music in your iTunes library. The best way I’ve found to rate my music is to do so while it’s playing. I Love Stars makes it easy to do so without needing to remember to pull up iTunes every three and a half minutes.
_why no more?
Why the Lucky Stiff, pseudonymous artist/programmer has deleted his entire body of work from the internet, including his blogs, github, and twitter accounts. Many rubyists, including myself, were inspired by his work. His style and talent were unique, not just in the Ruby community, but in the whole world of software development.
John Resig wrote about the disappearance:
_why – even in his code – was eccentric, humorous, cute, and whimsical. He relished his ability to express his art and was extremely good at it, at the same time.
Underlying the layer of whimsy that permeated his work there was a more serious tone: expression, simplicity, and education. In all of his code, and writing, he was constantly trying to find ways to bring the art of hacking to more people – to younger people – to simplify the complexities that normally permeate development.
Restaurant Websites
The most consistently bad category of websites has to be restaurant websites. Too many of them haven’t realized that the rest of the internet moved on from Flash based splash pages in 1997. They’re far to stylized and difficult to navigate. Most damning of all is that many of them don’t work well or at all on mobile devices.
Restauranteurs might have better things to do than become web experts, but someone should stop to consider their audience. I’m not going to visit a new cafe because they have music and a slideshow on their site. More importantly, if I can’t get quickly to the menu and operating hours from my iPhone, I’m going to move on.