January 2009
13 posts
“So basically, multiple dispatch is like democracy. It’s the worst way to...”
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From Larry Wall’s eleventh State Of The Onion: Programming is Hard, Let’s Go Scripting... The original perlmonger also included: “the continued evolution of the shell shows just how crufty a language can get when you just keep adding on ad hoc syntactic features”. I...
Something else to Disqus
I thought I would share a few thoughts on the third-party commenting system I embedded a few days ago. Some other nice features of Disqus aside from the ease of integration:
Simple export to XML of all content reassures me I can migrate when I want to.
There’s a top-level RSS feed, so I can see all replies in my feed reader.
I should be able to pull comments I make on some other sites...
First "two-click" sign-up using OpenID + OpenAuth
Very happy to read today that Google and Plaxo have launched the first realization in the wild of the way I reckon the world ought to work when it comes to social network interaction - the OpenID+OpenAuth hybrid approach. Plaxo member Alice can now send an invite to bob@gmail.com that links Bob to a Plaxo landing page where he can read about their service and if suitably impressed, click to sign...
http://mob.net/~ted/tools →
I haven’t quite finished moving my web hosting yet, but two of my three apps/domains are running happily on the new box. When wanting to test DNS propagation, I found the first of these little tools very useful.
Commentary: Sometimes the web works. Disqus!
Because tumblelogs are often about very short posts, pointers to elsewhere, etc. they often don’t come with a comments system.
But I often write longer pieces on this tumblelog. I use the venue as an excuse/catalyst to write stuff more carelessly than I would on my regular and much less frequently updated blog. So I want to have comments here.
I was pointing those who cared enough to...
You've mistaken my me, Ning
Ning is a platform on which to build social networks. (The idea as I understand it is to make smaller niche communities more viable by granting them economies of scale and network effects through sharing a common infrastructure and userbase.) A couple of weeks ago I started getting unsolicited mail from a particular one of their networks. It was sent to an address that I own, but don’t...
Close of business: Nonroyal Institute Christmas...
With respect to stuff I didn’t quite finish over Christmas… Following enthusiastic real-life and blog recommendation from Andy, I decided to watch MIT’s 1986 introductory lecture course, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs over Christmas and New Year. (I had fuzzily matched them as my replacement for the annual Royal Institute Christmas Lectures.) It’s a...
http://blog.asmartbear.com/blog/your-idea-sucks-now... →
I’d heard about the accidental births of PayPal and Flickr, and the sentiment implied, before. But this is the well-written post I’d now point people at to make the point that success is usually stumbled upon, so it’s a reasonable start-up strategy to walk towards some patch in a new field and just keep your eyes open.
Close of business: Casting around
With respect to stuff I didn’t quite finish over Christmas… The main reason I ever go to IMDb is when I’m watching TV and wondering “where did I see that face before?”
Actually the site is quite good at answering that specific question once you know to ask it. But it isn’t any good at discovering new interesting cast connections between shows for you. And I...
Domain Transfers. Easily? Hardly.
This is mostly a cut-edit-and-paste of text I had already written for other purposes, and it ends up here for diary / therapy-rant reasons, because it is cheap to do so. The detail is doubtless tedious - if you want the Cliff Notes version: even in 2009, transferring your domain between registrars can still be a royal pain - and I recently had a pretty bad experience with Easily.co.uk and so would...
Unfinished business
I just finished three weeks of holiday for Christmas/New Year. This allowed one week of “doing Christmas”, one week of being relatively useless, and one week of getting things done. It was good, I feel fully refreshed.
However I started more threads than I could service, and so have several quite ambitious projects not quite finished. Mostly for personal diary purposes, I list them:
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http://scotlandonrails.com/schedule →
The line-up for this year’s Scotland On Rails is even more full of luminaries than last year. As well as many Ruby/Merb/Rails stars, I’ll be particularly interested to hear from Michael Feathers. Well done SoR team. (I wish you’d made up with Giles Bowkett, though.)
Host anthonybailey.net does not exist
I’m halfway through changing registrar for my domain, anthonybailey.net.
In the process, losing registrar Easily.co.uk have, basically, messed up. Despite my sending mail double-checking that they would not do this, they’ve stopped serving nameserver and MX records for the domain but haven’t answered the gaining registrar’s transfer request - and I can’t start said...