Disqus - Latest Comments for Shog9

Re: FeedHenry needs you

Shog9 — Thu, 18 May 2006 11:21:18 -0000

You need a perm? Hate to be harsh, but that hair is crazy enough already...

(EM)OT: Nice to see you blogging again. :)

Re: JavaScript function queue

Shog9 — Fri, 19 May 2006 17:00:00 -0000

Eh, why not...

function fQueue()
{
var pos = 0;
var queue = arguments;
return function()
{
if ( pos < queue.length )
queue[pos++]();
}
}

function DoThingOne(whenDone)
{
document.getElementById("Output").innerHTML += "Thing One!<br>";
whenDone();
}

function DoThingTwo(whenDone)
{
document.getElementById("Output").innerHTML += "Thing Two!<br>";
whenDone();
}

function DoThingThree(whenDone)
{
document.getElementById("Output").innerHTML += "Thing Three!<br>";
whenDone();
}

function DoThings()
{
var q = fQueue(
function(){DoThingOne(q);},
function(){DoThingTwo(q);},
function(){DoThingThree(q);});
q();
}

...no idea if that's close to what you're looking for, but if it is and you get rich, send me a pizza.
A *solid gold* pizza.
With pepperoni and mushrooms.
*Morel* mushrooms.

-josh

Re: Functional objects

Shog9 — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 02:05:08 -0000

Yeah. 'Twas this that got me excited about JS, Good stuff...

Re: Life 101 #001

Shog9 — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 13:12:54 -0000

Why?
Brown sugar taints the taste of the coffee, while honey's subtle flavor goes better with tea. I mean, maybe if you're drinking instant, but then you might as well go straight to flavored syrup, rid yourself of any original flavor scorched earth style.

Re: Life 101 #001

Shog9 — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 12:59:49 -0000

You *are* drinking instant, aren't you. Ewwww!

Re: Funny florists

Shog9 — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 19:29:38 -0000

What caught my eye was this: "they are fantastic value at R150 and R160 respectively"
I read that, and i thought, "a *fantastic* price, eh? I wanna get me some of them pro-teas..."

Then i stopped, and thought, "wait - how much is R150? And what would a not-so-fantastic price for pro-teas be? How 'bout an average-run-of-the-mill price? What about a not-good-at-all price? And what would the delta be between that fantastic price of R150 and a terrible, horrible, no-good price? Ten R? Ten *thousand* R? And if i'd thought "ten R" as "ten Rs", how much would i be off once both were converted to dollars?!"

Finally, i thought, "i don't even know this company - why am i spending so much time estimating currency conversions when for all i know they're practically *famous* for using the word "fantastic" to describe things that aren't..."

Then i decided to reply, because frankly, all of this was more interesting to me than the joke that followed. Especially the realization that, if you'd thought to put a "Buy Now!" link in your post, i'd have an express shipment of pro-tea on its way to me right now, based only on the "fantastic" rating it received from a company that may well know nothing at all about tea. It's just scary how gullible i am, really...

BTW: do these comment boxes accept HTML? If so, which tags? If not, why not?

Re: To digg

Shog9 — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 09:41:46 -0000

It would be grand if “to digg” broke free of the site and became a verb anyone could use.

Yeah, assuming that by "grand" you mean "annoying". I bookmark sites, i rank them mentally by how often i see them cited elsewhere, adjusting these mental ranks based on my personal opinion towards those i see lauding them.
I've never "dugg" a website, i never hope "to digg" one. You may think it's "cool" and "rad", but to me it just don't sound fun.

Re: To digg

Shog9 — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 10:15:41 -0000

Think bigger, think of a site you like and the action it does and think how it would grand if that action had a label that broke free of that one site.

Hmm...

I like posting pointless comments on Paul Watson's blog; "watsoning", if you will. I can't really say my life would really improve if i could "watson" other people's blogs though.

Oh, wait, i can and do. I just call it "commenting". How grand is that!

Re: To digg

Shog9 — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 10:48:28 -0000

My point (if i have one) is that words like "comment" (substitute "debate", "refute", etc. as needed) already exist and are well understood. "Email" is derived from "mail" (by way of "electronic mail"), which has a long tradition in various postal systems, being originally derived from the word for the bags used to carry correspondence.

As i see it, a word like "digg" comes into being for two reasons: 1) the company wants a trademark, and 2) they don't have a good way of equating their function with something familiar. Not that they weren't trying - "to dig" is classic jive slang for understanding and enjoyment. But jive slang itself is hardly common - even the canonical jive meaning of the word "jive" is rarely used (that is, if something like jive could be said to have canon). Essentially, they created a word to describe something they weren't smart enough to describe using the existing vernacular of their intended users. (that, or maybe jive is really common among diggers. i'm still not entirely clear exactly who digg is targeted at).

So if it bugs you, fix it. Come up with a word that describes what you're doing, and make it popular. Add it to your site, tout it to your colleagues, make some noise.

Here's my suggestion: add some of those stupid links to your website. You know, the ones that usually say something like "digg this". Make 'em say "Recommend this on Digg". Fight the power, Paul - fight the power...

Re: Functions as arguements

Shog9 — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 10:21:59 -0000

What's even better is that you can return functions. Combined with closures, this results (for me) in a huge reduction in the need for big class hierarchies of simple classes, and drastically reduced the sort of cruft and namespace pollution that made me hate C++ so many years ago (a hatred that only diminished when i learned about templates).

Re: Return *

Shog9 — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 12:14:22 -0000

If you're talking to idiots, use small words. If you're writing for idiots, use simple constructs.
And that's enough about that.

Re: Key/value tags

Shog9 — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 12:16:36 -0000

So, how long before this "tagging" fad collapses under its own weight?

Re: V for Vendetta

Shog9 — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 13:48:41 -0000

(you're getting sloppy, Paul - that's some terrible image scaling)

I really thought they should have given the reason for the authoritarian Gov't more attention. V points to the public as the cause of the problem, asking them to wake up and do something about it. Evey flashbacks to scenes of her parents trying to do something about the way society is heading. The missing actor - the complacent / reactionary public at large - is alluded to but not shown. This irritated me - it sticks out, as the rest of the movie is not given to such subtleties. Contrast it with the (very detailed, very sappy) reading of the note in Evey's cell.

That said, i did enjoy the movie. :)

Re: MacBook Pro Diaries #003: Hash

Shog9 — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 17:15:20 -0000

So... you ordinarily use some weird keyboard layout that *doesn't* use Shift+3 for '#'?
Or it just isn't marked as such on the Mac...?

Re: MacBook Pro Diaries #006: Restarting conflicts

Shog9 — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 20:12:52 -0000

Know what really grinds my gears? Apps, and even system components, that want you to reboot after installation, but only need to update shell components and could just as well have made you logout all users and then update their precious add-ins.

For all the snobbery in Win32 land towards *nix and its "runlevel" system, it does make this sort of thing easy and fairly predictable.

Re: One a Day

Shog9 — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 20:05:47 -0000

"Mommy! I can see up that man's nose!"

"Just look away, Johnny."

Re: URL design and time travel

Shog9 — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:24:06 -0000

Honestly, i'm not terribly worried about *extra-specific* URLs. If it's important that they keep working, and it's important that you change your naming scheme, set up some sort of mapping. Heck, set up some sort of mapping anyway and let multiple sane URLs refer to the same resource. Yeah, i know, that also has problems... Life is grief, eh?

As for being discoverable... sorry, but i think you're gonna have to fall back on some sort of search in order for it to be useful. Whether that search is based on explicit tagging, keyword extraction, an actual full-text index, or just some sort of crazy fuzzy URL matching scheme... correct me if i'm wrong, but are most web surfers really bored enough to sit and manually increment indexes|dates / fudge keywords / guess at tags?

Re: Lightboxes

Shog9 — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 20:50:18 -0000

All true.
That said, the basic technique does work well as a replacement for pop-ups / transient "dialogs" on a page that can still benefit from the context of the page without necessarily benefiting from interaction with it.

Re: Feeding yourself

Shog9 — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 18:36:58 -0000

Couldn't it also mean that there are just a whole lot of fairly unpopular blogs out there...?

Re: Google Analytics on AIR

Shog9 — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:50:22 -0000

You forgot the single best part of using the app: "i just checked ars and there are a lot of visitors today..."

Re: ROW

Shog9 — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:56:24 -0000

I hear that the Russians' online music shops aren't so unfriendly... ;P

Re: Star Wars, The Order

Shog9 — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 19:32:18 -0000

If i were gonna recommend an order to someone i wanted to hate the movies, i'd recommend your order.

If i wanted someone to enjoy them, i'd recommend IV, V. If they hate those two, at least they haven't wasted their time on Jar Jar...

Re: Why not be truly open

Shog9 — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 13:37:12 -0000

"I don’t even want my social network to be part of a social network. My network is mine, it belongs where I am, not inside some other application."

Well, that's the key point, isn't it...
I mean, i'm probably the last person on the planet who should be commenting on social networks - i'm social the way the girl behind the counter at the DMV is social. And yet, i belong to at least three "social networking sites" simply because i have family on them and the way they're set up i can't view photos or comment or read birth announcements unless i sign up and sign in. Most of these, i can't use feed readers or any other common tools to aggregate updates, i can't properly bookmark pages...

...but for the people using them, these networks have a lot of advantages. Easy page creation, updates, uploads, simple access control mechanisms, little need to worry about things like comment spam or unwanted images sneaking into your site... Most of the routine annoyances that you might consider just the cost of being on the web are taken care of automatically.

So while my "social network" doesn't fit well into Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever, the common case is much simpler: you join whatever network most of your friends are a part of, badger the ones that aren't into joining, play a few games of scrabble with 'em and that's that.

They're popular because they fit the popular needs and wants. Twitter doesn't. Blog services don't. They fulfill other needs, and sure there's overlap, but there are also a lot of conflicting requirements, and being "truly open" doesn't exactly rate when the price of this "openness" is making my kid sister wade through stock touts, rude comments, and herbal Viagra spam in order to post pictures of her new hair style.

The walled garden social network *is* the app. By all indicators, it's a killer app. And unlike the closed system so loved by phone companies, this one is appealing to users not because they don't know better, but because they know all too well the failings of the open alternatives.

Re: Leopard Spots: Download progress

Shog9 — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 16:31:13 -0000

Hey, now *that's* cool. A non-superfluous shell integration... what a novel idea!

Arbitrary OT question of the day (and i know you're not a Mac developer as such, but there's something i've been curious about...): You know how in Windows, it's possible (but decidedly non-trivial) to integrate the shell into your app such that "objects" in the program (images, email attachments, bits of string, whatever) can easily become objects in the filesystem (or at least, the shell's view of the filesystem) with all the comfort that entails (copy/paste, drag/drop, passing off arbitrary operations to 3rd-party programs or extensions, etc.)... well, does that exist on the Mac? And, does it suck less? I realize i'm building a lot of ambiguity into this question, what with "the shell" in Mac-land and Win-land being two relatively different concepts... perhaps a concrete example would be easier: someone sends me an email with an mp3-in-a-rarfile attachment - do i have to export this to some filesystem location, open it up in my rar-decompressing app of choice, dump the mp3 to some filesystem location *again*, and then open it up in my music-playing-application-of-choice... or can i rely on both my email proggy, rar-proggy, and musics-playing-proggy to understand each other well enough to turn this into a two-click-to-listen operation? And if the latter, does that depend on some specific use of Apple-created software email, decompression, and music... or is it available across the board, a basic understanding among Mac-targeted software that *this is how things work*? Whatabout if my email proggy is GMail and i like to use a different music player for each day of the week?

Re: Rekindling eBooks

Shog9 — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 23:09:21 -0000

Kindle / Sony Reader... expensive, slow, single-purpose device designed to simulate the advantages... and many of the disadvantages... of traditional books. Except... I can't flip through forty dog-eared pages in under a second. I can't rip out the blank pages and use them for notes in a pinch. I can't write in the margins (annotating with an on-screen keyboard doesn't cut it). I probably could hit annoying people over the head with it, but it's an expensive way to catch someone's attention.

The coolest part by far is the "whispernet". I really see this taking off: people already pay subscription prices for cell-phone data networks in order to gain the privilege of paying ridiculous prices for downloads - imagine an iPod/Zune device that let you buy and download songs from anywhere, at any time, without having to look for a wifi hotspot or attaching some gharish cell-wireless dongle and paying $40/month + taxes and misc. account fees for a wireless data plan...

Instant gratification wins every time. If anyone still remembers Kindle in a year's time, it'll be because of the whispernet thing.

Re: Rekindling eBooks

Shog9 — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:16:12 -0000

I suspect you read more non-technical books than i do. ;)

Re: Captivated douchebags

Shog9 — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 19:54:03 -0000

Best post in months. Loved the "shout at the TV channel" metaphor...

Re: find :first vs. find :all in ActiveResource

Shog9 — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:46:48 -0000

Anyone else find the "Active" prefix used in the names of Rails components a grating reminder of a certain Microsoft theme from the '90s?

(yeah, yeah, i'm sure Rails has a much better reason for using it than MS did, but it doesn't matter, i'll always associate it with COM BS, the way i'll always associate *Gator with shady adware)

Re: Google Reader’s waterfall feature

Shog9 — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:43:11 -0000

So wait, a buggy Google Reader == The Tyranny of Emailish RSS?
I don't want to think of feeds as emails (and don't use my email program as a feedreader for that reason...), but i fail to see how you've made an argument here...

Re: Google weighs in on Microsoft and Yahoo!

Shog9 — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 17:16:27 -0000

One theory i haven't seen floated much yet is that MS isn't actually worried so much about competing with Google as it is about competing with Google *and everyone else*. MS knows how to shut down a single competitor - they have a long, successful history in that area. FUD and lockout aren't any less powerful now than they were twenty years ago.

IMHO, the problem is that if MS picks a battle with Google, Google attacks back, and Y! might actually come out the winner. Or Ask. I mean, why not? It's almost like the political campaigns going on right now - you're better off if you can act as though you sit above the fray, while your opponents tear each other to pieces. With Y! out of the way, there's a much smaller chance that users will flee.

Actually, i don't believe a word of that. But i don't believe for a minute that this move will actually benefit Microsoft, or, really, even hurt Google. MS is finally getting worried - after years of shrugging off competitors on the desktop, the desktop itself is becoming a less important percentage of the whole horizontal-market software universe. Web apps - and mobile apps - are blooming in a way that seemed impossible just a few years ago. And Microsoft's track record in both areas is abysmal. MS is lashing out frantically in every direction, desperate to get their claws into it. Every move they've made in the last 2-3 years reeks of fear: Silverlight, IE8, * Live *, W*, and now this.

Oh. And yeah, we're all gonna suffer. That's just par for the course.

Re: Aggregating application interactions

Shog9 — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 16:30:07 -0000

That reminds me of something... Back when i first read the ATOM spec, i though it sounded like a great way to implement two-way communication: GET a list of items, POST new ones, PUT modifications... it all seemed so... nice.

Then i realized that the feed readers out there didn't even bother rendering everything in each , to say nothing of any sort of support for adding new ones. What a waste. Any idea if that's changed...?

Re: Microsoft announces the Zune Phone App Store, Apple reality distortion field implodes

Shog9 — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:20:02 -0000

Meh. If they actually do a good job of standing in the gates of that walled garden, then more power to 'em.

If not, then trojan-horse-SMS-spamming software will be the death of iTunes. Sorry, but writing native apps ain't like coding up web pages. You have real power. And plenty of folks looking to abuse it.

Re: Vat meat

Shog9 — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:10:30 -0000

Ha!
After being exposed to "The Space Merchants" as a kid, i was suspicious of tofu for quite a while afterwards. Oh, i knew it wasn't *really* vat-grown meat... but i put that down to mere incompetence on the part of Our Corporate Overlords. Then McDonald's rolled out a "veggie" burger, and i knew i was right...

Re: Gas marketing

Shog9 — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:10:44 -0000

Wow, i would *not* have guessed that. Every so often i'll run into someone who *avoids* a certain brand based on a bad experience with dirty gas at some point in the past, but i've yet to actually hear someone express any sort of loyalty *to* a specific brand.

In fact, it's much more common to find folks driving across town to line up behind the pumps at a cheaper station, most likely burning up the few cents of savings in the process.

Then again, i don't know anyone who buys higher-octane "premium" gasoline either. Maybe i just hang out with cheapskates...