DISQUS

140 seconds is way too long for it to be an analogue to twitter. Over two minutes? It takes less time than that to read an average blog post, and less time still to scan a blog post and decide whether it’s worth reading. It takes less than two seconds to read a twitter post. Methinks the magic number for twitter video posts might be about 140 deciseconds. ;-)

All just my personal opinion, of course. Your mileage will vary.

Love the twitter #standup meme. But if your team standups are “kinda boring”, maybe ur doin it wrong?

Jason Yip has written some good articles on standups:
http://jchyip.blogspot.com/2009/02/quick-summar...
http://jchyip.blogspot.com/2009/02/few-pointers...
http://martinfowler.com/articles/itsNotJustStan...>

I assume AlterEgo 1.0.1 will be refactored to use this, eh? :-)

Nice!

YES. Pervasive nil checks and other defensive coding practices deep within domain code are an indicator that offensive code abounds: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thre...

I'd like to add to comctrl6's comment on the "nasty habit of trying to keep my
software up to date". I think this is probably another place where MacPorts
has failed you...

As you know, Ubuntu and Debian (as well as RedHat, SUSE, etc) have the concept
of a "stable" release and a "development" or "bleeding edge" release. And the
distribution teams take great pains to keep abreast of the various versions of
the packages so I don't need to... and only filter the urgent bugfixes or
security patches into the stable release. And their stable releases go through
several months of QA-induced feature freeze prior to release.

If I want to venture out on my own with newer versions of certain packages than
are in the stable distro, then I take some of that responsibility onto
myself... for just those several packages! But by and large, I can trust the
distro maintainers to shield me from patch releases that are really minor
upgrades in areas that I need stability.

While there may be no technical reason that MacPorts (and e.g. Gentoo and
RubyGems) can't follow this approach... in my experience, they just *don't*.
And that would be fine if I had all the time in the world (in college I always
used Debian unstable), but these days I'd rather be getting things done.

So, while MacPorts' lack of a downgrade path is unfortunate, I would suggest
that the bigger problem is that there is no stable upgrade path. And while the
distros do sometimes make mistakes with their stable releases, at least they
are an additional buffer between me and upstream.

"I intend to use “Ninja-Patching” from now on instead of that other phrase"

I personally favor "slapmethoding", which is entry #3 in _why's Complete List Of Substitute Names For The Maneuver We Now Know To Be Monkeypatching.

http://hackety.org/2007/08/10/myCompleteListOfS...

This is something that’s concerned me as well. Minorities were far better represented in my college classes than they have been during my career. Both in terms of foreign students, and American minorities. It does seem to me that women are even less well represented now than they were when I entered college.

I’ve worked with only two African American programmers, and you were one of them. And I’ve never worked with a female programmer. And it seems like my career is more diverse than the conferences I go to.

At RubyConf, there was probably only a dozen or so women in attendance, and I felt bad for them that they were so “obvious”. I don’t think that I would have the courage to attend a conference if I knew that I would be the only person of my race or gender and I would stick out. I wonder how much that effect reinforces the problem. And the problem does seem much worse at ruby conferences than at other software conferences I’ve been to in the past (No Fluff Just Stuff, MS VSLive).

I do wonder if we are doing something wrong in the computer geekery realm that other career paths are doing differently. For example, my wife is an actuary, a field which is heavy on the math/statistics geekery and is historically dominated by introverted white males. However her department is about 50/50 with regards to gender, and many different minorities are represented, and she has a similar experience when she goes to actuarial seminars.

I feel bad for people who might be edged out of an exciting and fulfilling career/life/hobby, but I also feel bad for myself, because I also selfishly miss the diversity of conversation that I can have in culture at large and that I have been able to have in the past.

Ultimately, I don’t really know what I can contribute to this conversation, and I don’t think I can really answer your questions. But I’m interested in it and often disappointed by the way things are.

Thanks for the great description of this and how you used it. I'm looking forward to trying this out and perhaps replacing some of my current integration tests with it. :-)