Disqus - Latest Comments for veselosky

Re: Copyright Status and Credits - The Outline of History

Vince Veselosky — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 17:18:46 -0000

Yes, the images are in the public domain, at least in the US. You do not need anyone's permission to use them. If in doubt, contact the creator as listed above.

Re: Fat Models - A Django Code Organization Strategy

Vince Veselosky — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 09:42:00 -0000

@k4ml got it right. What's missing in Django is an explicit Domain Model. Django's "model" is not a Domain Model, it is merely an abstraction over a specific storage layer (a relational database).

Tying your business logic to the storage layer is just as architecturally incorrect as tying it to the presentation layer.

It is problematic for many reasons. It makes unit testing business logic independent of the storage layer difficult (you should be able to unit test business logic without spinning up a database). It is completely impractical if your storage layer is anything other than a relational database. If your code is processing data from a file storage, or a web API, where then does your business logic go?

I strongly recommend the book Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans to help developers understand the importance of modeling business logic independently of the technical considerations of storing and presenting data.

Re: Perl 5: Hash slices can replace loops – Webquills.net

Vince Veselosky — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 08:15:38 -0000

Although the keys are returned in a random order, according to the documentation "So long as a given hash is unmodified you may rely on keys, values and each to repeatedly return the same order as each other."

As to how that is accomplished, you'll have to check the source code. It sounds like magic to me!

See http://perldoc.perl.org/fun...

Re: 17.4 Kings Against Priests - The Outline of History

Vince Veselosky — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:08:41 -0000

Sure, the images are in the public domain just like the text, so feel free to reuse them. Cool Tumblog! :)

Re: WJLA-TV to take over TBD.com operations

Vince Veselosky — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 06:29:46 -0000

It was silly to think that you could establish a new brand by hijacking an existing one.TBD needs to find its own audience and establish its own brand independent of WJLA-TV. The WJLA-TV website should always have been treated as a separate brand with a separate audience, partnering with TBD to exchange traffic.

I hope this fiasco doesn't sink TBD. It's an interesting model and deserves a chance to sink or swim on its own merits.

Re: What 10 Classic Books Were Almost Called

Vince Veselosky — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 21:29:41 -0000

Speaking of Ayn Rand, her earlier novel "The Fountainhead" was originally titled "Secondhand Lives", but was changed to focus on the positive rather than negative side of the book's theme. Personally, I think Secondhand Lives was a much more apt title.

Re: Stop selling scarcity

Vince Veselosky — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:36:40 -0000

Jeff, are you reading my mind, or am I reading yours?

http://www.webquills.com/20...

Re: 10 Things I Love/Hate About Movable Type - Scroll - Webquills.net

Vince Veselosky — Mon, 04 May 2009 16:23:32 -0000

@su Thanks very much for your response!

Plugins: MT ships with some "plugins" that are actually core code, and virtually every plugin I have found interesting enough to download and examine has wanted to place something outside the plugins directory, so I have always been extremely conservative in using them because I didn't want to untangle the mess if I wanted to uninstall it. David Raynes pointed out that PluginPath config variable is a list, so it's possible to stick plugins elsewhere (if they are well-behaved), and that helps a lot.

Template changes: I'm thinking specifically here about new functionality such as Motion, but even small fixes have the same problem. In order to get template updates from newer software releases, I have to replace my customized templates, and then manually attempt to re-merge my customizations. What I would really like is an automated merge like a version control system would perform. :) But at the very least it would be nice to get a diff against the originals so I could see what customizations have been made in what templates, to use as an inventory of what to manually apply to the new set. As it is, I cannot even run my own diff, because the templates are in the DB.

Sharing templates: I never really grokked global templates. If I use global templates for everything, do I have to delete all the templates in the blog? Sounds scary. And requires manually recreating all the templates as globals, right? Which as a lot of down-side, I think. When you say "source blog" I assume you are talking about cloning a blog? But that's just a straight copy, with nothing shared. Creating a custom template set is actually more along the lines of what I want (I could then "refresh" to get changes into all blogs) but last time I checked that requires writing a plugin by hand, or paying for a commercial add-on. When template set import/export is built into MT, I'll quit complaining about this one. :)

Thanks again for your comment, the MT community has always been engaged, and I have been impressed with the progress in MTOS. Do keep up the good work, I'm still a fan despite my complaints! :D

Re: 10 Things I Love/Hate About Movable Type - Scroll - Webquills.net

Vince Veselosky — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:52:03 -0000

@David Thanks for the tip, I didn't realize PluginPath was a list. That should certainly help keep questionable plugins out of my stable MT stuff.

Re: 10 Things I Love/Hate About Movable Type - Scroll - Webquills.net

Vince Veselosky — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:50:25 -0000

@Anon Thanks for the link [http://diveintoaccessibilit...]. It is not the position of the navigation in the HTML structure I'm complaining about, but the position on the rendered page (below the "fold" on most screens). Yes, of course this problem can be fixed. All the problems I mention can be fixed. My point is, I don't want to have to fix it, I want it to just work! :)

Re: What do you get if you cross Perl CGI with Mod-PHP? - Scroll - Webquills.net

Vince Veselosky — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:27:27 -0000

Mark, the links are working for me at the moment, so I'm not sure what the issue is for you. Perhaps the site was down briefly? Sorry for the inconvenience, but I hope you were able to find the site and learn more about mod_perlite.

-Vince

Re: Choose the right template system for your team

Vince Veselosky — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:03:19 -0000

I didn't realize there was a Java implementation of HTML::Template, thanks for the tip. That's certainly useful information for other folks in a position like yours, bridging between Perl and Java. And the comment syntax was a miss on my part, thanks for pointing that out. I stick by my assessment of the kind of workflow it fits into, but knowing it has these capabilities certainly makes it look more appealing.
-Vince

Re: Choose the right template system for your team

Vince Veselosky — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:28:52 -0000

@Brock: I'm right there with you. In fact, I'm in the middle of writing up some experiences I've had with TreeBuilder doing just that. I hope to post it this weekend. (I write slow, and edit myself alot. And it still never seems enough.) I hope you'll come back and check it out!
-Vince

Re: How to Travel the World with 10 Pounds or Less (Plus: How to Negotiate Convertibles and Luxury Treehouses)

Vince Veselosky — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 15:44:23 -0000

Tim, love the BIT method and use it myself when I travel (which is rarely).

If you're serious about the "Buy it there" method, why the heck would you travel with toothbrush, toothpaste, and disposable razor? Are you seriously traveling somewhere that you can't buy those things for five bucks at any corner store?

###

Hi V!

LOL... good point. I could, but I already have about a dozen sets, so I take the smallest toiletries with me. For me, the real trick is avoiding cumbersome/heavy/unwieldy "I might need this" items like excessive clothing and choosing BIT when needed.

Tim

Re: PR People Must Balance Consistent Message with Authenticity

Vince Veselosky — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:16:38 -0000

Is it just me, or is this herring extremely RED? Of course the quotes are similar. Two people working for the same company, describing the value proposition of their service in a consistent way. I would be shocked and surprised if they did not sound similar.

It sounds to me like Broadcast & Cable is just pouting because YouTube is neither broadcast nor cable, yet is stealing all their buzz. And then won't even grant them an interview! So B&C decides to scribble "YouTube Sucks" on the proverbial bathroom wall. And this is the best they could come up with?

I agree that YouTube could think outside the PR box more (couldn't most companies?). I love the idea of YouTube posting PR videos on YouTube. It's wonderfully illustrative of what YouTube is all about. But B&C is just blowing smoke here.

Thanks for taking their article and leveraging it into a conversation about something relevant. That kind of attitude is why I read MediaShift.

Re: New version of Safari Books Online

Vince Veselosky — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 02:37:41 -0000

Tim,

Glad you asked. I hate it. I agree that the "readers of X also liked Y" is a good addition, and I like getting search results from the articles, etc. But this AJAX business is exactly what the site does NOT need. Readers don't need the page to update in pieces, we just need the CONTENT to load FIRST so we can start reading while the navigation and extras continue to load. This would easily have been accomplished with a CSS layout and no javascript. Instead, I have to watch this silly animation load my content. More than once I have had pages "lock up" on me, or get confused about which page is "next" because I used the dreaded back button. I don't need magical javascript to read a book, I just need the text, okay? (And yeah, the pretty pictures too, but I'm willing to wait for them to load.)

Worst, you failed to fix my primary usability problem with the site. THE FONTS ARE TOO FREAKING SMALL! And now that it's all javascripty, clicking the "big font" button actually makes them SMALLER in my browser (because apparently the js does an end-run around my user stylesheet that sets the minimum font size).

Look, I love your Safari service and your books, but all the whiz-bang Web 2.0 spectacles recently added don't enhance the experience of the user so much as the experience of the people viewing the five-minute demo. Why couldn't you instead spend some effort tracking down the bugs in your translation system that cause whole sentences to get buggered into attribues on some invisible tag? (Try proofreading the Safari version of "AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition" or "Building Scalable Web Sites").

At least the web site remembers my user cookie overnight now.

Re: Early Opt-Out'er::Why I Cancelled Netflix

Vince Veselosky — Fri, 12 May 2006 09:24:03 -0000

I used to be a media junkie. But I cancelled my cable in favor of satellite when the cable bill kept getting bigger while my channel selection stayed the same. Then I canceled the satellite too, because frankly, there was absolutely nothing on television that was worth paying $50 or more each month. When I canceled the satellite, I put the money into a Netflix account. Meanwhile, everything good that was ever on television started being released to DVD. So now, via Netflix, I get to watch my movies, TV shows, and documentaries in better quality, with no commercial interruptions, whenever I want, and I didn't have to buy a DVR to do it.

Netflix is not going to disappear due to downloads, either. They are already starting to ship HD-DVD and plan to support the hi-def Blu-Ray format too. Do you really want to download 50GB to watch a movie? The old US Mail still has pretty good bandwidth for hi-def, I think.

If you don't watch the DVDs, then of course Netflix is not cost efficient. But I average just under $2 per disk, and I usually get 3-5 hours of entertainment per disk. Thats a lot cheaper by the hour than movie theaters, store rentals, and even cable or satellite (for me). Its not for everybody, but Ill be a Netflix customer for a long time.

Re: How much oversight do online forums, blog comments need?

Vince Veselosky — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 12:19:05 -0000

The difference between a blog and an old-school news site is the commentary. If you shut off comments, you are shutting out your visitors, and you are not going to grow a vibrant community around your blog (which is the point of a blog, isn't it?) One thing you do not want is robots posting SPAM comments, or trolls posting off-topic useless junk. The other thing you do not want is moderators quashing all dissenting opinion and turning your comment section into an echo chamber.

How you handle comments then really is going to depend on the type of content you post and the type of community you want to build. The more open and inclusive the community, the more tolerant it will have to be of trolls and spams, and more importantly opinions they disagree with. For some sites, moderation may be considered a necessity to control the signal to noise ratio of the comments. For other sites, the noise is half the fun. I find comments work best when there is a self-policing capability. Community members know what belongs and what doesn't in most cases. But again, you have to be careful to avoid the echo chamber effect.

So the "right" way to handle comments is whatever way fits best with your online community. My recommendation would be, start with your comments completely open (or as open as you as the publisher can tolerate) and see what happens. If you attract the right type of people, they will often take care of the rest. But if there is too much noise, slowly dial up the restrictions until you get a ratio you can live with.

Re: How much oversight do online forums, blog comments need?

Vince Veselosky — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 12:19:05 -0000