Developing Upwards

"Google, you have no right to track my searches!" How many people have been saying that, especially since the whole thing with AOL "leaking" those users' search records? "Leak" nothing, they released them carefully as an opportunity for research, and we did nothing but attack them. They could have sold them, names and personal billing information included, without ever telling us a thing. What they did was perfectly within their bounds, just read your agreement with them. Google seems to almost get more cruft about the whole thing than AOL. Maybe people just can't get surprised when they think they see something a company they never liked doing something they disagree with. People want to love Google, so they will get defensive about them almost to the point of taking it personally. How do you draw a line to the rights of users, when they do not even pay for the services being considered? Can we have any rights without being customers? If I asked y...

Millions of dollars went into the development of the Digital Video Disc format, its licenses, encryption schemes, patents, bushiness deals to ensure its success, and all the work that went into getting rid of those troublesome plastic cases with yard after yard of magnetic tape. We can all be thankful for that! We have gone through many forms of video, and we can take a lesson from the history of recorded audio. In 1878, Edison invented the phonograph, which we usually think of today as a cylindrical record. The lateral-disc records were technically invented in 1888, as a direct adaptation from Edison's design, but remained covered by patents and used as novelty talking toy technology for another thirty years, until the patents ran out in 1918, forty years after Edison's original invention. It would be another 56 years before the introduction of the cassette tape in Germany. The trend ended there, and we became frustrated with cassette limitations, seeing the introduction of th...

I was planning on writing something about the current conversations on the Python-3000 list about concurrency, which just doesn't stop being brought up and never gets resolved to any point that anyone is happy with. In an unrelated action, I went to check on my older blog, which I thought of resurrecting for some non-development articles, and I found a draft from a previous time the topic came up. I read it and was surprised to find that it proposes pretty much exactly what is being put on the table over this past weekend, with reference to walling off multiple interpreters in a single process and controlling messages past between them. The same technique scales for multiple cores, multiple processors, or multiple machines. I've decided to take the easy way out and just post the original draft with minor editing. I enjoy how spot on I ended up being with what is currently becomming an acceptable solution, it might seem. The original was written nearly a year ago. Does this mean...

I wasn't planning to write this, but a quick segment on Mind of Mencia made me want to say something about his piece on tonight's show. It was a rerun, of course, but I don't get to watch the show regularly, although I am a fan. Carlos Mencia blasted some technologies he deemed as outdated and berated anyone who still uses them. I normally enjoy anything he does, having been a fan since before his currently popular show. However, I just had to say something how much I disagree with him on all but one of these technologies. Corded Phones Yeah, I can't go without a cordless phone in a large-ish two story home, but sometimes you can't beat a five dollar phone that you can't loose between the couch cushions. Nintendo 64 Retro gaming. I don't have to say more. Fax Machine I hate fax machines, but the gas company won't let me e-mail them forms because, like it or not, its still easier than e-mail to get from deadtree to deadtree across long distances in a few...

I've been saying this increasingly in debates and discussions over in #python, where I frequent. It has to be something considered before, by more intelligable people than myself, but I don't remember hearing such a statement from anyone else. The focus on the software world has drifted over the years from a focus on programming to a focus on developing. The difference is import and subtle. We can see this in the trend of popular software related books, the evolution of practices and languages, and changing patterns in the industry markets. Books, Blogs, and Bantering The landscape has changed on the kind of information pushed across the board to techie types. Where as reading the official specification of the C language was once a good software book, the best of today have no mention or dependance on any particular language. The emphasis is on books on development as can be applied broadly and generally, such as the excellent Prefactoring . This can also be seen on the blogsce...

Yes, I do believe a good developer has to know more than a handful of languages . Ten sure is an arbitrary number to pick, but whatever! Read the list, I don't want to recap it. Of the ten languages listed, I don't find three and a half of them compelling choices. C# Python JavaScript AJAX (this is the half) Some people might find that an odd list. If you know a little about any of the languages, you might find it even odder. If you know a lot about the languages, you'll have no trouble agreeing, I feel confident. C# is largely what Java should have been. Python is, of course, a fantastic language for most purposes. JavaScript is essential for web work, and web work is essential for getting the rent paid, these days. AJAX, much the same. C# and JavaScript get some crap from the OSS communities. People look down their noses at C#, having such a distaste for all things wearing the brand of Gates. JavaScript can be an ugly, incompatable-with-anything mess, but it can be elega...

IGN has a case of split personality. On the one hand, I don't have a new enough version of Flash installed for Firefox on Linux to play their videos. On the other hand, if I want to watch some advertising, they wouldn't dare to stop me from doing what I wanna do! Why do so many sites think I don't have a new enough version? Is newer Flash better? No, but the company pays for new versions of Flash Studio anyway, and it exports by default to a newer version, so why bother to change it? Thats like a couple mouse clicks or something! Jeez.

Rasmus Lerdorf is an opinionated man. However, so am I, so I have some things to say about these particular opinions. Lerdorf is claiming the web is broken. I do not disagree. Lerdorf is claiming PHP is the cure, and I couldn't disagree more if he had written that statement on a shard of tin and jammed it in my stomach. That is quite a strong disagreement. I mean, didn't PHP break the web in the first place? Right off the bat, I should note that I do believe PHP can be used well. Any language (almost) can be used properly enough that it can be a decent environment to use, so long as you follow strict rules. PHP is a great example of a language that promotes ignoring any rules. Following a good set of policies, one can develop well structured and elegant applications with PHP, but the fact of the matter is that the language does very little to promote anything in the way of good use of itself. PHP might not promote bad coding, but it simply does so little in the way o...

This is in response to the article Why Johnny Can't Code , over at Salon Tech . I have heard several people already agreeing with the arguments against this article, so I know I am not alone. Although I completely agree that it is a very good thing for kids to have a quick and easy way to program on their computers, should they have the curiosity, I do not believe the author made very compelling points on the use of BASIC, or anything resembling it. Particularly, I think the author has far too high a reverence for BASIC and fails completely to see the damage the language can do to an aspiring developer, which I won't go into in this article. Conversely he seems to find languages that could fill the gap he says, namely Python, as somehow wrong for a job, which is entirely an incorrect idea. This is pointing from multiple vantages as being written by an unenlightened developer. Yes, a fundamental understanding of how software works can be a good starting point for a life of tec...

As many people have written about, IronPython 1.0 was recently released. There has been a lot said about it, and most interesting has been the response from many groups with little or no connection to the Python community. The fact that the language runs on .Net is more important than most Pythoners realize yet, and there is a predicted large number of future users of Python coming in from this new area of exploration. Many developers using C# or Visual Basic will be glad to move to a fun language like Python for at least part of their projects, and the integration with the CLR makes it flawless to mix with the rest of the components. It all reminds me of a line from Victor Vernado , the black albino comedian: its all the fun of dating a black man, without the disappointing look from your father. IronPython opens the door for a lot people who were unable to move into the community, due to personal or corporate barriers to leave the safety of the Microsoft Umbrella. IronPython is a brid...

I'm wrapping up a REST layer to the service backend I've been developing for my still-unnamed-employer (find out when we launch, real soon now!). I had never developed a service under the "REST" acronym before, so my boss gave me a crash course, I read some things, I thought I got it. REST, a buzzword in its own right, is like stapling smoke to water when you try to define it. That isn't because its vague, its because most of the people who talk about it don't know what they're talking about. Maybe I'm one of them and I shouldn't be posting this. REST is Not: HTTP XML RPC A protocol, format, or even much of a specification Rest is: An idea(l) Agnostic on just about every specification associated with it Requests on a REST Service are: Atomic. No request relies on any other made before or after it. Self Authenticating. Every request must include any credentials. See point 1. Self Describing. This is most commonly XML, and sometimes people think it m...