Developing Upwards

The more peeks I get at the HTML 5 spec, the more I dread it. We have barely shaken the last strongholds of crap-HTML since gaining some sanity some years ago. We put content in pages and we control style and layout in CSS, supposedly. Now, we see upcoming tags like article and nav and section, and all of it harks back to the days that were so dark in the web. I don't understand it. If anything, we should take the suggestions of Douglas Crockford to heart. I want semantics in my content, not layout or anything related to it. I want themes and templates understood by the standard, not developed by a thousand projects in parallel resource squandering. Any complaints I make about the upcoming HTML spec is completely trivialized by the fact that there is an upcoming HTML spec. Do you know how long it has been since any major shift in web formats? We're talking pre-Mozilla days here. I can't imagine the migration required with an internet the size we have today. The web makes...

So, I didn't see any opening for contributing in any useful way to the discussion about Google's new Chart API , until I read this post . How dare they call this service open. They should have been clear that their greed has lead them to secretly hide abilities of the service from the public, in an obvious attempt to corner the market on really cool graphs in web sites. My theory is that they hope everyone uses their "Open" Chart API, which doesn't include the full service's abilities, so that their own charts, using the entire breadth of charting power, are inherently better than yours. Beware the wickedness of the corporate greed, my friend. My sarcasm drips onto the floor. Now, I mean no disrespect to Marty, but this kind of post really does get under my skin from time to time. Maybe it just struck me at the wrong time. So what if Google has features they didn't document? So what if they use a different URL to access the API? Maybe the undocumented feat...

So I haven't realized it, but my twitters from the last day or so have gone unposted. Twitter pod is great, but its completely silent about authentication errors, apparently. The root of the problem is that I have two twitter accounts: ironfroggy and pythoncoders, which I intended as an aggregator of python twitter accounts. At the very least, a place to find other pythoners on twitter. Now, I haven't been keeping up on pythoncoders, so I decided to log in and update the followings, only to realize I forgot the password. Here in lies the cause of my troubles. The twitter "reset password" form does not take a username. Oh, no, it takes an e-mail address, which I have two accounts with the same of. I crossed my fingers, went through the process, and seemed to be brought back to my ironfroggy account, so I decided to figure it out later. Somehow, this process leaves the account with an unknown password, probably random or even null, or for some reason the fact that th...

I am saying nothing new here but I do this not for reddit votes, diggs, comments, or hits, but for love. This about a great online comic that completes my geek morning three days a week and the thing that lets me make all the big bucks: XKCD and Python, together at last . Congratulations!

The development sub-blogosphere is abuzz with responses and responses to responses on the debate over splitting up developers into two camps . The core idea is that 20% of us care about software development and 80% of us just do our job and go home. We all like to think we're in the 20% and we probably are, because the 80% doesn't care enough to recognize the distinction. They might recognize those few geeks at the office who don't seem to have a life, of course. Is the debate centering around who is what group and what it means or that we are grouping so bluntly in the first place? Well, we are a binary loving people, after all. For the 20% This Means... We love to self comment. We're a relatively small slice of the populace spending an unusual amount of time talking about ourselves and this whole deal just exposes that. Who reads about the split between the developers that care and the developers that just pay the bills? Not the bill payers. Even if this all centers ...

Daniel, at work, ran into a problem of accidentally removing a branch he had just created and made a commit to, thus loosing the days work. This was actually the fault of our internal scripts to manage the branching and merging policy we've set up. By "internal" I mean that I wrote them and it was my fault his whole day of work was gone, so that left it up to me to figure out how to repair the situation and salvage the current commit back from the ether. I thought it might be good to document, in the case that anyone else needs to do this. This works in the case of branch A existing and branch B being removed after a single commit on it and branch B being from A. This means we know commit A and we need to find an unnamed commit, what was B, to recover it. I can demonstrate the recovery process with a simple transcript. ironfroggy:/tmp ironfroggy$ mkdir A ironfroggy:/tmp ironfroggy$ cd A ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ git init Initialized empty Git repository in .git/ ir...