Bookmarks for March 26, 2010

How I Create those Del.icio.us link posts - TechLifeBlogged
I am doing this now, but I stopped at the email so I can review and edit, rather than let it post automatically.
Particletree » Visualizing Fitts’s Law
Great visual examples of how Fitt's Law works and why. Fitt's Law tells us that the difficulty of hitting a UI target is reliably predictable based on the distance and size of the target. Every designer or developer working with UIs should know this.
Checklists
Exactly what I was looking for. Upgrades a select widget into a series of checkboxes, where we want toggle selection to be the default, not single selection.
jquery-asmselect - Project Hosting on Google Code
Will likely use this, instead, because it seems to preserve the actual select, which toChecklist didn't do

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CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer. One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operate on

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful

How To Test

This is an index of different articles I've written covering techniques for testing specific software components. The number is small, but will grow in time. Initially, expect a heavier lean towards Django topics. How To Test Django Template Tags Parts One and Two

Developing Upwards

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