Justin Duewel-Zahniser › Comments

"How so? I'm about to hit vacation time for the year, so I'm going to work on the app and port it to the main Heroku instance. I'll take suggestions :-)" - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"How much are you paying and who's in your pool?" - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"One of the main issues with gems (and with all gems-like things that I have experienced--I realize you're using this as an archetype) is the dependency on the version of what you include. So, you have to re-write to adapt to the gem over time or freeze it, which has a whole other host of problems. A tool which would be able to report out (visually or not, I don't care) all segments of your code which reference the capabilities from an included gem would help with this. If frozen, you'd know what you need to touch if you decide to un-freeze. If un-frozen and upgrading, you'd know where you need to pro-actively improve things. Unit tests help here, but they just let you know where you need to make a change downstream and it would be nice to be aware up front, I think. Something gem-like with a level of intelligence about it's applicability to your code and with more sophisticated tools for version management and impact assessment might be the next step. Though probably far from the end..." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"One of its biggest flaws is simply that of not working a lot." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"RESTful is annoying, but people understand what it means when you say it. By people, here, I mean people who are familiar with representation state transfer concepts. And, I think we're saying the same thing. There would be an address for a conversation which could be used as a reference for both human and machine reading of the content." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"I think the idea here, in a nutshell, is to start from a framework of electronic communications that are universally threaded, collaborative, searchable and indexed across history (so you can revisit how the conversation evolved). It would make the distinction between chat and email less important. Messages would be real-time and all would have the same basic level of permanence. You could also conclude a discussion by editing out all the noise and providing a final summation, such that anyone revisiting the conversation would see the summation and only if they were curious for some reason would they roll back the timeline to see how it got there. Regarding your thoughts on URLs, etc., I suppose that's just a general RESTful API of some sort on top of the data repository, so I would guess that's doable." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"Just wait until you get to the boss." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"A similar problem can occur in poetry where the rhythm changes subtly, makes a line sound dead, and that drags down the whole poem. Even if no one is counting beats or even writing something formal like a sonnet. So, I agree. Technical excellence is not in itself interesting, but it's necessary to keep something really interesting from being dragged down, maybe." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"Great opening lines. I think the first stanza is the best." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"Well, thanks. Should I add a "Like" button?" - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"I'm told you can get policy tilted in your direction. And it would be hilarious to see some of them dance to hip hop videos." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"Thanks. It needs a little maintenance here and there, but I'm proud of it and I find it personally useful. That's a win :-) Novels is an interesting idea. The core idea would be the same, but I think you'd need a different UI optimized for writing much more content. Probably using the "remove distractions" style interface as the primary writing interface and have an entry box the width of the whole browser, or fairly close. Are you a novel writer? And, glad I can hopefully have helped you on your own project. Point me to it sometime so I can check it out." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"I like this one. Very tangible. One suggestion: instead of using the word "beauty" maybe just talk about the seeds or bits or whatever flowing away directly and let the beauty be in the imagery. Might add some more depth." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"I know I'm a brat about rhetorical questions, but consider how strong the ending would be if you changed the last line to "It might be you" or something like that." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"That opening line is just money. I'm even willing to be lax about my dislike for rhetorical questions :-P" - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"Nice ending. On the opening stanza, you have canes plural and pipe singular, so it seems like one dude with two canes and a pipe. Got a little twisted up there. I like this, though." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"You know. The title answers the question. I know I'm always telling you to try chopping stuff, but try chopping that last line ;-). I like the flow in the first four lines a lot. Especially three and four." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"Have you looked at EUCALYPTUS (I know...) in Ubuntu 9.04 server yet? It's actually supposed to be able to locally mimic the EC2 API. Penny for your thoughts." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"Yeah, I'm not sure how you would orient people who want to do CS but haven't already started in any way. I guess I sort of feel like college is a bit late for completely boot strapping some form of education, but not everyone gets CS in high school like I did and not everyone has a clue what they at least want to start with before they get there. On the algorithm side, I thought this would be something organized by the mentor as part of the education and hopefully exercised by some actual work, but that might be a little optimistic. I definitely agree that some real work would help out." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"Starts with no rhyming, goes to in-line rhyming, then to end rhyming. Any particular strategy there?" - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"I'm getting around to trying this out. Is there a way to deploy multiple sinatra apps to a single Heroku "app" if they run on different ports or some such? I'm interested in building something composed of a number of loosely-coupled services, but would like to deploy them as a composite application." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"It's based on Textile, so the best thing to do is read a reference. Perhaps I should switch to Markdown, though. I'm not sure if there's a fancy edit bar for that." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"Is computar good at you?" - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

""I slosh. warm filling-socks feeling" Tactile. Very nice." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

""The focus upon a single item of power" Edit :-) I like this line a lot: “This reality functions as a buffer / between your mind and your soul;" I'd try a statement instead of a rhetorical question after that to preserve the force of ideas there." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"Having fun with formatting, there?" - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"Very cool concept. The austere parts come off as really sincere." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"Hidden text between our lines. Fnord. I really like the "synthetic heart" concept. Maybe you could say something about it pumping data like blood. I thought "tech flotsam" was awkward to read, sound-wise. When I finds 'em like that, I jetsam. Har har." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"Hey man. Glad to see you on here. How was signup? One thought I had on this poem is that the last line might not be necessary and the line before that (end of the last stanza) where you say "and each other" might be already implied well enough by saying "all we have is the breeze" since the we in the context of the poem means the same as each other. The nice thing about this app is that it's trivial to change it, see what you think, compare it and change it back if you don't think it helps. I'm a relentless cutter so about half of my advice is always to try removing and/or re-ordering things :-P. I'm also a sucker for sensory details, so I'd suggest throwing in some concrete details here and there--the color or design of the window sill, the temperature or humidity of the breeze, that sort of thing. Gives the mind more access to get inside the poem." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser

"If you edit, you can pop the title in where it says "Untitled" and it'll show up bold above the poem. I wonder if that's hard to see when you write the first time... Third to last stanza is my favorite. Lick the tip and keep on writing is beautiful--very tactile and has great ear too. I wonder how that would work as the final stanza? The repeated lines at the end don't seem to close as strongly as that would." - Justin Duewel-Zahniser