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Kelly Norton › Comments
Disgraceful! I tried to download an album using amazon's MP3 Store app on android. It failed to queue the downloads, then completely self destructed (it won't even start now). However, it did manage to charge my credit card and I can't find any way to report the failure on amazon.com. My only recourse is to dispute the charges on my credit card.
Yikes, that's not good. My experiences with the Amazon MP3 store have been good so far, but it sounds like I need to keep my fingers crossed.
- Joel Webber
I finally found an email form and was able to download to my laptop. The app, however, still crashes on startup on my phone. I'm really surprised at how difficult it is to report problems w/ mp3 downloads.
- Kelly Norton
from Android
50% of US engineering students drop out - Why? - http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_nex...
ashish, Michael R. Bernstein, Zahra HB and 35 other people liked this
I am part of the 50% who don't drop out!
- Kevin Mohr
I didn't drop out but here is part of my experience in this post from years ago. It was discouraging to hear the professors talk. Needless to say i don't code. :-) http://www.altamirano.org/marketi...
- Antonio Altamirano
Thankfully I'm in the other 50%, but I can see why many would change their major or drop out. I saw it first hand where many 1st and 2nd year Mechanical Engineering students changed their majors to something 'easier'. The most common reason was difficulty with the required advanced Math courses. Calculus being the road block for many.
- Jeff P. Henderson
If I were entering college now, I would try to go to Olin. I really like their approach.
- Paul Buchheit
nice post, I'm looking for the number of engineers (or per thousand capita ratio) graduating in Greece (or greeks graduating around the world)
- George Tziralis
Many of Computer Science professors at Stanford were luminaries in their fields, but weren't very good at engaging students in the subject matter. Brilliant researchers don't always make the best teachers. I think this contributed a lot to the dropout rate.
- Jess Lee
How does this compare to drop-out rate for all US college students? And does "drop out" mean "of college entirely" or "take a break then come back" or "and choose another major"? The discussion may be lusty but I really don't like discussions that start on a figure w/ no bother to compare it to anything else, or link to info about how it's calculated.
- Wade Dorrell
In CA we have two types of public universities. The UC schools require the professors to do research, where as the State University schools do not. I think the State University schools are much better for undergrad tech education as you get much more attention from your professors.
- Jeff P. Henderson
The UC Berkeley College of Engineering started the Center For Entrepreneurship and Technology http://cet.berkeley.edu to address some of the issues Dodge talks about.
- Ruchira S. Datta
Engineering is hard and requires above-average intelligence. Think about it this way: Statistics tells us that probably 50% of people will be below-average. Wouldn't you want those 50% of the students to drop out before actually becoming an engineer? MIT just doesn't admit that half of the population in the first place, but most schools don't have that luxury.
- Gabe
People have a lot of options for (a) careers (b) money (c) power (d) image (e) attracting mates in the US, compared to China/India. Engineers are not valued very highly in the US compared to businesspeople, doctors, and lawyers.
- Mitchell Tsai
@Gabe: You would think that all the people that go to study Computer Sciences or seek other Engineering degrees are above the 50% average to begin with.
- Amit Morson
somestimes it's a scoail or maturity thing - was for me. I get by. Wished I finished.
- Alan Wilensky
from Alert Thingy
It's because of the fact that people with higher standards of living pursue less demanding challenges offering similar ROI (I = investment+involvement). That's why there's so many non-US students (especially from lower income countries) in engineering and why they're much less inclined to fail.
- Nenad Nikolic
from twhirl
Engineering sucks. I think there's a point where any engineering student realizes that even with a degree they're looking at a pretty mediocre salary working in a really boring job. Add this to the difficult coursework and boring courses, well, engineers are good at math. It adds up to being a raw deal. That being said, if you get into engineering at Stanford or UC Berkley, your ROI would look a lot better then mine. I'm sure a large number of engineering students consider dropping out, even after Calculus.
- Will Higgins™
All I can do is nod. For a couple of years, not a day when by when I didn't consider jumping ship, for all the reasons commenters here have mentioned: long hours, heavy workload, fickle job market, salary barely comparable with what I could expect with a business or law degree. But here I am, a month away from (finally!) finishing my EE degree, and I couldn't be happier.
- Derrick Burns
Continued from above: Basically, I think so many give up because they were looking to get something out of being an engineer: money, prestige, etc. But it's simply too great a commitment on several levels. You really have to pursue engineering because it's something you want to do, something you care about.
- Derrick Burns
I dropped out because Chemical Engineering was not what I was expecting. I wanted more Chemistry, less Math. I switched to IT Management and found it much more interesting. Mind you, I'm Canadian.
- Shey, Jamaican of FF
I remember having a crisis in my final year of Electrical/Computer Engineering. Dropping out was a non-option, but I did consider completely abandoning 3.5 years of engineering study to switch fields and schools during my senior year. In hindsight, I didn't understand what engineers really did. My vision at the time was closer to industrial or product design than engineering. I had to take it on faith in my first two years that I was on a path to do what I was envisioning.
- Kelly Norton
I suspect that more than 50% (even at good schools like GATech, I have friends who have done this) are in the wrong field. Many of my friends went into programming because they enjoyed computers and I've told them they would hate it because they don't like math. They don't listen. :)
- mjc
still others go into engineering due to parental expectation, which I find ridiculous, but understandable
- mjc
Amit: one of the properties of being in the lower 50% is not knowing that you're in the lower 50%. That means many of the applicants do not know they are unqualified.
- Gabe
Extensive aptitude/personality testing could fix this
- Aaron Eaton
I actually sit on an advisory board for ASU (arizona state) Poly - I can tell you that what I see is students becoming disillusioned by all the stuff they have to learn before they can go out and create something "cool". The challenge is keeping them engaged through the pre-reqs/early coursework. BTW - IMHO the problem with "drop out and learn X" is that they've intentionally skipped the fundamentals that make good engineers. Just because you can code doesn't mean you can engineer... two different things.
- Brian Roy
Is Computer Science part of engineering? Because it didn't take much training in Computer Science for me to start doing cool stuff. I wrote my first game and posted it onto the internet my freshman year (Core Wars). By my Junior year, I had designed a programming language and integrated in it into a MUD. Pengtoh had contributed to Linux by his sophomore year. On the other hand, I always flunked electrical engineering classes, and couldn't stomach math past linear algebra.
- Piaw Na
I switch from Engineering to a Computer Science degree. Apart from the fact that I wanted to program, there were two reasons. 1) The load was very high (it was close to 40 contact hours/week in first year). 2) The maths was hard - I'm ok at math, but combined with the high load I found I struggled when I wasn't too interested in it.
- Nick Lothian
"the US should staple a Green Card to every foreign student's engineering diploma and encourage them to stay in the USA."
- Clare Dibble
Same as Nick here. Dropped out due to difficulty and lack of passion for the field. Went back later to finish a BS in Computer Information Systems.
- Bill Sanders
I wonder what percentage of medical school students drop out. Engineering is a hard discipline, if you want to be a web dev or a study IT or "new media" instead. Making engineering "softer" because today's students don't like to work hard and expect results instantly will just create generations of mediocre engineers and will not make the US more of an engineering power.
- Kevin Goldsmith
from twhirl
engineers are boring and dry, pay is low, classes are full of non-social ppl. (and almost no girls). Why not study finance, or something, girls and pay is much better.
- imran
Engineering is fun! The big thing is that school's curriculums are frequently irrelevant. For instance, a lot of CS majors require irrelevant Math or Physics not because it's a requirement to do good software (they aren't), but because those classes serve as weeders. The result is, for instance, we get lots of CS majors who can't communicate or string a sentence together. If we rearranged the CS major so that we didn't impose a stupid requirement, we'd get a bigger diversity of candidates and less dropout.
- Piaw Na
Engineering is the best!!!! and for those who says it sucks or that the pay is not good (or that we are boring and dry), its probably because you are in that 50% of retards that dropped out of it. No other profession gets paid as much as an engineer right after graduation, and there is usually more demand for engineers than for anything else. I just think people are too lazy to even try anymore. I dont know why, even graduate school is fun in engineering. Aerospace is the best!!!!!
- Mike hawk
life in a conceptual box is the result .. content with that, you will stay with it .. not content, universes open up
- Gregory Lent
life in a conceptual box? do you even know what you are saying? universes open up when you quit engineering? If only you were to see the world through the eyes of en engineer, we see everything from several different perspectives, not just that of people like you. If anything, engineering has really opened up the world for me as it really is. Stop making those type of remarks. Instead get back to engineering school so you can see what it feels like.
- Mike hawk
I think I know the boxes Gregory is talking about from some of his other comments. Whether you've gone to engineering school is orthogonal to whether you can get outside of them. So it's pretty much irrelevant to this thread.
- Ruchira S. Datta
I dropped out the day I learned it had nothing to do with driving a train. Now I'm stuck with this silly hat and overalls :(
- Christopher Harley
At least, those 50% tried.
- ashish
I bet you the pre-med numbers are similar, but I'm not sure universities necessarily track undergrads who aspire to go to med school. In general, how many freshmen actually stick with the major they pick when they start college?
- Victor Ganata
What unusual item do you keep in your car, 'just in case'?
Beau Liening, Rob Haas, HTD and 12 other people liked this
Glock 29
- Itachi
Toothpicks. Related: http://friendfeed.com/micahwi... :)
- Micah Wittman
Wow, missed that thread the first time around. Cool!
- Kevin Fox
oh gosh, I have so much random awesome stuff in my car!!
- Georgia Diehl
bodybags
- Morgan Haley
a heavy blanket. Good for when I buy plants, lime, mulch etc.
- Mike Nencetti
Linksys router, 10-port network hub, cables, laptop screen cleaners, DSL filters, napkins.
- Cyrus Lendvay
Sweatshirt, blankets, extra gloves, extra stocking cap, extra coat, extra socks... emergency candles, it gets COLD here in the winter!
- Mark "DerBingle" J
Oh, and deodorant. y'know... in case of emergency.
- Cyrus Lendvay
My car registration
- Ted Gilchrist
Diapers & Wipes. An unopened package of pacifiers. Hopefully only for the new ~2 years, though.
- Steve "Daddy do it!" Lacy
A big rubber band thing-a-majinger with the metal hooks on either end for when I load my trunk with big stuff from Home Depot and cannot close the trunk lid :->)
- L Stephen Cleary
Corkscrew
- Kate Schmidt
snow scraper
- kartik vaithyanathan
Baseball mitt and cleats
- Ryan Kaisoglus
Man-sized safe.
- G. Sigh
Just kidding.
- G. Sigh
Ham radio, cigarette lighter, rescue breather.
- Mistletoe Glen
I have the usual emergency kit but for as for unusual items, I have a bed sheet, a tatami mat, and an unopened package of window blinds. The bed sheet is to cover the windshield if it's going to freeze overnight and I need to drive early the next morning. The tatami mat is for the beach. The windows blinds I bought about 3 years ago, meant to return, and never did. They're still in the trunk.
- Rochelle
A lint roller.
- Mathew™ one of a kind
A book I haven't read.
- Heather Solos
Taurus 9mm
- Spencer
Proof of insurance. Trust me. In Texas, that is unusual.
- Josh Haley
a billy club!
- Rachel Lea Fox
Fishing pole. Monopod. Softballs, glove, & bat.
- Rodfather
Caroline: your list is kind of hot....
- Morgan Haley
William Shatner.
- Derrick
A fork, and an old Honda steering wheel. When I still had a car. Both things came in handy surprisingly often.
- Lo
Soccer cones.
- Mahmood Padura
Envelopes.
- Jennifer Dittrich
Rubber gloves and a jumpsuit like mechanics wear. You'll thank me later, when you're clean.
- Christopher Harley
A picture of my car from behind. My "Coping with Road Rage" book tells me to be considerate of the perspectives of other drivers.
- Kelly Norton
Altoids
- James R
Racquetball racquet, package of socks, several copies of Wired and Entertainment Weekly (usually way out of date).
- Rob Haas
A "bug-in" backpack with nitrile gloves, particle masks, emergency SPCA blankets, flashlights, batteries, emergency am/fm radio, glow sticks, mini first aid kit, emergency water packs... I also have a large first aid kit.
- Beau Liening
from iPhone
wow - nothing. I better go add some things! Wait, I have my softball stuff in the trunk for those just in case I have an emergency softball game to play. LOL
- Paulette Garcia Morris
Rendering in WebKit - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Itachi and Joel Webber liked this
webkit, another example where failing to license as GPL destroyed free software.
- Andrew Euell
OTOH, Apple did take the obscure, buggy engine that was KHTML and turn it into an engine that is closely tied for most-standards-compliant and pushed Gecko further than if it didn't exist. If KHTML was GPL rather than LGPL, Apple might have started from scratch with their own browser engine and we'd be worse off. Having the top two rendering engines be one form of open-source or another is a big win, IMHO of course.
- Matt Mastracci
Andrew: Are you saying "license asGPL, as opposed to under a more liberal license?" And I'm curious as to precisely what you mean by "destroyed free software". AFAICT, WebKit is free for anyone to use and contribute to, and in very wide use. Perhaps I'm missing something?
- Joel Webber
What you're missing is that freedom isn't free. :) You need to be told how to use the code in order to be free.
- Ray Cromwell
Andrew: Yeah, I've noticed how WebKit is a shining example of fail. It seems like every week we get word of some new fail they've implemented. An effort that is forging a solid layer of good bedrock for the web as an open and powerful information platform ... epic fail. If only it had been GPL so it could've had no impact on human kind whatsoever. Oh well, maybe next time.
- Kelly Norton
Trolls, feeding, etc.
- Nick Lothian
Freedom isn't free... yeah, freedom costs a buck-oh-five...
- Joel Webber
The joys of being a father. We're low on space in our house, so I have to throw everything in my office. New workspace is the couch. :-(
What percentage of your house is taken up by kids toys? :)
- Ray Cromwell
Kids own about 70% of the house, about 20% is common (kitchen dining), and about 10% is mine and Stephanie's *shared* space. I'm holding tight to my one remaining couch cushion and my 1/4 of a closet.
- Kelly Norton
I guess your claim to that space died with the third child, then? Don't feel too bad, though -- we just have one, but our house is so small we have to watch movies on a laptop in bed to avoid waking up the rugrat...
- Joel Webber
I guess your claim to that space died with the third child, then? Don't feel too bad, though -- we just have one, but our house is so small we have to watch movies on a laptop in bed to avoid waking up the rugrat...
- Joel Webber
I guess your claim to that space died with the third child, then? Don't feel too bad, though -- we just have one, but our house is so small we have to watch movies on a laptop in bed to avoid waking up the rugrat...
- Joel Webber
Not only is your house space low, you have to post each friendfeed comment in triplicate to have room for the kiddos. I rather like having the couch be the workspace except that it's impossible to get into a ergonomic typing position.
- James R
kellegous on Google Web Toolkit, which compiles Java to JavaScript for running code in the browser, now includes Code Splitting, for reducing application download time - http://www.reddit.com/r...
"I think people are voting you down because of this statement: "It's no wonder that Google has been working diligently to replace GWT with Closure in Wave." Which is untrue and I think people are responding to that. For instance, I will downvote it for that reason alone. You bring up a good point though. Some of the empty functions you see play a part in type identity. In fact, using constructors for runtime type identification is pretty common. So, while it looks strange that there are a lot of similar functions, some of these have to remain. Other functions could be eliminated and will. There is already talk about doing merging of functions with identical bodies. But really the only reason you are noticing this is because of the work to sort the GWT output in a way that it compresses much better. Identical function bodies happen in pretty much every library. You just don't notice them because they look like: function setController(c) { this.controller = c; c.init(); } function..."
- Kelly Norton
I responded.Too often, people jump to conclusions based on anecdotal sampling or knowledge. There's also comments about how libraries like YUI, or Dojo, or Qooxdoo which can asynchronously load pre-split modules or concatenate them together at build time is "Code Splitting". That's right, it 'use' statement in perl or import statement in python, or require statement in your favorite JS module loader means the same thing as GWT's runAsync.
- Ray Cromwell
Found a workaround for GWT hosted mode unit testing crashing under Safari 4.0.4: run your tests in compiled web mode (yay).
If you want more details on that crash, just shoot me an email. Turns out to be a pretty bad JavaScriptCore bug that makes it impossible to protect JSObjects from GC. A fix was committed to JavaScriptCore last friday. So if you take a recent WebKit nightly and use DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH, you can use those instead of the frameworks that shipped with Safari 4.0.4.
- Kelly Norton
Hey Matt, do you know latest JDK update on Mac solves this problem ?
- Ozgur Demir
It's a webkit issue, so you need to wait for 4.0.5
- Matt Mastracci
from iPhone
argh
- Ozgur Demir
I'm a big fan of using WebKit tip. It's usually pretty stable.
- Joel Webber
Snow Leopard fixes this problem. :)
- Ray Cromwell
The End of Days for “View Source”? - http://ajaxian.com/archive...
James R, Bruce Johnson, Kelly Norton and Joel Webber liked this
I hope we just move on to good pretty printers and a standard format for mapping lines of obfuscated source back to the original.
- Kelly Norton
Agreed, Dion, that open source is a pretty good way to compensate.
- Bruce Johnson
from BuddyFeed
I think we can add something like <link rel="source"> <script src="..." originalsrc="..."/> and teach browsers about this to get back to "View Source". I don't think the issue is obfuscation, because ideally, you should be able to ship down precompiled bytecode for a VM in the long term. If the browser is going to become an OS platform, JS can't be the sole intermediate representation for executable content in the long term.
- Ray Cromwell
Gears has been dead (as in without a spirit) awhile, but now it is official http://www.pcmag.com/article... Shame it never lived up to potential
Being able to use Reader and Gmail offline was great! Can't wait to see what others do with the goodies in V5.
- Omni Adams
I don't know. I feel like the spirit of Gears is very much alive in HTML5.
- Kelly Norton
Someone snuck a useful "Timeline" view into the Chrome Developer Tools, listing load/script/render time. Looks cool.
Hasn't that been there for a while? Although I didn't notice the "Size" thing and the sort options before.
- Nick Lothian
oh, no - I was looking at timeline in the resouces view. I think the Timeline thing (and some of the other ones?) is new!
- Nick Lothian
Yeah, this one tracks loading/scripting/rendering, vs. pure load time of resources. It has some slider handles so you can narrow down the time as well.
- Matt Mastracci
I will confess. We were among the "sneakers". We focused mostly on building some traces through some key parts of WebCore (http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2009...). Timothy Hatcher and Pavel Feldman built the UI in inspector.
- Kelly Norton
Thanks, Kel. That seems like potentially useful information.
- Bruce Johnson
from BuddyFeed
I'm so clueless, I just noticed the "console" the other day that lets you view JS errors and even pause the load if an error occurs. Had no idea that was there. I'd been switching to Firefox every time something went wonky with my script, just so I could debug.
- Curtiss Grymala
Fix for GWT Hosted mode crash with Safari 4.0.4 - http://grack.com/blog...
My GWT started to crash all of a sudden because of Apple's JDK bug... damn thing ate all of my day..
- Ozgur Demir
if I just avoid safari and stick to Firefox I won't have any of these problems
- Andrew Euell
Ozgur, which JDK bug? Is that this one: http://grack.com/blog...
- Matt Mastracci
Awesome. I've been meaning to add those steps to the GWT issue. Since you've written it up, I'll just put a link instead.
- Kelly Norton
@Matt. yep.. same thing.. this suddenly started to happen today without a reason.
- Ozgur Demir
Ah.. no.. this was not it... I rechecked and noticed that I was already using java 1.5 and encounter this error and here is the answer: recent Safari 4.0.3 -> 4.0.4 update. It brokes GWT (don't know why) and here is the workaround: downgrade to 4.0.3 http://populationjim.com/2009...
- Ozgur Demir
Ozgur- you actually can fix that without downgrading. Check out the blog post linked above for a Kelly's method to use a nightly webkit build instead.
- Matt Mastracci
Hmmm thank you Matt (:
- Ozgur Demir
Trying to figure out if a 3x speedup in JS I get is from moving an indexed load out of a loop, or just a glitch. #magicblackbox
Roberto Bonini and Mark Trapp liked this
When you come out ahead it's best not to investigate.
- Kelly Norton
Firefox or Chrome. Make sure Firebug isn't accidently on, or triggered on by one domain, and off by another. (or filesystem/local)
- Ray Cromwell
I screwed up part of the perf work so we ended up doing 3x less work. I didn't trust the result, so I kept digging until I discovered my mistake (doh). Beefed up a unit test to make sure stuff like that doesn't slip by again (although after my Safari 4.0.4 upgrade, the old GWT hosted tests are busted locally, so I have to wait for CI). Grand total perf win for tonite's hours of work: 1%. :)
- Matt Mastracci
I have some good news! The Safari 4.0.4 GWT hosted mode bustage is not local to you :)
- James R
That is reassuring. :) I hadn't really had a chance to figure out if it was just my local situation. I guess this forces my hand to upgrade to trunk now.
- Matt Mastracci
from iPhone
You need a WebKit update - not a GWT one. http://nightly.webkit.org/ is thankfully very easy to do.
- James R
Google I/O 2009 - ...Performance Tips for Google Web Toolkit - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Andrew Bowers, Joel Webber and Bruce Johnson liked this
It might reflect badly on me if I "Liked" this.
- Kelly Norton
I got your back, Kel.
- Bruce Johnson
from BuddyFeed
Couldn't be as bad as Ray Ryan's "shrine wave".
- Joel Webber
Just wondering, is there something already that applies the optimizations you mentioned to javascript files? Is GWT appliying them as an post-compilation step? If so, is there a way to invoke just that step on already existing js files?
- Carlos Andrés Rocha
Not really. Google has some tools to optimize JavaScript, but it's actually not really JavaScript. It only allows a subset of the language and type information is required to enable many of the optimizations. I'm not aware of any projects that do this outside of Google. Internal to GWT there are compiler stages that operate on the JavaScript AST, but all the good stuff is done at the Java level. JavaScript is a language that really resists static analysis.
- Kelly Norton
And now those internal tools have been open sourced: http://code.google.com/p...
- Kelly Norton
..and that is pretty awesome. Thanks kel.
- Carlos Andrés Rocha
Don't understand Maine. How can what other people do change the sanctity of *your* marriage? How can social conservatives justify a free market ideology, but then turn around and support government restraint on the types of contracts people can enter into? Gubmint,hands off! But stop those people!
Bruce Johnson liked this
Great point, Ray. I'm going to steal that one.
- Bruce Johnson
from BuddyFeed
I've always wondered why it's not humiliating to these people that their notion of marriage is so weak and unstable that it is jeopardized by what other people do. Isn't that ultimately a vote of no confidence in their own institution.
- Kelly Norton
"Do something fun for yourself everyday" - John Mellencamp interview on NPR
Bruce Johnson, Joel Webber and Ben Dalton liked this
Does he have kids? Maybe his fun thing is moving Cougar in and out of his name :)
- Joel Webber
Apparently he does have kids. The statement was interesting. He was basically repeating something his dad always tells him. But the point he made was that people are always investing their time into work and a lot of people actually never cash out. The day they die they say they are working so they can eventually enjoy life. Kind of obvious, but it's always somewhat more interesting when you hear it from a guy who sang about pink houses.
- Kelly Norton
Sounds like the sentiments in "The 4-hour Work Week" Tim F calls it "life deferral"
- Bruce Johnson
from BuddyFeed
Remember when using the Internet meant telling your roommate not to use the phone and listening to 60 seconds of warbling tones to connect?
Joel Webber liked this
Yes. And remember how your roommate managed to pick up the phone while you were registering for classes causing you to have to take the 8am section of history.
- Kelly Norton
Think big. Code small.
John μller, Itachi, Laura Norvig and 88 other people liked this
How small?
- τorƍue
10 CLS
- Mattb4rd
Excellent advise K.I.S.S. :)
- Susan Beebe
How Big?
- John D Reasor
+ John
- τorƍue
Big enough to change the world, and small enough to get done right now.
- Paul Buchheit
Amen - release early, release often, especially as an entrepreneur
- Jesse Stay
Please provide a list of projects that we can get done right now that'll change the world. kthxbye
- Ken Sheppardson
Ken, I think the saying is, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"
- Paul Buchheit
Yeah, I figured you'd say something like that ;-)
- Ken Sheppardson
Paul, when you said "code small", was that just the first step? :)
- τorƍue
It's also the second step.
- Paul Buchheit
The next trick is taking all those steps in one direction, otherwise you can end up dancing around in one place like a madman, not actually getting anywhere. :-)
- Ken Sheppardson
20 ? "Shall we play a game?"
- Mattb4rd
Yes, good point Ken, though sometimes we must navigate around obstacles such as mountains and oceans.
- Paul Buchheit
And sometimes you have to head downhill to get to the top of that peak off in the distance.
- Ken Sheppardson
Don't forget time itself
- Jesse Stay
booo yaaa!
- Bill Heslin
On average, how much of a code project's big success could be significantly attributed to luck? Luck alone never gets it there, but still. I code because of the small rewards, so whatever the answer is, I'm fine with it. :)
- Micah Wittman
This is a more likely result, but keep swinging: http://friendfeed.com/funny-p...
- Mattb4rd
Think BIG. Code SMALL. Maintain ZERO! (Ideal conditions!)
- Nishant
Think small. Code big. http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc...
- Kelly Norton
lol @Kelly
- Nick Lothian
I'm currently coding for a machine that has 12 bytes of variable memory and 256 bytes of program memory. In a language with 32 commands. Am I coding small enough?
- Kevin Fox
Now wonders what Kevin is working on for Facebook ;-)
- Jesse Stay
Sounds like a remote control.
- Cristo
I've been coding a few of these for Halloween: http://efx-tek.com/topics...
- Kevin Fox
Cool. What's the application?
- Cristo
Light and sound effects with a few triggers.
- Kevin Fox
I must admit to being baffled by systems shipping with many gigabytes of code now that have similar functionality to systems with a few megabytes of code 15 years ago.
- Cristo
Kevin, nice! Now I want one. I remember writing a BASIC program in High School that controlled some AND gates via parallel cable on a circuit board we created in my electronics class. The purpose was to control 4 step motors. Awesome that you can just pre-program a chip now on a device like this that will do similar things. Need to look into that.
- Jesse Stay
Check out Revision3's podcasts. There are some with Patrick Norton doing this on System (I think that's the right one)
- Mattb4rd
@Paul: Which font size do you recommend for the code editor? 14pt? or is 10pt even better? ;)
- Jemm
Like jquery
- ★ Soner Gönül
Soner - that's a great example, actually. jQuery has been transformative, IMO, even in the face of alternative JS frameworks which aren't bad, just not greatness in a small package.
- Micah Wittman
Paul isn't it time for another sip of the premature optimization is the root of all evil kool-aide? You just aren't getting it :-)
- Todd Hoff
at atlanta airport, heading home! cant wait. bye, atlanta... till next time.
Sadly, almost all of Atlanta Engineering was in Mountain View so it must have been pretty lonely in the office this week.
- Kelly Norton
from Android
yep. it was totally like a ghost town! but that's ok. :)
- Jenna Bilotta
I made a sandwich earlier and was amazed how little it did to satisfy my hunger. Fifteen minutes later I found my sandwich in the den with only a single bite taken out of it.
Andrew Bowers, Bruce Johnson and Eric Ayers liked this
take a nap, brother
- Bruce Johnson
from BuddyFeed
Heh, I don't need a nap. What I need is a baby sitter.
- Kelly Norton
after 3 minutes with it, google wave seems completely non-awesome.
Oh, that's just because I wasn't logged in. It's more awesome right now.
- Kelly Norton
There should be a Reverse Turing Test, where you try and convince people you are Eliza or MegaHAL.
Andrew C, Mark Trapp, Itachi and sam liked this
I think I can pass that convincingly if you just let me use a computer :)
- Joel Webber
I think we already have that now. The general name we've given this collective is "the tech press".
- Kelly Norton
I was thinking out political system comes close, given the way spin and opposition works, it's so predictable. Party A gives speech: "Magnificent speech, one of the best ever!" Party B: "This speech was a disaster!"
- Ray Cromwell
Printer to me: "Offending command: timeout". I offended an inanimate object. I thought I was a pretty reasonable guy. Gives a whole new meaning to sensitive devices.
Matt Mastracci and Joel Webber liked this
Your jobs probably wouldn't timeout if you would stop sending the 'timeout' command.
- Kelly Norton
Oh, I thought I was sending the printer to Timeout in the corner when I pressed that large green button. It never obeys me.
- Andrew Bowers
I find it awesome that near-decade old, re-discovered source can still be compiled and run without more than a few tweaks.
John E. Bredehoft, Curtiss Grymala, Itachi and 5 other people liked this
In my opinion, that's the way it would logically be. Older codes do not try to be 'smart' and use this and that frameworks, or try to be 'sophisticated' and designed with multiple inheritance, overloading, and so on and so forth. They are written to 'get a job done, right now'. They might not be easily extensible (at a glance), but their simplicity made them, well, temporally portable (i.e., can still be compiled and executed many years in the future)
- Pandu ● IT Optimizer
from fftogo
I found some of my old code and was happy to see that it still doesn't work.
- Kelly Norton
A lot of old BSD code from the 80s in shar archives will still build, since it is mostly ANSI C with few dependencies. Our world today is increasingly interdependent. In the old days, a lot of projects had only 1 or 2 programmers, and they mostly wrote their own frameworks, which typically meant, they wrote their own linked list, hash tables, persistence code (usually dbm), etc.
- Ray Cromwell
This code was written in C++, then ported to work with g++. I wrote it to work against the std c and c++ libs. It links against GL, GLUT and SDL. None of those have changed enough in the last decade to cause issues.
- Matt Mastracci
from Android
@Kelly: "still" doesn't work, eh? Well, as they say, time heals all wounds, but it surely won't revive a long-dead corpse :-)
- Pandu ● IT Optimizer
from fftogo
But the real question is whether or not you still want to do whatever the compiled binary does. :)
- Curtiss Grymala
I took the plunge: Chrome is now my default browser. I was using it for the last few weeks, but starting it by hand.
CAJ, somewhere else, Kelly Norton and metalerik liked this
I am not using Chrome until an official Chrome version for Mac..
- Ozgur Demir
I made the switch a while back. Everytime I click on a link in another app and a new tab is started (instead of Safari's tendency to create a top level window despite what your settings say) I feel that distinct feeling of the absense of frustration.
- Kelly Norton
@Ozgur definitely agreed!
- Özge
What qualifies as official? Google is producing builds of Chrome for Mac and Linux: http://www.google.com/chrome...
- Kelly Norton
@kelly. on that page, on top: "Developer Release".
- Ozgur Demir
For a developer release, it is very stable. Some minor missig items: lack of bookmark import, --enable-extensions doesn't seem to work.
- Matt Mastracci
from iPhone
@Ozgur: So you aren't looking for official ... you're looking for a stable, non-beta release?
- Kelly Norton
My tab sizing complaint disappeared quickly after discovering the "close tabs to the right" menu item. Now I keep my important stuff on the left and clear the junk off the right when I have too many tabs.
- Matt Mastracci
from iPhone
@Matt. yea.. but still a development release (: on the other hand, the reason behind my decision is not even that, as a Mac & Linux user I am really disturbed by Google 's decision. "They can wait, we are working on Windows release". wtf?
- Ozgur Demir
Since all the platforms require a lot of unique infrastructure work (ie: figuring out how to run isolated processes with GUI components), I can understand the desire to perfect it on the platform with the biggest market share (I'm an OSX/Linux user too).
- Matt Mastracci
from iPhone
@Matt.. yes, but.. seriously...v3.0. And also, there is Firefox example on the other hand. I can't accept it as an excuse..
- Ozgur Demir
Hey Netflix, its cool that you use Silverlight and stuff. But you totally screw my iMac G5 with a PowerPC chip. Not supported? Guess I'll have to stream from Hong Kong. They don't seem to have a problem supporting me :(
Kelly Norton and Joel Webber liked this
I have a power mac g5 too and it seems we're all about to be dropped from existence by Apple. Now I'm thinking of other things I can do with this beastly metal box I have. I've always enjoyed sitting on top of mine, so I think I'll mount some controls and a motor and make it into the world's first racing workstation. Maybe I can race it on the lawnmower series.
- Kelly Norton
432 small openstudio drawings - http://www.flickr.com/photos...
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Carlos Andrés Rocha and Kelly Norton liked this
Are these from the set of SVG's I extracted back in April or did someone else do an export?
- Kelly Norton
Been Waiting For DotSpots? Come And Get It. - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009...
Rob Schonberger, Joel Webber, Kelly Norton and 2 other people liked this
Sweet - got in! Thanks.
- Kurt Starnes
I'm now distributing my objectified thoughts ... thanks dotspots. @Matt - Why am I limited to approved news sources for leaving a dot? I was actually going to be clever and respond to this friendfeed entry in dot form.
- Kelly Norton
Technically you aren't actually limited - you should be able to dot any text, anywhere (with the exception of https:// sites for privacy reasons). We do some analysis of the text client-side which is a bit more difficult on really dynamic sites like FriendFeed. There's some improvements to this coming down the pipe later on so we can offer this service universally. It's amazing what sort of things people are doing with DHTML these days (setting innerHTML to itself and recomputing the whole DOM?)
- Matt Mastracci
The stuff on the website references the news rather than the web in general because it's easier for people to process. :)
- Matt Mastracci
So long as you allow me to leave dots on localhost and about:blank. There was a firefox extension internal to google at one point that allowed you to comment and rate internal docs. I started the cult of about:blank, a secret society of people who were curious enough to try to abuse the extension.
- Kelly Norton
Oh, yeah. I almost forgot about that. Of course, on DotSpots, that might lead to a huge concentration of dots on a single URL, which may or may not be a good thing for the system.
- Joel Webber
Ah yeah, we limit the number of dots per paragraph to one to avoid too much clutter, but we'll be adding some per-viewport-page maximums as well in the near future. The theory we're running on is that people would rather see 2-3 really good dots inline and use a second step to view all of the other dots.
- Matt Mastracci
I generally use Vim for working in WebKit/Chromium codebase, but I'm trying TextMate. Any way to make it not beachball on large projects?
Hitting Cmd-T (which is the whole reason I was interested in TextMate) causes the UI to lock up for several seconds. Typing in the search box is unbearably unresponsive. Perhaps it's just not intended for use on something like the WebKit tree.
- Kelly Norton
My God, how did I get to inbox 547? I #blamedrewscancer for mailbox inflation. #rafflegrab
547! You have a long way to go: http://friendfeed.com/kellego...
- Kelly Norton
btw, I'm now at 12,849 (no wait, 12,850)
- Kelly Norton
LOL. I archived everything that was in my inbox from 2008 back in June and have been able to keep it pretty clean until now. Ugh.
- EricaJoy
Ze Frank on Labor Day and Socialism - Video - TIME.com - http://www.time.com/time...
Joel Webber, Kelly Norton and Ben Dalton liked this
"We hate lines so much we are willing to sacrifice our children and our life span."
- Kelly Norton
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