rc3.org

Over a month later, post number two in my “rules of thumb” for developers series. The first post was on writing less code, period. This one is on using less indentation.

What I really mean by this is that I’m strongly not in favor of complex nested code structures. I find them to be difficult to [...]

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For the past six months or so, I’ve noticed a smattering stories that paint a very grim picture of goings on in Mexico. This morning’s news is that Mexico’s national police chief was assassinated in his home yesterday.

Last year the Washington Post reported on murders of Mexican musicians by drug cartels.

For more background, read about [...]

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… and then there are programmers. jQuery creator John Resig has ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript. Not only is this an incredibly cool hack, but it also makes Processing a heck of a lot more useful in a practical sense. I wonder if this will become the new best approach for presenting graphs [...]

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Good news: there’s now a native version of OpenOffice for OS X. Bad news: it’s really slow and buggy.

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Everyone’s heard the old saw, “Those who can’t do, teach.” Turns out the basic formulation goes back to the sixth century BCE, and is attributed to Anacharsis, a Scythian philosopher. Here’s the original, as reported by Diogenes:

He marvelled that among the Greeks, those who were skillful in a thing vie in competition; those [...]

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This story is astounding on many levels. Scientists recovered data from a Seagate hard drive found in the wreckage of the space shuttle Columbia. The hard drive was used to record data from a physics experiment conducted on the shuttle mission, and that data has now been processed and the results of the experiment have [...]

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FP Passport has some amazing satellite photos that show the extent of flooding in Burma in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. As we know from Katrina, insufficient official response following a disaster can lead to additional deaths, and Burma has one of the worst governments in the world. The Burmese government is almost certainly more [...]

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Today I actually get to vote in the Democratic primary. I’ll be voting for Barack Obama.

Let me explain briefly why I’m for Barack. Aside from the fact that his ideas for what we need to do as a country are roughly compatible with my own, it is his philosophy of how to govern [...]

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John Gruber digs into opinion among Blackberry users on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard. My theory on the iPhone has been that people switching from non-smart phones will love it, and that people who are switching from other smart phones probably won’t like it. If you are already a heavy Blackberry user, the loss of productivity [...]

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_why the Lucky Stiff is working to compile Ruby into Python bytecode so he can run it using Google Application Engine. I’m just linking to this because it’s so damn cool.

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