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 follow when reading code, and to be good places for little logic bugs to hide. How often have you seen code that looks like this? ...
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 Los Zetas, a group of former special forces soldiers who hired themselves out to a Mexican drug cartel. ...
… 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 and other data visualizations within Web pages?
Good news: there’s now a native version of OpenOffice for OS X. Bad news: it’s really slow and buggy.
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 who have no skill, judge
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 been published. Follow the link for a photo of the hard drive in the state in which it was found. ...
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 concerned with hiding how bad things are from its own citizens and the rest of the world than it is with actually preventing further loss of life. ...
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 switching brings on probably doesn’t compensate for the areas where the iPhone is superior to the Blackberry. ...
_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.
Tyler Cowen links to a comment on the FT Economists’ Forum by author Paul Collier on rising food prices and the political problems that prevent us from addressing them effectively. Collier’s argument is that we’re failing largely due to resistance to industrial agriculture and genetically modified crops. First, here’s why food is getting more expensive: Paradoxically, this squeeze on the poorest has come about as a result of the success of globalization in reducing world poverty. As China develops, helped by its massive exports to our markets, millions of Chinese households have started to eat better. Better means not just more food but more meat, the new luxury. But to produce a kilo of meat takes six kilos of grain. Livestock reared for meat to be consumed in Asia are now eating the grain that would previously have been eaten by the African poor. ...