I was never that happy with this color scheme, so my new mind-numbing, end of the day task will be re-styling it, as well as actually adding content to it. I’ve been digging up old websites I had done work on and taking some screenshots, so hopefully sometime soon the site will be blessed with real content. In the mean time, I’ve been trying to hack less on the shuttle as it absolutely kills my wrists, so that little side project I’ve been working on is taking a bit longer. I’ve also been spending some time reading Django docs/source and now the develpers mailing list, hoping to contribute to the ORM in the department of scaling. Then I can have my cake and eat it too – develop on a kick ass framework AND have it scale better than a fat whale on some swallows. Stay tuned for the redesign, I’m quite pleased with what I have so far.
Archive for September, 2008
mihasya.com is getting a kick in the ass
Monday, September 29th, 2008Beanstalk: a study in how to tell nobody uses your service
Sunday, September 28th, 2008I signed up for an account with Beanstalk a while ago back when I was looking for a place to host my code, and haven’t really visited or used it much due to having switched to Git (you’ll notice that after trying Beanstalk and rolling my own SVN/WebSVN, I’ve ended up at Github with all the cool Rails kids). They recently sent me an email asking how they can make their service better, but instead of replying like a civil person, I’ll rip on it here.
I actually like the Beanstalk quite a bit – had I not fallen in love with Git, I would have probably used this app quite a bit right about now: the free account allows up to 3 users, and that’s exactly what I need. However, the developers realized far too quickly that it is also the perfect app to ride 37signals jock with – it has a very limited feature set by definition, so it lends itself nicely to a nice clean, simple interface. The team ended up taking that mantra a little too seriously: they have foregone a “login” feature. I recently tried to log into my account to see what code I had there before closing it (I had completely forgotten about Beanstalk until they sent me that email), but alas I could not. Maybe I’m fucking crazy, but here are the screenshots. You tell me where the login button is. I tried clicking a few of the main navigation buttons to see if maybe it was tucked away somewhere, but I did not see it. Help me find it!
php: giving it a rest
Saturday, September 27th, 2008As I had previously indicated, I’ve gotten a bit tired of just hacking PHP all the time – one can only handle so much PHP array notation. Since I get to do a ton of that at Yahoo!, I’ve decided to try to do as little of it as possible outside. This means I won’t be touching my PHP projects very much.
Wheel and mihasya_libs, are both in a state where they can be used and certainly extended. The source can be found here and here respectively. I’ll gladly answer questions if someone actually wants to use it. I know one guy has already branched an older version, so I guess my blog posts and source publications weren’t as futile as they seemed at first.
What am I up to now? Python, and particularly Django. I know this seems ironic after all the shit talking I’ve done about frameworks, but let’s get real here – nothing I’m writing right now is going to scale very much any time soon. As a bit of good news, if it does, I have a pretty clear idea of how I would hack Django in a way that would keep the same pattern. In fact, I think that a lot of the features Cal requested in his keynote can be worked into the Django model quite nicely.
In case you’re wondering, I’m not just writing bullshit “hello world” apps in Django. Last week over the course of a few shuttle rides (oh commute, how I love you), I’ve quickly put together a little joke app. The back end is just about done (~6-8 hours of work, counting me poking around the django docs, examples and source at almost every step of the way, granted it doesn’t do much), so after I sprinkle some CSS magic and make some graphics in my VMWare’d copy of Photoshop (OH JOY!), I’ll unleash this beast. If it’s not launched tomorrow, it’s probably Gabe’s fault. Seriously, who the fuck still runs Gentoo?
FAIL: startwearingpurple.com
Monday, September 15th, 2008I was going to write a healthy rant about the bundle of fail that is Yahoo!’s new “start wearing purple” campaign, but it pretty much took care of itself. Just go have a look:
Reasons why this is total fail:
- it’s a marketing campaign about NOTHING
- Yahoo! clearly outsourced the development of this website – because it’s not like that’s what we do… websites…
- perhaps even more hilarious is the evidence for this: whoever did the website used mootools instead of YUI; gotta commend the sense of humor – a website all about getting people pumped up about Yahoo! using a library that is pretty much in direct competition with one of Yahoo!’s own.
- the worst part is that whoever they outsourced it to did a terrible job, in my opinion. I could catalog the reasons, but I’ll just let you roll your mouse over one of the pictures and see for yourself. Fancy animation does not a quality website make.
Yahoo! is a great place to work, and I really can’t complain about it too much, but things like this really make me wonder who was asleep at the wheel when this was getting pushed through. I bet someone gets a huge raise for this too.
Girltalk@Hackday 2008
Saturday, September 13th, 2008
The hackday concert this year did not disappoint. Gregg Gillis rocked the house. See my flickr stream for more photos/vids (click the picture).
The “Mojave” Experiment
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008Even if these commercials weren’t total bullshit… well… they’d still be total bullshit. Not a single one of those people is actually using the computer. Of COURSE it looks nice while somebody else is going through scripted bullshit interactions while you’re just watching the flashy moron-geared graphics and animations.
I wanna see one of those suckers plug in an inkjet printer. That is reality show material right there.
“JavaScript: The Good Parts”
Sunday, September 7th, 2008I highly recommend this book to anyone working with JavaScripts, particularly novices. I have very little ambition about the size of my javascript nuts, but I know I’ve grown a pretty decent pair over the years. I did, however, learn a whole lot from this quick, easy read.
If you are just starting to write JavaScript, READ THIS FIRST. In fact, this is probably the only book on JavaScript as a language in and of itself (outside the idiosyncratic world of browser DOM models and proprietary javascript engines) you should even bother reading.
Ironically, the part of the book that might be the most useful to a slightly more seasoned hacker are the appendices in which Crockford talks about the shitty parts of JavaScript. I actually do believe what Crockford says – if you only use the “good” parts and avoid the shitty parts, your code will be more reliable, more maintainable and easier to read.
The section on functions and closures opened my eyes.
In my opinion, a must buy for any serious frontend programmer. It helps that it’s also pretty cheap.
I know it totally sounds like I’m just trying to get in Crockford’s pants, but seriously, it’s a really helpful book.
On a side note, Open Hack Day is coming up. Stop by and show off.