My new Bamboo Stylus arrived today! It’s just long enough so that the upper inch or so rests in the space between my index finger and thumb, and hefty enough so that I feel it there. I don’t have the specifications handy, but I’d say it weighs slightly more than a typical rollerball pen, but less than a typical fountain pen.
I’m playing more with Noteshelf and thinking about how I use a whiteboard. And I’m noticing aspects of my sketching for the first time…
My drawings mutate a lot as I create them:
I often wish I could do a diagram twice — once as a dry run, once “for real.”
These alterations happen more often to my drawings than they do for others. At least, it seems that way to me.
I often need to diagram things at work. It’s usually something like a system block diagram, a gnarly code problem, or client-server interactions. Sometimes it’s just a list of things I’m comparing.
Whatever the diagram is, I need to the keep it around for a while. And refer to it, scribble on it, and update it. And sometimes share it.
Since “back in the day,” I’ve used a whiteboard for this. Or sometimes pages from a pad of graph paper. I’ll noodle around, sketch things out, and leave it up.
For sharing, I’ve resorted to snapping a photograph of the whiteboard with my iPhone. (Or a couple of photographs, which I then stitch together with AutoStitch.) If the photo’s not adequately square, I straighten it out with Genius Scan. And then e-mail it. The mail message can get pretty large, so this can be a nuisance.
Eventually the whiteboard needs to be erased, or is accidentally erased. Or I lose the graphing paper doodles, or decide to throw out the diagrams.
In December, I received an iPad 2 as a gift. And I’ve gotten around to thinking, why not step up my game and use the iPad for this? (Yeah, I’m being dramatic and rhetorical. Sorry. I’ll re-phrase: “I’ve decided to use the iPad for diagrams and simple drawings.”)
I haven’t completely figured out how I’ll do this. I’ll write about my experience here as I go down the learning curve, mistakes and all.
Read more…
I protected my tweets on Twitter.
When you protect your tweets, you have to approve any new follower request.
This is easy if you use a desktop or laptop browser. But if you use a Twitter client application, or a mobile browser on Android or iPhone, you can’t approve new followers. In fact, you won’t even know about them. You’ll see new follower requests only if you view Twitter with a desktop browser. (I’m crawling slightly out on a limb here. I’ve tried a few iPhone apps, and none have let me approve follower requests. I can’t find references to Android apps that let you do this, either.)
This irks me.
I bought “Python Testing Cookbook” by Greg L. Turnquist, published by Packt.
The good. I liked the cookbook recipe approach. Each recipe has the same headers: Its name, “How to do it,” “How it works,” and “There’s more.” This may not sound fancy, and it isn’t, but it works.
The writing’s good (albeit sometimes elementary — see below) and the example code is well laid out (except when it isn’t — see below). The book starts with the simplest form of unit testing, and goes all the way to measuring test coverage, and load testing. That’s a lot for one book to cover, which is both good and bad. Your first line of defense can be one book, but unless the book is very well written, it may leave every reader scratching their head over one section or another.
I learned a couple of new tricks.
I recently questioned whether Bitbucket was suffering from neglect. My conclusion was, “yes”…
Jesper Noehr, a (the?) Bitbucket developer, replied to the post. He said Bitbucket’s development was “quite active.”
But… Bitbucket’s newsfeed has been “temporarily” disabled for over a week:
Bitbucket newsfeed problem
At my new job, we’re selecting a hosted “revision control + wiki + issue tracker + document repository” service.
My first recommendation was Bitbucket. I’ve used it for a while, and have always been satisfied. (I even have a paying account plan!) But after a day of use, we bumped into odd problems. Like, Windows users couldn’t upload documents, and errors when we used HTTP Secure protocol. And then I found many issues in Bitbucket’s issue tracker (i.e., issues about Bitbucket) that were (open && non-trivial && had no activity for many weeks).
How do we confidently assess the health of a hosted service? Large enterprises can meet the other company’s management and get privileged information about its finances, staffing, etc. But individuals or start-ups getting at that kind of information is impossible, or at least will need way more back-and-forth e-mails than they have time for.
I had a revelation this morning: I learn about news events mostly from Twitter. This seems obvious, and almost natural, in hindsight. But even three months ago I didn’t expect this.
In Becoming a Craftsman, Rock Hymas writes about Mercurial vs. Subversion. It’s an excellent exposition of the tools and their underlying philosophies, and how his own development style changed from working on a Mercurial-based project. It’s slightly marred by his conclusion that using Mercurial makes you a better developer; he seems to believe it does this partly through its own weaknesses, which I find odd reasoning. But putting that aside, it’s an excellent read.
He tasks me for my July 2008 article on Mercurial vs. Subversion:
One counterpoint to the ease of branching is that it may isolate developers. John DeRosa registers his concern about this:
“Additionally, I think distributed SCMs like Mercurial have a not-yet-fully-appreciated problem in making it too easy to not [ever] check code back into the main pool. With a local repository, a developer can feel protected from accidents and continue working happily for quite a long time. And then, say a year down the road, he/she does a massive check-in and discovers an integration problem. Branches, or a local repository that is effectively a private branch, should be easy to make — but not too easy.”
Let me explain why I don’t buy it. First, “a year down the road”?! Seriously? It says something that you have to imagine a scenario so horrible and unlikely in order to envision easy branching as a bad thing. I think that the author likely didn’t realize how easy merging usually is with a DVCS like Mercurial. And he must have totally forgotten that this lone maverick developer could have been merging the main development line into her own repository every day or week. The right solution to this imagined (and barely imaginable) scenario is not to eliminate easy branching, since without it the lone developer will do the same thing, but be much more likely to lose her work because it won’t be stored in a repository. The right solution is to fix a broken culture that enables someone to go a full year with no accountability for their work.
NewsGator has released a Beta update (3.2b6) of NetNewsWire, which is their Mac syndication feed reader. I’ve used NetNewsWire for over a year, and before that I used their FeedDemon syndication reader on Windows. I’ve been very happy with their readers, so when I received the notice of the new version + impending change to their synchronization service, I immediately upgraded.
Here is a snap review.
The UI is unchanged and there are no new features. Q: What new development has Newsgator done with their syndication readers? A: Nothing.
The only change is that it now syncs with Google syndication reader, because they’re nuking their NewsGator Online syndication service. Essentially, it’s now just a front-end to Google Reader. A front-end with a dated UI.
As an extra bonus, it nuked 3/4 of my subscriptions. By, “nuke,” I mean that they flat-out disappeared. Gone. Pffffffffffffft. That’s 3/4 of the subscriptions I have lovingly built up over the years. Thank you, that was swell.
I can easily confuse it by creating folder names containing commas.
I know this is a Beta, but come on.
I’m looking for recommendations for alternative RSS readers. I don’t like web-based readers; I prefer a local application. Any suggestions?
——
Update 7/30/09: The NetNewsWire Beta blog has a to-do list for version 3.2. It lists things that don’t work because Google Reader doesn’t support them. Like nested folders, and folders with names containing “certain characters.” The 3.2b6 Beta deletes them with no warning. Brilliant.
Over the years, I’ve used many website forums and bulletin boards. They’ve been based on a variety of packages, such as phpBB, LiveCloud, or vBulletin. PhpBB is, I think, the reigning king of forum software.
To add a forum to a site, you can use an off-the-shelf system, or roll your own. Casual sleuthing will reveal an assortment of at least 50 some-odd off-the-shelf bulletin board systems, from which you can choose one to run your forum. If you want a bespoke forum, most frameworks provide bits of the necessary functionality, if not entire customizable forum modules. For example, see the Django forum applications or Drupal’s Forum module.
Web forums are OK, but I’ve yet to encounter one that wasn’t clumsy in some way — sometimes, in multiple ways. And you know what? I’ve yet to find one that beats august Usenet, when accessed with a decent reader such as Agent or Unison.
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