Check out this suggestion IntelliJ IDEA makes when I try to find a file:
Never mind the terrible file name. Notice how it finds it even though I didn’t know it had an underscore in the name. Making the search do exactly what you expect would have been fine, but a real programmer thinks about what is really useful, even if it defies expectations.
Well, that was it. Today was the first time Microsoft ever distributed a new operating system for free. I spent some time this morning playing with the new Xbox interface.
Initial thoughts: Much better. Way faster to get around. Pretty. Going to do some more exploring after work.
Giant foreboding turtle and other interesting artwork.
Simmons and Burke have a lousy website but it is worth digging through for some of their massive collages of images found online.
Blip.fm is like Twitter for music. I have to admit that this one is aimed right at me.
Boxer has gotten DOS emulation for games, something that always sucked, simple enough to actually use without wasting away a few long nights.
ColorZilla Firefox extension is a color picker for the browser. I only use a couple plug-ins, but this is one of them.
Seven popular fonts for designers and a nice description for each.
Some beautiful art by Tony Ariawan.
Cal Henderson at Djangocon gives a very amusing talk, which eventually leads to some actual discussion of Django.
Some (nsfw?) stupidity that still amuses me every time I see it. I’ve said it before: cultural connotations don’t go away if you just ignore them. A designer legitimately has to avoid this kind of situation.
And here is the silly stuff that I finish with.
The most important programming skill I can think of has nothing to do with programming. It is the ability to think of every task in the context of the software that is being made.
The task: write an HTML parser in one week. A good programmer gets it done. A great one explains why the project is better off using an existing HTML parser.
The task: write a function to export a data structure to XML in three days. A good programmer gets it done. A great programmer asks why, finds out the reason for the task is irrelevant, and spends three days doing something useful.
The task: write a class that encapsulates some inventory business logic in a day. A good programmer gets it done. A great programmer thinks about it, nods, then gets it done.
If you’re worried that if you followed this process you’d often get the response “Just do it!” then your management may have some serious problems.
I actually have some legitimate things I’d like to write about soon, but this will have to do for now.
ThemeRoller is starting to take on some of the features of a framework, as hinted at during the jQuery Conference at MIT. You may know it as a handy tool for creating skins for jQuery UI widgets. What makes it more is the idea of being “ThemeRoller compatible”: designing your own widgets, or perhaps own sites, using the predefined CSS classes used by ThemeRoller. ThemeRoller takes care of some of the CSS problems you might have solved on your own: stretchy background images, relative sizing of elements, and browser compatibility.
It seems awfully simplistic for a framework, but it is serving the same purpose. How far can we go, using a predefined set of CSS classes instead of picking our own when we design? I’m not sure yet if a whole site could be reasonably made this way, and I’m not sure anyone has tried. But it is an interesting question: stylesheets are already reusable on a small scale (element selectors rather than class and id selectors) and it is fun to wonder if we can make them even more generally useful.
These three items with this smudge style really stood out to me. Will be hitting up the Diesel store to see them in person. Found on diesel.com.
The Rules of the Meme:
Take a picture of yourself right now.
Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
Post that picture with NO editing.
Post these instructions with your picture.
