arocks

I think every introductory programming language must make it easy to play musical notes with a command as simple as:

    PLAY "T180 DF#A L2 A L4 O4 AA P4 F#F# P4 O3 D"

and draw simple shapes with a statement like:

     LINE (0,0)-(100,175),2,BF

Code in BASIC might have not been the most well-written. But it was certainly fun to program in!

and another: http://bootswatch.com/flatly/

> Steering an offshore team in an Agile manner is hardly possible

This is so true. I sometimes wonder how the so-called Agile offshorers actually work.

This has been a long awaited update for django-registration to make it compatible with Django 1.5's user model. To give some context, several people submitted pull requests over the last few months which were continually rejected. Glad to see this canonical Django package getting finally updated.

Note: The documentation[1] still describes 0.9 version.

[1]: https://django-registration.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

I completely agree that the new icons look much worse than their predecessors. Even if they wanted to embrace Flat Design they could have done a much better job. For example, this designer seems to have nailed it: http://www.behance.net/gallery/iOS-7-Redesign/9271243

A lot more examples are in the Python wiki: http://wiki.python.org/moin/Powerful%20Python%20One-Liners

This is brilliant and looks much more comprehensive. My intention was to use Django to the fullest without the help of a third party library. Mainly to cover some of the recent features of the framework which were not covered elsewhere.

I would like to clarify that I was working on this, on and off, since last year (yes, it takes quite a bit of effort to create video tutorials). I read the tutsplus course page and it seems it is a course for teaching Django to beginners. It seems our approaches are different too.

Hi! This is the author. I was pretty sure that someone would point this out and I completely agree.

But, even Programming has to be taught. Among the many ways to learn programming, I think the best approach is to demonstrate how a good progammer programs and explain the thought process.

One of the endearing qualities of web design and development was how the source was open for everyone (HTML, CSS and JS). Developers could read the code, understand and remix each other's work. This helped in its rapid growth from a design platform to an application platform.

Enter asm.js, where the source code is as readable as a compiler's assembly output. Once again we are back to code that is hard to hack and improve. Sort of similar to the days of Flash except that entire applications are being built on this platform.

It might be a great end user experience, but it is not the best way forward for web development.

I have been using Feedly for a bit and my analysis:

PROS

- Great UI. Layout similar to a Magazine

- Intelligent sorting of content - Must Reads etc.

CONS

- No offline reading on Android app

- No pure HTML client like Google Reader

- Feedly Chrome Extension eats up RAM and slows down my laptop. Uninstalled.

CONCLUSION: Still looking for a better alternative

Exactly. It would be great if we can see which languages and other server side technologies they use.

Google Reader was a busy user's tool for reading through several blogs quickly. Asking Google Plus users to visit the blog makes it as useful as, say Twitter without any of the productivity benefits. It is a typical social platform with all the distractions for people who would like to be distracted. A different set of users, in my opinion.

Another two months and we should see the headline, "How and Why We Switched from Python to Go."

An extremely informative and well-designed site. I wish all open source projects had a section which explained why they chose the components that they have chosen and a high level diagram of how the technology works.

Content produced by Disney and others are written with a stereotypical kid in mind. Their brief must be something like this - "Our target audience needs a bright colour palette with lots of bubble gum pink and syrupy greens. Should have fast and loud sequences to keep them engaged. Goofy characters work. In any case - Don't Make Them Think".

Trust me it is a relief to not see the young generation glued to such content all day (which even they don't find engaging any more). If they find joy in building and designing something themselves, then more power to that.

> What I realised, however, was that by not getting to know the iOS ecosystem in extreme detail before designing for it, I was completely ignoring the imperative for design to suit its context.

Good user interface design must always follow the maxim - Don't make me think. Hence, context and medium is always key to interface design.

Ah, ten years of separating content from style. It promised then that if designed properly, any page from the last decade can look contemporary by just changing the CSS. I think CSS Zen Garden is itself a proof of that.

Misleading headline alert. All code is debuggable. Logging, mentioned in the article, is more similar to code tracing. It may or may not be useful, because the log might omit information crucial for debugging. There is no way someone can write logging code for every scenario that might break in production.

To me, easily debuggable code (whatever that means) is code written clearly with good documentation. Often well architected systems are modular (rather than a spaghetti mess) and problems are easy to isolate.

I recently moved my blog from Jekyll to Pelican and wrote about it [1].

Functionally some of the differences I found are:

* Jekyll output directory structure has a one-to-one correspondence with its input. While Pelican tries to standardize it for you e.g. static files go to one folder.

* Pelican has built in support for theming. Jekyll makes no such distinction between your theme and content.

* Pelican has a much more modular architecture since it can supports multiple inputs like reStructuredText/Markdown and multiple outputs like PDF

Anecdotally, I found Jekyll to be a bit slower than Python for building my blog.

[1]: http://arunrocks.com/moving-blogs-to-pelican/

Agree with a lot of points and appreciate someone writing it down. Way back in the days, I used to be a pencil and paper type programmer; there used to be very little distractions like social networks or even an online help systems.

As a result, I still have a more comprehensive knowledge of the standard library of a language or the instruction set of a microprocessor. Today, my learning is very need based. While programming, I cherry pick the information I need based on Google searches.

This leaves me extremely dependent on externalities and am faced with too many distractions. Maybe, I need to learn to tune everything else out and focus more.

> Programming is like a house builder.

Sorry, but that analogy is completely wrong. I would recommend reading Fred Brook's "The Mythical Man-Month" (among many other books on software estimation) to understand why.

He argues that unlike activities involving physical mediums like house building, computer programming creates with an intractable medium. You would be surprised, in the field of programming, that many so-called "programmers" cannot even build a simple house that is stable on its own foundations.

In fact Winzip recognizes extension-less README files quite well. It shows them in a different color and most users understand that it is something to be viewed. The name 'README' is pretty obvious.

While we are at it, do we still need to use the three letter extensions which are a legacy of the MS-DOS era and FAT filesystems? A couple of years down the line, people would wonder why we tried to save one letter by typing 'txt'!

Implying that the Job's quote can promise future innovation is a bit of a stretch. It is a good story, I agree. Without the occasional frictions and collisions, it is almost impossible to make a group of highly talented people produce great results.

Having said that, just having a highly talented team without good leadership is disastrous. The role of the leader is more important than the sum of talents of the team. He inspires the team to a common vision and ignites passion. The term 'passionate team' becomes meaningless without a shared vision.

It is not fully scripted. The game has enough random elements that it might result in an unplayably hard scenario e.g. key portal blocked by dozens of mobs. Hence the AI must be smart enough to reduce the intensity of the generated content to a sufficiently playable level.

This is a challenge in every randomly generated game content and the AI Director solution seems to be a fair one.

Series 40 was one of the best operating systems built by Nokia. Unlike the Series 60/Symbian series, these Nokia phones are snappy and do not slow down with time.

These feature phones were quite capable for basic phone features, but never evolved to the Facebook era. This effectively led to the mass adoption of touch screen based phone. If Nokia has solved the social app problem with this phone, I think they have a winner.

Direct link to the research mentioned in the article: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.0265v1.pdf

It concludes that Big Bang risky projects should be avoided and smaller projects with comprehensive contingency plans should be preferred instead.

Indian Astrology is quite a lucrative field. Almost every other person in India believes in it, including wealthy businessmen who are interested in everything from calculating the right time to start a new venture to the most numerologically lucky name for themselves.

On the other hand, most mathematicians end up as school teacher in India, especially if you are only good at arithmetic (which I believe was the case, based on her feats and books). Being a school dropout, she would have faced huge barriers in any Indian academic institution to conduct research in Mathematics.

So, you are right, in the absence of a mentor there were not many options left for Shakuntala Devi. Mathematical calculations are heavily applied in Indian astrology and now computers are used for this purpose. Hence, Astrology would have been an interesting diversion for her.

Shakuntala Devi had also inspired an entire generation to read and understand her books about recreational mathematics. Her books like 'Puzzles to Puzzle You' were used to prepare for interviews in IT companies which used to have several rounds of puzzle solving.

She would probably be the last human (that I am aware of) who could beat a computer in arithmetic.

I am not sure if every product benefits from reducing Cognitive Overhead. Some of the areas where it would work are novel technologies (like Shazam or Wii) or mass market products.

How many of us would use a music player that just had start and stop buttons? Why would this seem as an inconvenience? If the product is already familiar, then it would be better to improve on the already familiar interface. When it is a completely new technology, you get an opportunity to make a fresh start.

Similarly, many niche products have power users who would be unhappy if the interface is too "dumbed down". The classic case of an IDE and UNIX text editors come to mind. An IDE is quite obvious to use, but many would not find it as efficient.

Cognitive overhead is a good guideline but we need to understand our target market first.