codefisher

But we expect this don't we from YouTube? Just as an example of how broken it is I have been live streaming at our local church, our parish priest decided to sing "Tantum ergo" which was written and set to music at best guess 1264. YouTube flagged it.

I will also have to write normal views for it. I just would like some easy system for pluging those views all together nicely for, without having to do it myself. Also some extra stuff to take care of permissions when doing that. I eventually I think I will have to write my own such system to get what I want.

I mentioned the admin interface as well. I wish it was easier to customise when you need something more user friendly, and not something that is just a GUI for accessing the database. But it is hard to get away from, since everything else by default plugs into it.

I would like more accountability from professors somehow. Maybe not from student reviews, but at least someone unknown to the professor randomly attend a few classes to check the quality of them. Right now I have a professor that says things during class that are obviously incorrect, and can be verified as incorrect. Her attitude towards students is also disrespectful. But there is nothing we can do about it, no way to communicate to the university that they should be embarrassed and ashamed to have such a professor.

This was what we taught to say when I was a tutor for a university. The point was the student could not come and just point out that something was wrong with the marking and they deserve more points. If they thought the grade was not fair it could be remarked, but the whole thing would be remarked and a totally new grade assigned. You might come out better or worse for it.

This looks like it could help make it much easier to profile my django web apps during development.

The equivalent code with out the context manager is actually this:

  f = open('foo.txt')
  try:
     contents = f.read()
  finally:
     f.close()

So yes, extra reason to prefer the context manager.

I am in Europe (Italy) right now and before it was taken down thepiratebay.se was blocked. But now I can access it directly. Interesting.

Users should be able to access all your content without JavaScript. I think the old rule of progressive enhancement still applies, JavaScirpt can add extra things, but everything should remain functional without it. If it does not work without it, your doing yourself harm I think, remember one very important user is search engines, and they don't (as far as we know) use JavaScript.

I saw most of this coming. I have studied a little Ancient Greek which has the same problem of the Arabic, and Polish which is similar to the Russian, and now I am living in Italy. I guess it is one of those things though as programmers that we just forget about too much, and just expect translation to a mechanical process in the last stage of the development cycle.

Besides all the jokes - which are funny - this is something I posted a bug about before, when working on slow unreliable networks this can happen. You end up reading half the page, and then it tells you it can be displayed.

What I came here to say. If the screen is wider, it just means I can position two things side by side, what ever that be: email + webpage, word document + webpage, code + webpage, code + command line

I pirate tv and movies because for me that is the only reliable way. If I got to Amazon/iTunes and try and buy a download it rejects my visa card for not being from the country in which I live (studying overseas). The torrets are providing a better service, I find what I want quick and easy, and there is no payment problems.

If there is a good service and I have to pay no problems. I am willing to give out $10 to Amazon every time there is a ebook I want. Give me a better service so I can follow the 2-3 TV series I want, and watch the occasional movie, I will pay.

That is not really very relevant when building a Firefox add-on. Firefox add-ons get incredible access privileges to the browser internals. That is part of what makes it hard, but also powerful. An example of what I mean, it was not overly complex for Sunbird (the calender app) to be turned into a add-on. There is no reason also for example that Thunderbird could not be turned into an add-on for Firefox. Except then you would have SeaMonkey...

But my 2c, is that even if the project does not work out as hoped, what ever they are doing can put turned into ad add-on.

I would guess it is in part because a lot of them carry around far too much baggage that adding this in afterwards is too much work.

I am having a shot at it with django. Rather early yet, but doing something like this is the goal. It only really exists on svn right now http://codefisher.org/svn/djangopress/

It looks like I have got higher up the ranks for some of my keywords, so the change must be good ;)

I guess they mean they made everything that the user is aware of. Uses don't see, or even need to know about WebKit or SQLite.

But since when was advertising honest?

It would be nice if they made it easier to disable all alerts (it is possible, but takes a bit of reading to work out). In general I hate their use.

10 years is too long though for a simple thing like this.

It would just turn into a place where nobs ask questions, and you really want that done in the proper place. And you also have the moderator overhead.

Haskell was my answer too, mainly because it is rather different from other languages I know, so it forces you to think out side the box, and try new things. Which you then bring back to other languages.

Do similar things only when there is nothing else really interesting ready to hand. So if I have an assignment due and have a total dislike for it, yes I will waste a lot of time reading various site like HN. But if I have something fun available, maybe only a few moments when I am taking a break.

The book I have is "C A reference Manual" by Harbison and Steele. The advice I got when I had to buy one or other for a course I was doing that it covered much the same stuff, just assumed you had some background in programming.

I don't know, the contract between the background and the text is low already, so making it worse would be kind of hard.

I like using a drop shadow on headings or other important bits of text that have been placed on something that causes the contrast to be low. But I try to make it so it is not obvious it is there, just subtle.

At the end of the day this is why I don't use CAPTCHA's on my site, they can be broken by a bot that is smart enough. The better option is to use something to analyse the contents of the spam to decide what it really is, and there are some tools that are really good at doing this. Heck I even found for one form that banning 'http:// (and notifying users with JavaScript if they typed it) stopped 100% of the spam I was getting.

Mine was similar, Python Python C/Java. Though there are half a dozen others that I am perfectly comfortable with.

You might be able to copy the parser out of the Google Closure Compiler. http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/ you can be sure it works, and is stable. I think though it uses Rhino under the hood, so you could look at that too. http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/

There are quite a few things you need to learn to be able to program well. One of the easy ones is syntax, which is what you have to learn to go from one language to another, in addition to the names of variables/functions.

What is much harder to learn, and is largely language independent is: 1) Problem solving - the ability to break problems down into simple task that then can be trivially solved. 2) Data structures - programs are unless unless they have data to work with. Knowing how to best represent it is vital, do you use an array, linked list, tree etc. 3) Algorithms - known ways of operating on data to produce some out come. Everything from using a loop to add numbers, to sorting lists, or adding a node to a red-black tree. 4) Design Patterns - know ways to structure code, in a tried and tested fashion. 5) Architecture and Interface design - how to structure your project as a whole (what goes where) and how to set how one portion interacts with all the others.

Along with many other things. Point being the first language you learn matters little, if you learn to program that cross any language barrier. I have not touched the first language I learned for almost a year, but have learned 2 others in that time.

Having said all that, I am most at home in Python because there I know many of the language specific features.

Reminder to self, don't multi-task and half read stuff before posting comments.

It is a pity that the API does not have a way of getting what appears on the front page. I was planing to soon create a script that scanned the front page, and then applied pg's algorithm from "a plan for spam" to remove links that I think are off topic. Actually turning that into a desktop client would be rather cool, or maybe a Firefox extension as that is more my kind of thing.

I agree with you on 8) I don't see why it matters so much what style of braces are used as long as the block of code and I currently looking as it consistent. If future developers object that badly, there is also many many auto formatters out their to fix it.

the article is clearly rather dated, and a number of the points (as jws notes) are rather irrelevant now.