dripton

Last time I had two job offers, I chose a nice 12-mile bike commute over telecommuting. About 90% of the time, I'm happy with that decision. (The other 10% of days involve bad weather or rude drivers.)

Of course, if I were telecommuting I could just go take a bike ride at lunchtime on nice days, and not have to deal with darkness or bad weather or packing work clothes or rush hour traffic. Though I worry that I wouldn't.

Now that some browsers have merged the URL bar with the web search bar, you will end up doing this whether you want to or not. And even if it's obviously a URL rather than a search term, Chrome (by default) sends every URL you type to google.com for autocomplete. (For the ten minutes between when I found this feature and I found out how to disable it, I was really angry at Google.)

Yes. I loved this book, but didn't really get much out of it except affirmation of my own beliefs. I think it would be much more valuable for a new programmer, or a non-programmer who works with programmers, than for an experienced programmer.

Pillow (https://github.com/python-imaging/Pillow) is a fork of PIL. If you look at recent commits, you'll see one that claims to make it more Python 3 friendly, but not quite Python 3 compatible because of differences in the C code. So maybe a good opportunity for someone to jump in and fix that.

They do update them, but manually and probably not very often. Looking at commit logs, all three features that have asked for donations have had a lot of work done, but that's different from success.

You don't get to pick what other people work on, unless you pay them.

PyPy is quite friendly to new contributors, so if you want to help speed up JSON or improve docs, visit #pypy on freenode and offer to pitch in, and I'm sure some core developers will do their best to help you help them.

Or if you really want a feature but don't have time to work on it, see if any PyPy devs are accepting contract work. I suspect speeding up JSON wouldn't take one of the experts long, so it probably wouldn't cost you much.

Docs are more of a moving target: no matter how much you write, users will always want more (and then some of those complaining users will fail to actually read what you do write). There was a tutorial session at PyCon US this year about using PyPy to speed up Python code, and the video is on Youtube.

Fantastic.

Needs a pause button.

Note that some of these changes were forced by rules changes. So I don't know if "evolution" is quite the right word.

I don't have actual numbers, but it's my primary desktop at home, and it saw everyday use.

Funny, I suspect that SSDs have much higher real-world failure rates. (My personal, limited, anecdotal evidence is that my 64 GB Crucial M4 SSD lasted about a year as the root drive in a busy Linux desktop, while I have a stack of about a dozen hard drives that have been retired due to being too small or too slow while still working fine.)

Lack of moving parts is great, but flash allows a finite number of write cycles.

I've never had a debit card. Every time I've opened a bank account, I've asked for a plain ATM card with no Visa or MasterCard logo instead. It's safer because there's a mandatory PIN and an enforced daily withdrawal limit.

I bought a 64 GB Crucial M4 SSD for a boot drive for my Linux desktop about a year ago. About a month ago, it started giving read/write errors eventually leading to kernel panics. (Didn't lose any data.) I switched back to the hard drive.

I don't see a huge difference in productivity for normal desktop use. An SSD is definitely quieter, and somewhat faster, but caching means most of us are already not hitting the disk that hard. (Obviously if you're doing intensive work with big data that doesn't cache well, that's a different story.)

Which is still way better than any lottery I've heard of.

My netbook is running Lubuntu 11.10. It was previously running Ubuntu 10.x Netbook Edition and Ubuntu 10.04. They work. (I like Gentoo too, but I don't want to do much compiling on a netbook.)

Most GUI programs aren't designed to use in 1024x600. For example, it's hard to actually read email in Thunderbird because there isn't much room for text after subtracting pixels for window decorations, menu bar, toolbar, header bar, and status bar. I think a netbook would benefit from a tiling window manager, but I haven't got around to installing one yet.

It's theoretically a felony charge in every state, but in practice, drivers who run over pedestrians or cyclists often get charged with traffic infractions or don't get charged at all.

In the US we have three kinds of charges: felonies, misdemeanors, and infractions.

Felonies are major criminal offenses. Misdemeanors are minor criminal offenses. Infractions are oopsies.

Most traffic charges are treated as infractions, even when they lead to levels of damage or injury that would ordinarily mean a misdemeanor or felony. Cars are somehow "special." If you want to get away with murder in the US, definitely use a car not a gun.

(But don't be drunk. Drunk driving is no longer socially acceptable -- if you're drunk and kill someone with your car, that's serious jail time. If you're just a bad driver and kill someone with your car, that's an oopsie.)

Max out the 401k and IRAs every year. Save more on top of that. Hope we don't get hyperinflation to wipe out all those savings. If necessary, keep working (maybe part-time, maybe telecommuting, whatever) into old age.

EULAs are only valid in some jurisdictions.

Of course, even if one lives in a jurisdiction where they're not, it would take some guts to stand up to Oracle's lawyers. And to convince your ISP, your government, etc. to stand up to Oracle's lawyers.

If you're a W2 employee, they already have that information. It's on the W4 form that you fill out when you start a job, so that they can deduct the right amount from each paycheck.

Also, while we're at it, animated GIF click-to-play.

I don't want anything on a web site animating or making noise without my specific permission.

I found CarMax to be pleasant to deal with, but they have awful prices, both when buying and selling. For example, they offered me $5000 for my car, which I ended up selling pretty easily to some guy on Craigslist for $7500. Of course there's more hassle with a private sale, but not $2500 worth of hassle.

Can you cite the law?

I think it's fine to compare Go and Python. They're both general-purpose programming languages. When choosing to write a new program, you can often pick either of them. I can imagine problems where either might be a reasonable choice. In fact, there are programs that I've written in both. (Granted, those were Project Euler exercises, not code that someone was paying me to write.)

Don't get too caught up in the marketing.

The US military has been offering ROTC scholarships that completely cover all college costs (at least at cheaper schools) for a long time. Of course they also include a multi-year commitment to a job that could include being shot at.

Probably none. You can still use ZeroMQ. If Crossroads ends up better than ZeroMQ, you can switch.

I'm a programmer in the US, and I get 4 weeks paid vacation plus 2 weeks paid sick leave plus 10 paid holidays.

At my previous job I got 4 weeks vacation (it would have gone up to 5 weeks after 4 years) plus (I forget how much) paid sick leave plus 6 paid holidays.

At the one before that I got 4 weeks vacation plus unlimited (within reason) paid sick leave plus 10 paid holidays.

In other words, you don't need to move to Europe. You just need to find a better job.

I sometimes see C++ code where all the member variables start with "m_". I'd much rather have it enforced by the language than in a coding convention. (I personally find Ruby's explicit "@" prefix for member variables prettier than Python's explicit "self.", but that's minor.)

For my area, Apple has several zoom levels of detail less than the others. It shows the small streets but not their names. Google and OSM zoom to the same level, but OSM shows more details like walking paths and power-line rights of way. So I'd use OSM if walking or biking, Google if driving, Apple never.

Possibly. (Not necessarily at exactly the same time.)

I read the study, and they did attempt to isolate this effect from others, but correlation is still not proof of causality.

It's also possible that there's a co-factor: TV appeared about the same time as reliable birth control.

Obviously, the LICENSE file wasn't there when I posted my snarky comment. Props to the author for adding one, though, since now I know that I can use this code.