dws

A co-worker built his using the GeekDesk frame and a butcher-block table top that he scavenged from somewhere. Quite nice.

"no... I just haven't done it. I've so far found no need to."

Also touched on in the sections on "Fisheye View" by Leung et al., "A Review and Taxonomy of Distortion-Oriented Presentation Techniques" in Card et al., "Readings in Information Visualization", Morgan Kaufman, 1999.

A bit of googling also turns up http://eagereyes.org/blog/2008/fisheye-calendar-at-yahoo.htm... and a PDF of Bederson's paper on Fisheye calendars http://www.lib.umd.edu/drum/bitstream/1903/1201/1/CS-TR-4368...

If you want a better guarantee of having 3 pairs, go with 7 developers. Then you're covered when one is sick/on vacation/on jury duty/off getting married/stuck at the DMV, etc., and you've built in some insurance in the event that one of your coders gets run over by a bus.

Thanks.

After re-reading this article, I'm still not clear on how these snapshots ended up in _his_ EBS account. Can someone explain (in terms that a non-EBS user will understand)?

"Compare and Contrast." They're on the chart to show what your options are when you select CA from CAP, and to provide a basis for comparison with the other options.

I'm mixed on this. But it does explain a weird "Google for X, it's on the first page," "No, it's not!" incident at work that resulted in a 5 minute team Googlefest.

Your choice might depend on your eyes. If you're subject to presbyopia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbyopia), either due to age or a bad draw in the gene pool, having two 24" monitors lets you angle them to minimize the need to refocus.

Using jQuery in the (optional) admin tool doesn't commit the framework to jQuery. The view and template mechanisms remain blissfully JavaScript toolkit agnostic. I happen to use jQuery with Django, but appreciate the neutrality.

As he mentions, if you only ever look at the code through an IDE that does code folding, the long list of imports is a non-issue.

Beware of sample bias: People who have netbooks may be universally happy with them, but you're not hearing from the population who found the keyboards too small to type on comfortably (even for short-haul typing such as emails) and opted for something with a full-sized keyboard. Jeff found a model with a full-sized keyboard, but those are very recent. Stores in my area don't stock them yet.

This advise carries over to software development. To give yourself focus the next morning, leave yourself with a breaking test.

I'm wondering whether some of the Rock Star Games management got their start at EA.

There's a lot of space left over from the dot-com run-up, and it's built for a profile of VC-funded startup that's been on the decline since the bubble burst. A lot of the empty space I see in the south bay is of the old 'big open space in the middle surrounded by offices' model that assumes the big, florescent-lit cubicle farm that used to be the norm.

So the space is there, but it's a good thing for a type of tech company that seems to be getting rarer.

Peter Norvig points out elsewhere that some apparent "declines" can be explained away by a growing population of non-technical web searchers.

There's no snow to shovel in Silicon Valley. Does that matter? Hell, yeah.

"The Age of Persuasion" is excellent. You can ferret MP3s out of the CBC pages with a bit of work.

Meanwhile Coffee shops with wifi are full.

Diseases. Catastrophes.

How does tornado on twisted perform relative to tornado?

Citation? Evan is from near Lincoln, a significantly smaller city.

If you're working near florescents, try moving or turning them off. If you made an unlucky draw in the gene pool lottery, the fast flicker from florescents can interfere with your eyes' ability to focus, which can lead to eye strain. Taking a periodic break to stare at something distant is good. My optometrist claims that getting a 15 minute dose of indirect sunlight (looking at something outside with a blue sky background) is even better.

An eye exam will also rule out something like cataracts, which usually hit when you're a lot older, but may arrive early if you made a particularly unlucky draw from the gene pool.

"The best programmers are the ones who write the most legacy software. The best programmers are the ones who learned the most from their projects and go on to be better and better."

The second bit is true. The first bit is almost certainly not. DHH makes some good points in this talk, but it sure seems as though most of his experience is on projects that he either started or was with from the early days, and that he's been spared the pleasure of working on codebases where 'svn annotate' shows names of people who have been gone from the project for years.

Yup, Peopleware. That's what I get for ignoring the "time for sleep" clue.

Tom DeMarco was part of the paradigm shift toward thinking about software development as an Engineering discipline. He was very influential in his day, and "The Mythical Man Month", with he co-authored with Tim Lister, continues to influence. What's remarkable about his article is that thought leaders of a revolution often go to their graves convinced that they were right. Seeing one thoughtfully recant is a rare pleasure.

The article is vague on when MySQL was dissed, but the closer you get to 2002, the more common MySQL 4 was.

Which the City of Bozeman has since backed off on.

Decent overview. Skips over middleware.

I remember a time when webpagesthatsuck.com didn't suck. Now it's full of ads.