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mccutchenon AppEngine 1.4.3 released: new file API, concurrent requests & more

Hasn't this mostly been addressed by the High Replication Datastore?

mccutchenon Keep the JVM, dump the rest ([thoughts on] Scala+Play+MongoDB)

Like the author, I'd be interested in hearing about better ways to handle Scala's `Option` type.

mccutchenon The most modern browser there is: Internet Explorer 9 reviewed

True, but lack of XP support combined with XP's 40-50% market share in early 2011 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows#Usage_share) means that this great new browser might take a long time to gain traction.

mccutchenon The most modern browser there is: Internet Explorer 9 reviewed

That's a fairly inflamatory headline, and the reviewer's definition of "modern" is never explicitly given. I'd argue that the Chromium and WebKit nightlies I downloaded this morning are more "modern" than IE9.

Edit: Still, kudos to Microsoft on what appears to be a solid, modern web browser. I'm just taking issue with the review's angle.

mccutchenon Dudes, this is so not REST

We might be getting close to this point: Maybe we should just give up on the term REST, since it’s become so diluted as to mean nothing more than “HTTP API that’s not as hard to use as SOAP”?

This is a shame, because RESTful APIs are (for me, anyway) usually a joy to build and to use.

mccutchenon Neat Algorithms - Flocking

Here's an implementation I wrote some years ago that includes obstacle avoidance. Clicking adds obstacles, spacebar adds boids, reloading gets new colors. This ended up looking somewhat like sperm avoiding eggs...

http://humortree.org/projects/flock03/

(Java applet warning!)

The source code is here:

https://github.com/mccutchen/humortree.org/tree/master/proje...

mccutchenon Fabric Python with Cleaner API and Parallel Deployment

I had not heard of func until this thread. I chose fabric because it was the only Python-based option I was aware of.

mccutchenon Httpstat.us: API for generating different HTTP codes.

Recent-ish WebKit and Firefox browsers do support PUT and DELETE in XHR requests. I'm pretty sure that any IE < 9 does not, not sure about IE 9 or Opera (though I'd guess Opera does support those verbs).

mccutchenon App Engine 1.4.2 SDK - API Updates and Additions Edition

They've had support for Django 1.0 and 1.1 for some time now.

mccutchenon The "S" Stands for "Simple"

This is old, but I thought it was great. I'm just glad suds exists (https://fedorahosted.org/suds/) for when I do have to deal with SOAP (Amazon's Fulfillment Web Services, primarily).

mccutchenon Practices That Hurt Dyslexic Users

Most of the criticisms of justified text are based on the fact that web browsers use "naive" justification, without intelligent hyphenation. This can lead to

    lines  where    words   are   spaced   far   apart

which many people find harder to read.

Printed books are justified and hyphenated, so this is not an issue.

mccutchenon A few tips for Web API design

> Except for consuming the API directly in a browser, there's little reason that XML should cause you pain.

I disagree. Unless the data I'm working with are awkward/difficult to represent in JSON (ie, they're highly structured documents, for which XML is ideal), XML is always more painful to work with. More painful to produce and to consume.

This is working primarily with Python and Javascript.

mccutchenon Paul Buchheit: Four Reasons Google is still Awesome

You're probably right. But you've got to admit that Apple itself makes its products seem much more magical than Microsoft does. They do such a good job that it's really easy for the media to pick it up and run with it.

Nearly all of Microsoft's own promotional stuff is extraordinarily bad, especially in comparison to Apple.

mccutchenon Netflix: Culture of Fear

I don't think he's making any claims that this comes from first person experience.

mccutchenon Trulia acquires Movity (YC W10)

Uh, what? Wilson Miner designed the Django admin interface (and the Django site, and Everyblock, etc.):

http://www.wilsonminer.com/work/#django

mccutchenon Realtime encoding - over 150x faster

Sure we know old people who may be offended by that word. But how many of those old people will be reading this blog post?

mccutchenon Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

Seconded. I've been a happy Pinboard user since the service launched. Haven't had any trouble.

mccutchenon Oia a port of Io to Javascript and node.js

I've been fascinated by Io ever since reading _why's two introductory posts on it:

* http://web.archive.org/web/20080212010904/http://hackety.org...

* http://web.archive.org/web/20080430135919/http://hackety.org...

See also Ioke, a JVM- and CLR-based language heavily inspired by Io, being developed by JRuby developer Ola Bini:

http://ioke.org/

mccutchenon Why Emacs is great - SLIME repl for developing in-browser javascript

This looks like it's exactly what I was looking for. Many, many thanks to you.

mccutchenon Why Emacs is great - SLIME repl for developing in-browser javascript

The last time I tried js2-mode, its indentation rules really drove me crazy. So now I use espresso-mode (which reliably indents the way I expect it to) to write my JS and turn on js2-mode to have it lint my JS.

Do you know if that has changed, or if maybe I'm missing some easy .emacs magic to make it work?

mccutchenon Python Black Magic

I learned this trick when I first picked up Python, too. I came from Java and, naturally, started writing Python code in the style I had learned to write Java: Heavily object-oriented, with getters and setters everywhere.

Eventually, though, I stopped trying to program in Java in Python. Once you relax and stop trying to hide your precious instance variables from all of the potentially pernicious or incompetent programmers who might be using your code (usually, in my case, just me), you no longer need tricks like this. And you realize that you never really needed them to begin with.

mccutchenon Was the Wheel of Fortune One Letter Solve Really a Miracle?

"Alas, I just have to marvel, because for some reason my mind doesn't anagram well. I just don't have the knack. To me high-level Scrabble playing looks like a superpower."

I feel the exact same way. Well put.

mccutchenon Show HN: Critique my pro football (NFL) data webapp

Seconded. A feed and/or an API would be super useful.

mccutchenon Google Sawzall now open source

Haha, I think it's a great excuse. But I just don't see the value in telling my version control software about the MIME type of every single file in my project.

mccutchenon Google Sawzall now open source

That's because it's being served as raw text data from the Subversion repo.

mccutchenon Ask HN: How to legally obtain sports data for commercial use?

I too have wondered about this for a couple of minor side projects. I've always resorted to scraping, but it feels wrong and I know it's not feasible for commercial projects.

I've always assumed that there was some commercial data source out there that would provide all of this information in a nice, structured format for some kind of fee, but I have yet to find it.

One nice thing about major sites moving to "live" scoreboards is that you can often find nicely structured data sources behind them. For instance, here's the NFL's live score feed, in JSON:

http://www.nfl.com/liveupdate/scores/scores.json

(Unfortunately, it's empty as I write this because there are no games going on right now. Here's an example taken late on a Sunday or on Monday morning: http://gist.github.com/626612)

Another, related question is how to get good gambling information (point spreads, totals, etc.) for the same use case. I think this might be easier, as I've come across various sports book sites in the past that offer subscription services.

On Yahoo's NFL odds page, it says their data source is OddsShark (http://www.oddsshark.com/) whose home page advertises

  Offer comparative live odds and other sports stats on your site FREE of charge.

  You pick the sportsbooks, you pick the bet types and OddsShark.com sports betting odds engine does the rest, delivering feeds to your site.

I got in touch with them, but never received a response...

mccutchenon The New Gap Logo Might Be a Genius ‘Crowd Sourcing’ Stunt

If that were the case, they probably would have just announced the change in a press release (and alerted the appropriate design blogs) and waited for the backlash. I don't think they would have gone ahead and deployed the change to gap.com.

mccutchenon Ask HN: An Online Spreadsheet Certain People can Edit

How about a public Google Docs form that sticks its data into a private Google Docs spreadsheet?

http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

mccutchenon Python idiom for taking the single item from a list

Both of those still fail for other non-list iterables, like generators.

mccutchenon The Ugly Truth About Classic Games. They Are Terrible.

Tecmo Super Bowl, too.