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mccutchenon 2014 Personal Annual Report

I love personal annual report season. Nicholas Felton's (feltron.com) and Jehiah's are the two that I've been looking at the longest.

The amount of work that goes into these — being thorough when collecting the data throughout the year and putting it together in a nice package at the end — is too daunting for me to consider, so I like observing and admiring the odd minutiae of the lives of those willing and able to put in the work.

mccutchenon The Slow Web

I think this is a beautifully expressed thought:

"… as soon as I saw 'the slow web movement,' I assigned my own meaning to it. Because it’s a great name, and great names are like knots—they’re woven from the same stringy material as other words, but in their particular arrangement, they catch, become junctions to which new threads arrive, from which other threads depart."

mccutchenon Show HN: BackboneScreencasts.com

I would always rather see a text tutorial than a screencast.

mccutchenon Python For The Web

Nice. It does seem like one of the lighter-weight Python web frameworks might fit in better with the overall theme of this intro, and Flask is a great choice.

I thought about doing the same thing as I read through it.

mccutchenon Python For The Web

Note: In Python 2.6+, you can just `import json` instead of needing to install and import simplejson.

mccutchenon Mobile Devs you can now have a single backend for your Android and iOS apps

I'm still confused. I'm neither an iOS nor and Android developer, so maybe this is not a confusing situation to them. But:

> What we mean by single backend is you can have one backend and you don't need to know whether you are on an Android or iOS platform. You get the same analytics.

I can't fathom why a backend service would ever not work this way.

mccutchenon Mobile Devs you can now have a single backend for your Android and iOS apps

Kind of strange title, to me. I don't know why anyone would ever create separate server-side backends for different mobile platforms. I guess this just means that this company is providing libraries for both Android and iOS? Are the other "easy mobile app backend" services focused strictly on one platform or the other?

mccutchenon Test your browser's safety (according to Microsoft)

"We do not have any data for your browser, so we can’t give your browser a score."

Chrome 16.0.904.0

mccutchenon Haskell's Fixed Point Combinator

Most of this went right over my head, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I'm endlessly fascinated by Haskell.

mccutchenon The process behind our startup's logo design - draftswork shown

Maybe it's just because I read this before I looked at it, but I agree.

mccutchenon Currency.io, a html5 currency converter - open sourced to learn from

> _I think this is the current problem with mobile web apps today; too many are trying to feel native. Instead try to make it feel smooth and responsive, as a web app._

I think this is exactly what OP has done. It doesn't feel "native" to iOS to me, but it does feel like a well-made little web app. I don't have an Android device to test it on, but it does seem like it would fit in just fine on one.

mccutchenon Hey, Bethesda Let’s settle this

I think Microsoft owns the trademark for the word "Windows".

http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/en/us/IntellectualPrope...

mccutchenon Building Lanyrd

That's a pretty good approach. I guess the main drawback is that the git commit hash will change far more often than the contents of most of the static files, though, right?

mccutchenon Building Lanyrd

Ahhh, thanks for the details. The only solution I could think of involved writing out a dict like you're describing and using a template helper to look up the modified asset filenames. I was wondering if there was a more elegant solution that was escaping me.

And it probably would've taken me a little while to realize that I'd need to rewrite CSS files as well, so thanks for that, too!

mccutchenon Building Lanyrd

I like this approach to static assets, where each file's name is changed to include the hash of the file's contents on deployment. But I've never implemented it myself, because I can't figure out a good way to refer to those static assets in my templates.

simonw, if you're listening, how do you solve this problem?

How do you go from, e.g.,

mccutchenon Use pythonbrew to manage multiple python installations

Likewise curious. Seems like that should be addressed in the README.

mccutchenon Fair use isn’t much good if you can’t afford it

To me, it does look like fair use. But I'm not a lawyer. I found this argument pretty compelling, though:

http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/6840184364/hand-pixelated

"That cover is NOT the original photo, downsampled. It’s a hand-crafted, precisely drawn interpretation of the source. Anyone who’s ever seriously put pixels to screen will tell you that this is an actual artistic method, one with its own challenges, tricks, and yes, an aesthetic."

mccutchenon What PHP Needs

"and how 'reflection' is way simpler than any other language"

I've never heard this claim made, and it has been a long time since I've actually used PHP in any meaningful way. Care to expand on this?

I'd be interested in a comparison to Python's support for reflection, which is simple and pervasive.

mccutchenon Kyle Bragger on Redesigns

He's referring to the Lobster free web font, which is showing up on more and more sites these days: http://www.google.com/webfonts/family?family=Lobster&sub...

mccutchenon Working with git? These aliases will save you hours

The big downside of these (for me) is that they don't let me use the great bash completion that git (optionally) provides.

mccutchenon "The worst algorithm in the world?"

The title is hyperbole (I'm sure that I've written much, much worse algorithms, many times), but the breakdown of Fibonacci sequence algorithms is really enjoyable.

mccutchenon Rise of the Mac Git GUIs

"iTunes for your git repos" is a great way to describe some of this software. Well said.

mccutchenon Rise of the Mac Git GUIs

I'm pretty sure they're calling the git command line tool. As far as I can remember, I've had to tell all of the ones I've tried where to find the git command.

mccutchenon Rise of the Mac Git GUIs

I'm sort of fascinated by this, but out of all the git GUIs I've tried on Mac except for GitX work backwards from how I want/need them to work. I live at the command line, but I do like having a nice GUI for staging commits and viewing history.

GitX works perfectly for me in this regard. It's simply `gitx -c` from the current directory to open a nice GUI for staging files (or pieces of files) and composing a commit message or `gitx` to view the history of the current repo. And it's fast, so launching it does not get in my way too much.

All of the other ones I've tried have had poor command line integration and wanted me to tell them about my repos ahead of time. I guess maybe that reflects the needs/workflow of the majority of people who want a nice OS X GUI for git, but it doesn't work at all for me.

Just sort of interesting.

mccutchenon [dead]

The design is overwhelmingly cluttered and noisy. I'm sorry that I don't really have any concrete suggestions, but I'd suggest getting a better feel for whitespace (e.g. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/whitespace) and visual hierarchy (http://www.google.com/search?q=visual+hierarchy).

Actually, I do have a concrete suggestion: Lose the orange stripes in the background. They don't serve a purpose and they actually interfere visually with the "log in" and "share a link" boxes, at least at my particular browser window size.

mccutchenon The iOS weather-app market

I love this idea, but why do you want permission to access and update my Twitter feed?

mccutchenon Why PHP Was a Ghetto

> PHP has its own beauty, such as arrays which can support numeric and string indexes at the same time.

What's the difference between PHP's arrays and hashtables/dictionaries/etc in languages like Python, Ruby, and JavaScript?

As a Python programmer (who started with PHP years ago), PHP's arrays now seem sort of muddled or confusing. I prefer Python's dedicated list/dict types (though nothing is stopping you from mixing numeric and string keys in a dict).

mccutchenon Unfollowed Me worm spreads on Twitter - stop allowing 3rd party apps

Agreed. It would also be nice if the 3rd party apps were required to provide short explanations for each of the permissions they were requesting.

I almost never provide access to any 3rd party Twitter app that wants permission to "read and update" my stream, because I don't know if they have any legitimate reasons to want to update it (aside from automatic self-promotion tweets that look like they're coming from me).

mccutchenon Cluster SSH (OSX)

This seems like something that would be much better if integrated into a tool like Fabric or Capistrano that already knows how to send SSH commands to a bunch of different servers.

Does anything like that exist? I guess the downside would be fixing problems if your command failed in 1 or 2 of 10 or 20 servers… Then you'd have to open up a separate session to those servers to figure out what was going on.

mccutchenon How to damage your brand in one smooth shot - Way to GoDaddy

> Not sure if you read the article but Jacques specifically states there's a clear difference between a rich dude shooting the Elephant and a native Zimbabwean game warden doing it to protect his crops (which btw, there are many other ways of going about that than shooting it). The psychology behind the former doing it can be extremely powerful (and enraging) compared to the latter.

That's a great point. I mostly agree with the GP, but the symbolism of Parsons' actions is really powerful.