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I go out into the mall to kill an hour, eat some lunch, and come back. Just like he said, it is all set. I walk out the door with a brand-new feeling MBP--after they service it, they polish it down with some kind of cleaner that leaves everything shiny again. A nice, and appreciated, small touch. I was impressed.

This blog works because the "fakeness" of the stock people nicely parallels the ridiculousness of the slogan to create a satirical meta-advertisement... about advertisers.

Unless you make satirical apps for app developers, or satirical science papers about scientists, you're not duplicating the irony of this blog.

In fact, an expect script [can be] nicely self-documenting, because somebody can look at it and see "oh these are the steps to deploy X" because the scripts basically read as "at the foo prompt, enter bar" over and over again, with some branching to handle varying responses (missing prereq, error messages).

The "ultimate" in building environments would probably have to be something more comprehensive and declarative like bcfg (http://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/bcfg2) which I have seen in action and it works but is very XML-heavy.

Having a lawyer on retainer and speed dial might help you catch some of the BS and/or protect yourself, but most Americans can't afford that. A (supposed) cop can easily claim PC to prevent you from calling anybody else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect

Slightly weird syntax, but learnable in a few hours. You are likely to already have it on your machines.

Wake up and smell the coffee, Windows users: you've had an app store for seven years now, and its primary target (gamers) are actually pretty damn happy with it now. If they branched out and sold regular apps (not that they would, it seems too dilutive for the brand) you'd basically have a pretty competent Windows App Store. (I can see it now: "Achievement Unlocked, 10 page paper")

Edit: tried it, and those two things do work.

Note to jeresig: this article illustrates a beef I remember passing on when the jQuery docs reorganized; it works well as API reference now, but before, introductory text for each section of the docs describing things like event namespacing made for a nicer introduction to beginners like me, as well as the structured sub-organization of methods within each section. Now, it's more of an alphabetical method soup, so a lot of beginners probably never bother to learn that event namespaces exist, or what the jQuery event object does. For example, you can only get to the documentation on the event object from within the documentation for methods like .bind(), which I find odd. (How would a beginner know that it even existed unless they went specifically to the .bind() docs in an alphabetical list of other cooler sounding methods?)

http://daringfireball.net/misc/2005/04/tiger_details#waiting...

A completely fake progress bar--it was just something for you to look at.

(Also, it's layout for print, so better to think in terms of pts or picas.)

The Times was a bit imprecise in how they used the kid's words to explain the bug (about par for their technical reporting, unfortunately). The way they write it, it sounds a lot like <textarea maxlength=1000></textarea>, but if you think more about the explanation of the wide characters and the "print preview" it can't be that.

Overflow issues are actually not trivial to fix, as opposed to the claims some people are making here about "just count the words". Without allowing an excessive amount of space or allowing for more flexibility in the way it lays it out (flowing across multiple pages, etc.), it can be hard to estimate how much space to give for something as vague as a 150-word limit. If the Common App instead specified a 1000-character limit, the programmer/designer could take the widest character like "W" and determine the max y-height for 1000 W's.

Competition over tangible consumer technology, I understand. An arms race (what this is, because most would call finance markets a zero-sum game) I do not understand.

This sort of algorithmic black-box HFT with uncontrolled news feed input is like mutual assured destruction, all over again. What is it going to take to give the financial industry a sense of responsibility?

A lot of JSON libraries, e.g. json_decode in PHP, refuse to parse JSON without double-quoted keys. I'm actually curious what you are using to parse it (that isn't running on JavaScript) that allows such things. I don't know the details of your API, but is this an object that you intended to be passed to a jQuery method that re-encodes it with JSON.stringify before sending it to your API?

It seems strict, but JSON is a subset of JavaScript's object literal syntax. See http://json.org/

SOAP isn't going anywhere in the big-business world, but for smaller businesses/apps that can play faster and looser with data integration, I absolutely agree that REST is a simpler and more pleasant choice to work with.

Using correct brand names conveys trustworthiness.

More bare assertions than anything else you will read today.

Best comment from Bamd:

The article makes a lot more sense coming from MG if you know that his original title was "Google is Dead."

Then he realized that quarterly results will be out before too long, which might make the article look a little silly, remembered some things from watching Inception again last night, and bam, here we are.