On Codecademy, you can learn to program in various languages. It starts off very slowly and is targeted at non-technical users. That’s their claim anyway—the material in the courses I looked at ramps up pretty quickly.

Anyway, the interesting thing I saw was in their introductory test. It struck me as a subtle way to get you to enter your email address. I’d just recently discussed this on a project I’m working on: how can we make it fun for the user to enter personal information? The goal is... [More]

Whether there is such a thing as truly objective journalism—reporting without any explicit or implicit bias—is the subject of the article Is Glenn Greenwald the Future of News? (New York Times). It’s a conversation between Bill Keller—editor of the New York Times—and Glenn Greenwald—currently of the Guardian and, most recently, the driving force behind reporting on NSA spying and distributing Edward Snowden’s revelations.

Greenwald argues quite convincingly that there is only journalism and... [More]

The following article was originally published on the Encodo blogs and is cross-published here.

The following article outlines a solution to what may end up being a temporary problem. The conditions are very specific: no server-side logic; HTTP authentication; AppCache as it is implemented by the target platforms—Safari Mobile and Google Chrome—in late 2012/early 2013. The solution is not perfect but it’s workable. We’re sharing it here in the hope that it can help someone else or serve... [More]

In order to provide a service, a company must generate enough revenue to cover costs. Rent has to be covered, utility bills must be paid and employees must get their salaries. Let’s assume that the main goal of the business is actually not to make the owners rich, but rather to provide the service and also provide employment. This is what we are trained to think of when we think of a small business.

Another goal of our economy in general is growth. When a company grows, it can provide its... [More]

The article Ross Douthat: Conservative Who’s Scared of a Free Market in Health Care by Dean Baker (Beat the Press) states the case with pharmaceutical patents very clearly, succinctly explaining how purported libertarian and small-government conservatives sometimes argue for government regulation. This case is a perfect example of why it’s OK to ignore the opinions of people like Douthat: they have shown time and again that they are either (A) corrupt, in it for themselves and their friends or (B) ignorant and possibly... [More]

Russell Brand has been in the media of late, the first time because of an acceptance speech at an awards ceremony sponsored by Hugo Boss, during which he reminded everyone from whom their sponsor had gotten his inauspicious start (the S.S. in the 1930s).

In response to that hullabaloo, he responded with the relatively well-written essay Russell Brand and the GQ awards: ‘It’s amazing how absurd it seems’ (Guardian), in which he wrote,

“I could see the room dividing as I spoke. I could hear the laughter... [More]”

Microsoft just recently released Visual Studio 2013, which includes Entity Framework 6 and introduces a lot of new features. It reminded me of the following query that EF generated for me, way, way back when it was still version 3.5. Here’s hoping that they’ve taken care of this problem since then.

So, the other day EF (v3.5) seemed to be taking quite a while to execute a query on SQL Server. This was a pretty central query and involved a few joins and restrictions, but wasn’t anything too... [More]

The most difficult technical problems to solve are the ones that you don’t notice. The workflow and tools to which you’ve become accustomed are terrible, but they’re so ingrained that you might actually find yourself unthinkingly defending them because that’s just how it has to be.

Why is your DVR’s fast-forwarding feature stuck in the past?

Fast-forwarding and rewinding digital movies is one of those things.

Many people have DVRs now—provided, often enough, by the cable company... [More]

The article NASA’s Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration by Dave Mosher (Wired) discusses a resource shortage that will be hard to address: plutonium.

Plutonium was produced in much larger quantities during the nuclear-arms race of the mid to late 20th century. Though the arms race was morally reprehensible and fantastically expensive, a byproduct was that there was more plutonium available for scientific endeavor. Pound for pound, it is unparalleled as a long-lasting energy source. As of the end of... [More]

This is an article I wrote many years ago, when GTA IV had just come out and I played the game almost to completion.[1] I never got around to publishing it, though. Now, with GTA V out for the PlayStation and X-Box, I dug up this post and figured I’d clean it up and post it anyway.

From 5 Reasons GTA IV Is The Worst Great Game Ever Made (Cracked):

“…there’s simply no way to accurately tell everybody that this is the most jaw dropping game you’ve ever played, and at the same time you fucking hate it so... [More]”

1. Jewel of the Nile (1985) — 5/10
2. Snakes on a Plane (2006) — 4/10
3. Devil (2010) — 4/10
4. Veep (2012/13) — 10/10
5. Freaks and Geeks (1999) — 9/10
6. Escape from New York (1981) — 7/10
7. Under the Dome (2013) — 6/10
8. Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (2012/2013) — 8/10
9. The International (2009) — 7/10
10. Raging Bull (1980) — 7/10
11. Red (2010) — 8/10
12. The Mechanic (2011) — 8/10
13. Apocalypse Now (1979) — 9/10
14. Natural Born Killers (1994) — 9/10
15. Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) — 3/10
16. Sunshine... [More]

Argo (2012) — 6/10

Ben Affleck directs and stars alongside John Goodman, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin and Zeljko Ivanek in this movie about the CIA pretending to make a movie in order to smuggle US-embassy employees out of Iran during the hostage crisis. The cast is good and the idea isn’t bad but the execution is a bit slow, especially in the second act, where I felt that they didn’t sustain the suspense well at all. The direction and cinematography were quite good, but not exceptional for... [More]

A little while ago, I wrote about my experiences with the SBB automated ticket machines. The online experience is somewhat better but still has some mysterious bugs and omissions—it’s hard to believe that this software has been in use for years—and by millions of users.

Where’s the Zürich Hauptbahnhof?

One example comes from the list of suggestions returned when a user types in the “from” or “to” field in the route finder. One day, I entered what I thought was an easy match, one of the... [More]

This diagram of the branches of economics by Zach Weiner (SMBC) sums it up very nicely.

SMBC 2013-09-19

I was recently given the book The Next 100 Years (2009) by George Friedman by a friend. After the first few dozen pages, I’d made so many quizzical notes that I had to look up the author, because I’d never heard of him. It turns out that he’s “the founder, chief intelligence officer, financial overseer, and CEO of the private intelligence corporation STRATFOR, a global intelligence company founded in 1996”, according to Wikipedia. That helped set the context for the book a bit better.

There... [More]

Opera has officially released their first desktop browser based on the Blink engine (forked from WebKit). The vision behind Opera 15 and beyond by Sebastien Baberowski (Desktop Team) explains how Opera 15…

…is dead on arrival.[1]

Choose your market

For years, Opera has held a steady 1.7–2% of the desktop browser market. This seems small but comprises dozens of millions of users. More capitalist heads have clearly prevailed at Opera. They’ve struck out for a more lucrative market. Instead of catering to the 2% of niche, expert... [More]

The helpful page, Ignoring files (GitHub), taught me something I didn’t know: there’s a file you can use to ignore files in your local Git repository without changing anyone else’s repository.

Just to recap, here are the ways to ignore a file:

• Global .gitignore: you can designate basic exclusion directives that apply to all repositories on your system. This file is not committed to any repository or shared with others. Execute git config –global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global to set the file... [More]

The article Girl buys water, spends night in jail by Dylan Stableford (Yahoo! News) describes an utterly lunatic crime-stopping scene:

“[…] the student, [20-year–old] Elizabeth Daly, was walking to her car on April 11 at approximately 10:15 p.m. with a box of sparkling water […] when the agents—six men and one woman, all in plainclothes—approached suspecting the box […] to be a 12-pack of beer. One jumped on the hood of her SUV; another pulled out a gun […]”

Seven agents. Tailing and taking down a college student... [More]

I’ve been using CSS since its inception and use many parts of the CSS3 specification for both personal work and work I do for Encodo. Recently, I read about some length units I’d never heard of in the article CSS viewport units: vw, vh, vmin and vmax by Chris Mills (Dev.Opera).

• 1vw: 1% of viewport width
• 1vh: 1% of viewport height
• 1vmin: 1vw or 1vh, whatever is smallest
• 1vmax: 1vw or 1vh, whatever is largest

These should be eminently useful for responsive designs. While there is wide support for these new units, that... [More]

From the article Rand Paul’s Confederacy Scandal Is Not an Anomaly – Libertarianism Is a ‘Philosophy’ That Papers Over Deep Racism in America by Thom Hartmann (AlterNet),

“So now comes a political philosophy—libertarianism—that says everything is fine, everything is equal, and government should get the hell out of the way. […] Of course, […] most [libertarians] probably don’t see how their “get rid of government” policies prop up institutional bigotry, but the reality is that when you blast government as... [More]”

SMBC puts some very interesting words in the wizard’s mouth that explains his role quite well. After Dorothy and Co. have revealed him to be a fraud—a mere man rather than the all-powerful wizard they’d imagined him to be—he says,

“[…] Now then, you can either persist in your dull revelation, or you can close the curtain and return to your world where good and power can allow without wicked dross, and where the broken vessels of your lives can be made whole by the caprice of an... [More]”

Recently, the post What’s the most intellectual joke you know? (Reddit) got a lot of play and a tremendous number of suggestions. I dug through what were rated the top 500 replies and extracted and collated my favorites.

Computer Science

• There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

• The programmer’s wife tells him: “Run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.”

  The programmer comes home with 12 loaves... [More]

The following story tells tale of a day spent with the ongoing user-experience (UX) catastrophe that is the interface of the SBB/ZVV automated ticket machines.

While it’s certainly possible that our experiences are unique and that others can easily purchase their perhaps simpler tickets, we have found that veering ever-so-slightly from the beaten path leads into some very deep and dark weeds.

Even were we to accept that the fault for the confusion engendered by the UI lay entirely with us,... [More]

The post Please share your hidden OS X features or tips and tricks (StackExchange) yielded a treasure trove of keyboard shortcuts, some of which I knew and many that I’d never heard of or had long ago forgotten.

I collected, condensed and organized the ones I found the most useful below.

Finder & Open/Save dialogs

• ⌘ + ⇧ + G shows a location bar where you can type a path (/ or ~ also works in Open/Save). This text field supports ~ for the home directory and has rudimentary tab-completion.
• ⌘... [More]

A little while back, I read about the mantis shrimp (Wikipedia) in a comic called Why the mantis shrimp is my new favorite animal (The Oatmeal). The comic is both amusing and informative, describing and depicting the shrimp’s unbelievable visual organs (here, citing Wikipedia):

“The midband region of the mantis shrimp’s eye is made up of six rows of specialized ommatidia. Four rows carry 16 differing sorts of photoreceptor pigments, 12 for colour sensitivity, others for colour filtering. The mantis shrimp has such good... [More]”

The following article was originally published on the Encodo blogs and is cross-published here.

The article Announcing the .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview provides an incredible amount of detail about a relatively exciting list of improvements for .NET developers.

x64 Edit & Continue

First and foremost, the Edit-and-Continue feature is now available for x64 builds as well as x86 builds. Whereas an appropriate cynical reaction is that “it’s about damn time they got that done”, another... [More]

It is difficult to imagine how democracy and capitalism are to work together. Democracy is ineffective in the presence of concentrated power; and capitalism acts to concentrate power.