ART && CODE Symposium: Hackety Hack, why the lucky stiff from STUDIO for Creative Inquiry on Vimeo. hacketyhack.netwhytheluckystiff.netartandcode.ning.com why the lucky stiff (or _why) is a computer programmer. His best known work may be Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby, a book which teaches the Ruby programming language with stories; its eclectic style has been compared…

Drop ACID and think about data by Bob Ippolito of Mochi Media, Inc. from PyCon 2009. The Video: The Slides: Glossary: ACID CAP Theorem BASE BigTable by Google Dynamo by Amazon Cassandra, an Apache Incubator Project, formerly of Facebook Python dict Immutable vs mutable (computer science) Tokyo Cabinet Tokyo Tyrant Redis Document database CouchDB MongoDB…

At BarCampLA, Jim Bumgardner was inspirational for many things. One small thing was for pointing out these two films: “Lapis,” a short film by James Whitney: “Catalog,” a short film by John Whitney, 1961 Over on Coverpop, Bumgardner shows off work inspired by John Whitney: Whitney Music Box which is beautiful and hypnotic and surprisingly…

The other day I was listening to the Stack Overflow Podcast, which features two interesting bloggers who I’ve read for some time: Joel Spolsky of JoelOnSoftware, and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror. They tend to ramble a bit, and they’re not as funny as they think they are, but I enjoy it. On Episode 28…

This post is inspirational for me as a programmer: Call Me Fishmeal.: Pimp My Code, Part 15: The Greatest Bug of All Software is written by humans. Humans get tired. Humans become discouraged. They aren’t perfect beings. As developers, we want to pretend this isn’t so, that our software springs from our head whole and…

Last night at LA Flash: Chumby Fest! I had the incredible thing happen, I won a Chumby. It’s cute, and hackable. I will be adoring its cuteness and hacking its hackability when I get some time. Work is busy right now, and I’m enjoying it a great deal. It’s stretched my OO skills in PHP5,…

I’m up relatively early this morning. I can hear rain outside the window of the office. Leah acquired some of the lovely All Natural Cola by Whole Foods and I’m having one of those. I feel a tickle in my nose and I think I might be getting a cold. That’s not optimal. I have…

One of my goals in the new year is to create some kind of simple online game in JavaScript. I’m almost at a point where I have free time, which is so awesome. Also, I’m learning some of the libraries and frameworks for JavaScript — to that end I’m experimenting with some of the frameworks…

I’m pleased with how things are arranged right now. Usually being content means I am blogging much more. So much wonderful stuff to say! I’ve been pleasantly busy. This pleasantness has manifested itself in steady work, side projects finishing finally, and things at my dayjob going relatively well. Herein I will try and communicate some…

Don’t use oxygen and smoke, please. Thomas PM Barnett, a great Powerpointer, mentions that Al Gore has his Nobel Prize because of his PPTs (actually Keynote, but same difference, presentation software). Read/Write Web has good thoughts on Microsoft’s playing catch-up with Google on a number of web tools. I like competitor for Google. It means…

People don’t write PHP like this anymore, or, if they do, they get hurt badly. This is old code of mine. Timestamp is January 29, 2002. Yeesh. <? $where_they_are = ‘http://’ . $SERVER_NAME . $REQUEST_URI; if ($HTTP_REFERER!=”) { $recipientlist=’joe@artlung.com’; $emailsubject=”visit to $SERVER_NAME via ” . $HTTP_REFERER; $emailbody=”someone came to $where_they_are via $HTTP_REFERER ip address: $REMOTE_ADDR…

Thoughtful thinking from DVD Jon who knows about this stuff. Think Closed Has Nokia or Sony Ericsson ever bricked or refused service on an unlocked phone? Not that I’ve heard of, and if they did, they would have been quickly sued in several countries where consumer rights are more strongly protected. Did Sony ever brick…