Viewing profile — jz

> When the number of "moving parts" created by your abstractions outnumbers the actual bits its abstracting, then you know your design took the wrong turn somewhere. This is an int…

Part of the zen of Python is "Flat is better than nested". Until recently, I always thought of this at a code block/function level. Recently I realized that this is also important …

I needed this in a rake task under Rails 2 a while back; I ended up doing the following: require 'action_controller/integration' app = ActionController::Integration::Session.new mo…

I am genuinely surprised at how much others spend on software. I started totaling up his list (excluding monthly services like dropbox) and stopped when I reached $500, which was r…

Looks like someone stepped up: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/django-non-relational/...

You down voted my question but still did not provide a concrete example.

> Money moving from one place to another does not always help the economy. When money flows from the corporate coffers directly into the private accounts of its executives, general…

When I first looked at Haskell, the 'Maybe' concept was new to me and seemed like a useful concept for other languages. http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.12.2/html/libraries/base-4.2.0…

I agree that the change will cause a lot of pain, however early adopters tend to have a high tolerance for pain. If you don't want to deal with the pain or are running a server (yo…

Check out Mondrian: http://mondrian.pentaho.com/ I used it a couple years back at a startup. It's written in Java and IIRC works (only?) with MySQL. Mondrian took a bit of work to …

Background: http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1306816425.html In all fairness, the guy was being a dick (no pun intended) to Zed. However, Zed should have kept the insults to the trol…

Looks interesting, however I really dislike iTunes' "everything under then sun" motto. If you are looking for something much more lightweight for playing music, check out mpd http:…

The girlfriend mentions seemed irrelevant and out of place. I've noticed lately that more and more technical bloggers try to inject this fictional writing style to draw in readers.…

Although not as featureful as pv, try hitting CTRL+t under OS X or any of the BSDs during a long running process. It provides status of the current running process without having t…

I purchased my first CD set yesterday. They provide great tools (OpenSSH, tmux, and of course OpenBSD) which save me time and money and make my life easier.

I work remotely 100% of the time (and not always in the same location). The use case for me is to quickly show a feature to coworkers without having to commit/push to a remote serv…

I saw Aaron Patterson's presentation at RubyConf this year, which I have to say was just as funny as informative. It was essentially all about squeezing every bit of performance ou…

A little late to the party, but I went through a bout with wrist/arm pain for over a year. I did physical therapy for more than 6 months, saw a doctor that said I needed to have su…

If you work for any employer that actually cares about you, convince them to keep you on their insurance and take a 6 month sabbatical. If they are not sympathetic to your situatio…

I thought the exact opposite. I'm in Chicago and the spill covers a 1/3 to 1/2 of Lake Michigan. After zooming out though, it clearly would cover Lake Erie or Lake Ontario. The thi…

I've been programming exclusively in Ruby for almost 3 years now and came across this while I was looking at tempfile's source. I was gonna write about it but turns out this guy su…

I've switched to Chrome on my Mac because of its speed and quality of dev tools as well. It's a shame though since Firefox and Firebug were both revolutionary and "raised the bar".…

As a BSD user, I recall some of the porting problems were because of the reliance of ALSA instead of OSS. Anybody know offhand if it still uses ALSA?

Ever wonder why Dells, HPs, and Gateways come loaded with a lot of crap software? It's because ISVs know that your typical user won't spend more than he has to. You are forgetting …