31–40 of 52 posts
I'm surprised to see that this submission is from 2008; while I identify with the author's struggle (and subsequent delight) as he plays the part of an Internet archaeologist, I thought this was a common piece of knowledge five years ago, let alone today. Goes to show how incorrect assumptions about what we do (and do not) know can be. Burners-Lee's talks are wonderful. My favorite is his talk "Hypertext and Our Coll…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait. What. Really? Oh my goodness. Okay, so that sort of works. It's a bit of a kludge though.
It’s not a kludge. It’s a way to search websites that happen to have awful search (like Google Groups). In most cases that works very well and it’s universally applicable. It’s a consistent search interface for (pretty much) any website there is. You can just throw Google at it and it works as good if not better than the websites’ own search (depending on how good that is), but it’s also a consistent interface you do…
> consistent search that works the same every time
+ vs "" ?
> sometimes they are so bad that switching over to Google is a necessity to find anything at all.
Yes, Google search is a useful tool for websites that have hopeless search. I've used it for Wikipedia and other websites. It's baffling that Google's own product has search so broken that using a different Google product to search it is considered not-kludgey.
An example from back in the day was the acronym (presumably) "Afx". Vast numbers of identifiers in the old MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) Windows API C++ wrapper used this prefix. For some reason not knowing what it meant caused me chronic stress.
href => @,to,dest,target (others: http://json-ld.org/)
-------------
/etc => /config
/etc/rc.d => /config/start.d
[beyond POSIX]
Though I didn't know the A stands for Anchor, so there's that.
I'm surprised to see that this submission is from 2008; while I identify with the author's struggle (and subsequent delight) as he plays the part of an Internet archaeologist, I thought this was a common piece of knowledge five years ago, let alone today. Goes to show how incorrect assumptions about what we do (and do not) know can be. Burners-Lee's talks are wonderful. My favorite is his talk "Hypertext and Our Coll…
In the software world we often seem to end up with abbreviations which are ubiquitous but no longer strongly linked to their unabbreviated form. I often find this annoying and distracting. I try an avoid being the source of such annoyance for others. For example if I find myself using abbreviations in my source code, maybe as a prefix for example, I will always ensure the abbreviation is explained at least once in a…
In the software world we often seem to end up with abbreviations which are ubiquitous but no longer strongly linked to their unabbreviated form. I often find this annoying and distracting. I try an avoid being the source of such annoyance for others. For example if I find myself using abbreviations in my source code, maybe as a prefix for example, I will always ensure the abbreviation is explained at least once in a…
In the software world we often seem to end up with abbreviations which are ubiquitous but no longer strongly linked to their unabbreviated form. I often find this annoying and distracting. I try an avoid being the source of such annoyance for others. For example if I find myself using abbreviations in my source code, maybe as a prefix for example, I will always ensure the abbreviation is explained at least once in a…
TL;DR: it stands for Application Framework X (a group at MS responsible for the MFC, Microsoft Foundation Classes, library at some point)
In the software world we often seem to end up with abbreviations which are ubiquitous but no longer strongly linked to their unabbreviated form. I often find this annoying and distracting. I try an avoid being the source of such annoyance for others. For example if I find myself using abbreviations in my source code, maybe as a prefix for example, I will always ensure the abbreviation is explained at least once in a…
In a lot of Windowsy projects, there are files called stdafx.cpp and stdafx.h. I'm not sure what they do either.