Getting unstuck by trusting your process Image by wallyg via Flickr Everyone has that looming project that either seems huge and foreboding or maybe it seems small and is progressing at an embarrassingly slow pace. Either way, it is easy to get stuck by over thinking things. One thing that a musician mentor of mine used to say was to…

Javascript zen: the class is the object I was reading Douglas Crockford’s book `Javascript: the Good Parts’ when I came across an example involving a parser that was seemingly unrelated to the section that it appeared in (Section 5.3, p51). I re-read the section and then looked at the example again, wondering how such an oversight could have occurred in…

The value of free coding Image via Wikipedia In a time where nearly every mainstream development environment has the benefit of IDE support including source-level debugging, auto completion and even incremental compilation as we type, I think that there is still value in stripping things down to just a text editor and a compiler. I have met developers who have…

How not to write an email opt-out page Periodically, I take a hard look at what shows up in my email inbox. Invariably a few emails are sitting there because I either opted in to something unwittingly or perhaps I opted in knowingly but now the emails have worn out their welcome. Either way, it is time for a purge.…

The composable web I’ve just been looking at the new Google Buzz API . What struck me first was that it is built up completely from other established protocols: Atom extended with Atom Threading Extensions , MediaRSS , Activity Streams , and PubSubHubbub . Notes on future directions include support for Atom Publishing Protocol for posting and editing messages, Salmon…

We need a data API for the web HTML won for human-readable data. We can point our browsers in any direction we please and we can expect to get something that is at least partially decipherable as human-readable content. The same is not true for data yet. What is the equivalent for data? It is not XML, since there are…

Failure is not the goal “Fail often” is a recurring mantra among many startup thought leaders, but there is a disconnect between the meaning of the phrase and the semantics that it is intended to convey in the context of startups that has been grating on me. I understand the intent of statements like this, but I really think that…

Thoughts on Apple’s new tablet: the iPad I’ve been writing about tablet devices on this blog, so I wanted to put my initial thoughts out there on today’s announcement of the iPad. I wrote earlier that in order to succeed where others had failed, a new tablet device would have to re-invent the UI completely. What I failed to notice…

Source control in the cloud I’ve been experimenting with using GitHub for a few small projects that I have in mind, and I just had a minor revelation about having source control as a web service. I checked in a file and realized that I didn’t finish commenting something important in the header. Ordinarily I would have gone back to…

Stereo imaging for tutorial images I was watching a Discovery Channel interview with James Cameron about the filming of Avatar. One thing that struck me was his comparison of shooting in 3D to shooting in color. When color film was first introduced in cinema years ago, studios didn’t stop shooting black and white overnight, there was a period of overlap.…