December 2010
4 posts
Great corrupted quotes
Some poetic and powerful language, desecrated by various forms of repetition—either in perverse interpretation or just banal and commonplace usage.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” — Thomas Jefferson
Despoiled by the Oklahoma city bomber, who was executed wearing a t-shirt with these words.
“When...
Pronunciation Pet Peeves
OK I realize I am in mortal danger of becoming one of those people you meet. Those curmudgeonly misanthropes who correct your grammar, pronunciation (and somehow verbal spelling) while all you’re trying to do is have a light chat and talk about your cat. Or whatever.
But please, these things matter. While we’re speaking this language we’ve all mostly agreed on, mostly,...
“INTERVIEWER: Tell me, what is the worst-case scenario? Sir, we have so many...”
– CNBC (Interview after being named Fed Chairman in 2006 on the verge of the great housing bubble)
Governments have no right to privacy
I have come to realize that governments are typically viewed as benevolent parental overseers rather than the public servants and safety nets they ought to be. This is endemic in our language: “Democrats are in power”, “the ruling party” and so on. This perversion runs so deep that we have largely abdicated the collective responsibility we share in the health and purpose of...
November 2010
2 posts
Experimenting with Agile at Google
The engineering discipline at Google can best be described as the Cowboy Methodology. This derisive monicker is used by agile practitioners to chide those who follow no process at all, the connotation being that they produce messy and often untenable results.
There are exceptions of course, many Google teams use various degrees of XP, Scrum, or something else entirely. However, these are few and...
Comets and Meteors
I am exploring writing an app with Comet (reverse Ajax) aka ‘hanging gets’. I thought I knew how this worked in detail, but after days of research I found my knowledge sorely lacking. There isn’t much good information on the web either, so I thought I’d summarize what I learned here.
You can achieve server-to-client message pushing in several different ways:
Websockets -...