Archive for the 'Brain Dump' Category

Brain Dump

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on August 4, 2010
in Brain Dump
. 0 Comments

Frameworks. Every single tech person is touting around the word Framework these days. And we all seem to have a different definition about it. Even when it obviously does not apply. Here’s what a tutorial had to say about the Blueprint CSS Framework :

Blueprint CSS isn’t really a framework in the sense that it’s not MVC (model-view-controller) like something like Ruby on Rails

Way to go kid. Don’t go around confusing Frameworks with MVC Web Server Frameworks (of which Ruby on Rails is an example). Also, do check out Blueprint CSS, it’s quite good for small-ish projects without a great web designer on hand.

Drive-through open source. On the topic of having fewer tech people around you yet still managing to set up your free open source tools, Bitnami offers free installers for the main open source applications. Instead of having to hunt down appropriate versions and configuratios of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP to run your Drupal web site, just download and install the Drupal package stack.

Gifts and choices. In a powerful address at Princeton, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos explains the difference between a gift (I’m good at doing X) and a choice (I decided to do Y) and the power of X=Y. Go read it. It’s great. If you’re wondering whether you should quit your job and start a company, go read it again. It only gets better.

DNS Propagation. Need to point your domain to another server, and wondering how many DNS servers have already caught up on the modification? WhatsMyDNS.net handles this for you. It’s free and very useful (albeit in an extremely specific situation).

Browse the Brain Dump category or subscribe to my feed.

Brain Dump

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 14, 2010
in Brain Dump
. 0 Comments

Programmer Fonts. We programmers love fonts that are fixed-width, clean and readable even with a small font size. My personal favorite is Proggy Tiny, a free programming font. Do you have your own favorite, or do you use whatever the system default is?

Stop Micromanagement. Take any game where you play as the here and have to accomplish something. Now, turn it into a game where you control the world to help the computer-controller hero accomplish the same thing. This is the difference between doing it yourself and micro-managing someone to do it.

Programming Games. On the topic of having games teach interesting concepts, the second installment of LightBot is now available on Armor Games ; the game teaches recursion, recursion-based loops, and conditionals.

Google Street Smarts. It’s fairly easy for us to search online for our own names, to see what others might find. How many of you have tried to search for pictures on geographical locations based on their names? And how can we know if we’re not on Google Street View, anyway?

New Favicon. There’s a new favicon on the blog. You should see it in the address or tab bars above, or here:

Brain Dump

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on June 7, 2010
in Brain Dump
. 0 Comments

HTML 5 Advertising. Many ads these days come as Adobe Flash-based video. Given that Apple still has no plans on providing Flash support on their iPhone or iPad, surely they would look for an alternative solution? It looks like they have: their recently announced mobile advertisment platform, iAd, will provide video ads using HTML 5.

The Mind as a Security Vulnerability. The core of every security flaw is an user mistakenly allowing someone to do something unintended. Our inability to know everything or check everything is fundamental here. For instance, we check whether a site we visit is who it pretends to be on the first visit, but not when leave the tab and come back to it again. Phishing (and conning) is an interesting form of psychology research : looking for unconscious assumptions about the world.

The blogger’s approach to Privacy. I blog under my real name. So, don’t expect to find on this blog tales of my decadent nights of heavy drinking (assuming for a moment that such nights did exist). I apply the same restraint to all my activities online : whenever I would post something anywhere on the internet, I ask myself whether I would post it on my own blog, so I know I don’t have to be afraid of the weekly facebook privacy policy changes.

The ban on laptops. In an ideal world, only one laptop is allowed in every meeting, and only if there must be some computer-based presentatio involving that laptop. If you have trouble pushing a laptop ban agenda, remember that Bhutan did it back in 2008. If a government does it, why shouldn’t you?

Easier Turing Test. The turing test determines whether an artificial intelligence is sneaky enough to pretend being a human by having a long text-only conversation with an actual human. These days, many data sources aim for quantity instead of quality. How easy is it to have a computer program pretend to be a reputable source of news? SnarXiv already does this for scientific papers, and is nearly undistinguishable from actual arXiv listings.

1170 feed subscribers
(readers who polled a feed this week)