April 27th, 2007
I was working on one of my js apps that updates the content of an element on mouseover. The performance in FF 2 was poor compared to all other browsers. After profiling with Firebug I realized that the problem was setting the innerHTML of an element. In Firebug, setting the innerHTML took about 3 times as long as the rest of the code for the mouseover, which included getting the mouse position, pulling a value from a large array, performing math on that number, and moving a cursor to the proper place on the screen.
I looked up the js docs, and found that FF elements have a property named textContent. I used this property instead of innerHTML, and performance for the mouseover doubled.
I was happy about finding this quirk. Then I told my friend Derik about it, he asked “did you look at the source to figure out why textContent is faster?”, then he called me a pussy when I told him I hadn’t.
The next post will be about delving into the Firefox source code
Posted in javascript, programming | No Comments »
April 23rd, 2007
I made my friend Dstillz’s interesting chat list. Pretty cool. dstillz
Posted in humor | 1 Comment »
April 23rd, 2007
I was watching the “Sexy Back” video today. I thought that a femaile sung the song, apparently not. So I did a search about the song’s production. I ran into this site Pro Audio Review. The site details the song’s production. Who knew such a site exists.
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April 10th, 2007
You might consider what I say nice. I might be have moments of kindness. I’m not saying I’m going to aim to be mean or cruel. What I am saying is that I’m not going to sign any blogger code of conduct.
Here is why
The big deal about blogging is that it breaks down barriers to entry for publishing. That’s why it scared the shit out of traditional media, thats why they made fun of it. Thats why they questioned whether or not bloggers were true journalists, and whether or not they should be afforded the same protections… because they were scared.
Look at who is proposing a code of ethics Tim O’Reily , Dooce, Kathy Sierra. All popular bloggers and important people. Now I’m sure they don’t even think that they are restricting free speech, or putting up a barrier to entry, but watch, it will happen. Like any club, it seems harmless enough, but what happens next.
What happens when Reddit, or Digg won’t accept a link unless its from a ‘nice’ blog?
Well now who ever decides if a blog is nice has a lot of power. And who is on the commitee for deciding what the standards for nice are, that’s right, O’Reilly, Sierra, and Dooce. Thy will have more power than they now have, and power corrupts.
Of course when Reddit or Digg stops accepting ‘mean’ submissions there will be another news aggregating site, maybe ‘meanit’. I’d love to write that.
So thats why I’m not going to join a blogging code of ethics
Posted in blogging, tech scene | No Comments »
April 2nd, 2007
I’m not sure what to title this. “Why I’m not an economist… Why economists are hypocrites…” but I decided to go with something positive.
So I graduated about a year and a half ago with an Economics degree from George Mason University. I enjoyed the way my degree taught me to think and analyze things. I agree with the tenets of Mason’s econ program (free markert libertarianism). But I didn’t want to be an economist.
I realized that if I became an economist, I would sit in a room and write papers, do studies, and pontificate about things that I had no hope of ever changing. That sounded like a career of frustration. I also knew that my career would be dependent on intra office politics and more schooling compared to actual accomplishment and ability.
So I decided to become a programmer. I have used and programmed computers for years and started off college as a CS major (thats another story). I built a we app in my spare time ( http://formula1db.com ) a couple of weeks after I finished classes and was quickly hired. I chose to be a programmer for many reasons
1. I build things. I like building things and having a tangible result. I take pride in this and I get to do this with my career.
2. This is not a risk averse field. Yes I could hose a database or a server, but a properly architected system will have a backup plan. This allows potential employers and me to be much more daring. I was able to be hired with comparatively little experience because if I screwed up they would only be out my wage (I couldn’t nock down a building, kill a patient, or cause millions in financial damage by a mistake).
3. This is a field with low barriers to entry. This was important for me for my initial job but is also important for a couple of other reasons. I can cheaply start my own company, I only have to feed myself for a couple months. I can also practice at home on my own equipment to become better with my trade. Imagine a pediatrician asking to take a baby home for a night or two to practice appendectomys. Because there is a low barrier to entry this career also doesn’t suffer from ivory towers, any nobody can come up with a good idea, I like this because it keeps me on my feet.
Now I have tried to be positive, here is some friendly jabbing at economists, specifically free market classicals.
For a group which decries unions, government regulation, and barriers to entry aren’t they all hypocrits for chosing a profession which has all of those characteristics. (I will write the first comment on this article picking my arguments apart).
My degree advisor, Bryan Caplan has written many papers about why higher education is inneficient and should be disincentivized. This was a running joke around the department because he of course also argued that economists are important and should be incetivized, I think we all recognized the humor.
Posted in programming | No Comments »
January 30th, 2007
As I alluded to in a previous post, it is possible to integrate subversion into finder with applescript. In fact someone has already done this SVN scripts for Finder . I haven’t yet played with these, but they are open source, so I hope to contribute.
Posted in OS X, unix | No Comments »
January 30th, 2007
Most programmers I know hate the term web 2.0 .  It sounds like something a sales guy would say. I have seen ads for programmers that say “If you love what web 2.0 can do, but hate the term, we are the place for you”. It just all sounds so synthetic.
There is new stuff happening with web apps. There is more participation now then there was in the late 90′s. The UI is better. Tech people like all that, but why don’t they like “web 2.0″?
Web 2.0 is a finite judgement of something that is very fluid. In fact one of the hallmarks of web 2.0 apps is there lack of version numbers, constant revision and improvement. The term is out of place, something out of the last decade when MBA’s decided what a product would be, in total contrast to communities and user generated content.
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January 23rd, 2007
It’s painful, very painful. I need to get better with the command line client, but I still miss Tortoise. SCplugin simply doesn’t work on Macintel, not even the pre-compiled nightly build. For a while I used svnX but I’m still not that impressed with it, because its a standalone application. A friend recomended smartSVN a standalone java app, I haven’t tried it yet.
For now I am using tortoiseSVN under windows on my shared folder. Yes it is an utterly inellegant solution. Yes I’m paying 256 + megs of ram just for a version control client. But most importantly, YES VERSION CONTROL IS THAT IMPORTANT.
Right now I’m thinking of writing my own tortoiseSVN clone with applescript and shell scripts.
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January 23rd, 2007
This seems to be an obligatory blog post nowadays. Two months ago I got my first mac. I have used PCs since I was 7 and it was a tough change, I’m happier for it though. There are things the mac just gets right, there are other things that will annoy out to no end. Here are some of the things that I had the hardest time finding.
Cmd = Apple = Cloverleaf logo = ⌘
Ctrl = ^
Shift = Up Arrow =
Option = alt = ⌥
⌘-Space = open the spotlight search box
this is the fastest way for me to find programs without cluttering up my dock.
⌘ ` = apple-tilde key switch windows in the current app
This was key to be able to navigate os x with the keyboard.
^ Scroll wheel = Zoom screen in
You need to enable this in
System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Mouse > Zoom
This zooms the whole screen in
⌘^⌥8 = show negative image of the screen
This turns all your whites to blacks and vice versa, it makes some text much easier to read. Â You need to enable this in
System Prefernces > Universal Access
Posted in OS X, keyboard | No Comments »
January 23rd, 2007
In my web 2.0 class at Cooper Union, we have talked about what enabled web 2.0, Sanford’s argument is Moore’s law. I have a slightly different take.
None of the things we are doing with web 2.0 are particularly new in computers (other than video), what is new is the medium. Computers could drag and drop graphical elements in the 80′s, they could communicate with one another in the 70′s and the 80′s, they could accept user generated content in the 70′s (think data entry clerks typing into terminals connected to a mainframe). Hardware wasn’t the primary limiting factor preventing web2.0 type apps in the mid 90′s , programmers were.
Programmers had a lot to get used to with the web in the mid 90′s, writing portable code was more important than ever before (HTML/Javascript) and there was a whole wealth of possibilities that most programmers hadn’t wrapped their minds around yet. Some were there, Slashdot especially pops to mind. But on the whole it took them a while to familiarize themselves with the concepts of interactive community oriented sites, and get the basics firmly established (dynamically generated pages, web servers communicating with databases). Once they did, and saw other people building web 2.0 type apps they said “Hey this isn’t that hard, I can do that” and they did, thus we have now have a lot of web 2.0 apps now.
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