audionerd's comments

What happened to Dan Kottke? The Wikipedia article doesn't seem to get into it.

If you can now run automated searches across multiple Dropbox accounts, think what that does for aggregating file storage and sharing.

Imagine how easy it would be to build a multi-user pseudo-P2P file search/share app on top of Dropbox now.

Or imagine when a user can sync/export their settings from a "cloud" service to a SQLite file in their Dropbox automatically.

I wonder if this approach could be used for more "static" sites as well? This sounds great for JavaScript-heavy web apps, but what if there's server-side HTML generation involved?

Speaking of kerning, here's a simple CSS declaration for modern browsers:

    text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;

... which will give you improved handling of kerning pairs and ligatures.

see: http://www.aestheticallyloyal.com/public/optimize-legibility...

How does this differ from http://www.kernjs.com/ ?

I was first introduced to the concept of 'streams' akin to this in SuperCollider, which uses them as building blocks for musical patterns.

http://danielnouri.org/docs/SuperColliderHelp/Streams-Patter...

http://danielnouri.org/docs/SuperColliderHelp/Streams-Patter...

SuperCollider is a fun language to study. You end up with compositional structures like the following (notice 'inf', which indicates an infinite loop)

    Pbind(
      \octave, 4,
      \degree, PstepNadd(
            Pseq([1, 2, 3]), 
            Pseq([0, -2, [1, 3], -5]), 
            Pshuf([1, 0, 3, 0], 2)
          ),
      \dur, PstepNadd(
            Pseq([1, 0, 0, 1], 2),
            Pshuf([1, 1, 2, 1], 2)
        ).loop * (1/8),
      \legato, Pn(Pshuf([0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 0.5, 0.5, 1.6, 1.4], 4), inf),
      \scale, #[0, 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8]
    ).play;

Is this just a way to trigger rsync every time a change happens to a given folder?

Looks like this command powers it:

  rsync -rav --stats --log-file=/home/$USER_NAME/.lipsyncd/lipsyncd.log -e "ssh -l $USER_NAME -p $SSH_PORT" --delete $REMOTE_HOST:$LOCAL_DIR $REMOTE_DIR

Couldn't you just toss that in a Guardfile and get the same effect?

  https://github.com/guard/guard/

Or am I oversimplifying it?

I noticed C#/.NET didn't make the list.

Is there a source for that Hemingway quote?

Perhaps he was simply being modest. "UI design, programming, and product strategy" are just the three specific subjects he has felt qualified to "long argue" about.

So, more often than not, you'll catch your state machines attaching behavior directly to your objects. Which sometimes bugs you, because you want your states to be less about "nouns" and more about "verbs".

And eventually you notice that, in most cases, you crave coordination across those "nouns" (e.g.: "a transition in model A provokes a transition in model B"). The real workflow now lies "at the intersection of two models". You start to wish for the equivalent of "process management" in addition to state management.

So this, coupled with general unhappiness for the sort of anti-modular/anti-abstraction problem you see in state machines, might incite you to look at "workflow engines" like Ruote.

http://ruote.rubyforge.org/

TL;DR I am drinking the 'ruote' kool-aid right now. Augment your state machines with a great coordinator in the sky, a few levels higher in the architecture stack.

(BTW: I'm paraphrasing this argument from John Mettraux's "state machine != workflow engine" post, and Kenneth Kalmer's Ruote presentation from this year. Really changed my thoughts on the matter recently.)

If you're hesitant to be an early adopter (AKA "guinea pig") Rails 2.3.x is very stable, and most of the useful plugins in the Rails ecosystem are still maintained for Rails 2.3.x.

Many big names are still on Rails 2.3.x, too. Forgive me if I go astray here, but GitHub and DocumentCloud are two examples that come to mind.

You might want to check out RQL, which builds on JsonPath:

  http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2010/11/02/resource-query-language-a-query-language-for-the-web-nosql/

It would be great to see a standard emerge here. I've watched with interest as JSONPath and JSONQuery proposals have been presented, JS ports of Linq, and this latest proposal: RQL –

http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2010/11/02/resource-query-langua...

There's an Arel-style JS implementation to build RQL strings using chained methods, which makes it quite conducive to composition and makes it feel more like functional programming.

Along those lines are D3's selections:

  http://mbostock.github.com/d3/#selections

... and jLinq

  http://www.hugoware.net/Projects/jLinq

NEAT. Now I want to hook this up to Maildir...

I've been digging into RailsAdmin for a project recently as well, and really liking it so far.

A couple things I'd like to see addressed from the author:

- How is Active Admin's approach different?

- Why would someone choose Active Admin over RailsAdmin?

I wonder why they went with many <div>'s, instead of a single <div> with JS controlling the background-position and clip?

Right, you can't project from Earth and get that kind of broadly visible image. You'd have to setup projection via satellite orbiting the Moon.

I would disagree with the statement "nobody can afford to burn a huge logo onto the Moon". If the only constraint is who can "afford" it, the advertising world has some pretty deep pockets.

Yes, the Moon Treaty was never ratified by the US. I think it's worth noting to show both the historical precedent of respect for the preservation of the Moon's environment, and that such respect is widespread throughout the world.