natevw's comments

natevw | 9 years ago | on: Project Bloks: Making code physical for kids

At first glance, seems a lot like http://littlebits.cc/ only not shipping yet. Might have a bit more emphasis on programming though when it's released?

Their own list of "prior art" https://projectbloks.withgoogle.com/research shows some even older "block-based" electronics kit projects.

natevw | 10 years ago | on: Delicious is finally dead

Yeah, I made the mistake of continuing to collect links via the site while its been slowly getting more broken. Been too busy to write my own simple self-hosted version.

Now I realize — obvious in retrospect — that I should have simply jumped to Pinboard as soon as I had managed to export my bookmarks a few weeks ago. (Or years ago when Delicious got "sunset" for the first time, and Pinboard first came out and everyone else but me switched over…!)

natevw | 13 years ago | on: Reprojected Zoomable Raster Tiles

Years ago I wrestled against similar problems trying to make a completely visual map-based photo organizer, with only partial success: http://calftrail.com/mercatalog.html

So I can tell you that what Jason Davies has been doing in this realm recently is 1) really hard, 2) really legit and 3) really exciting. While Mercator was a great choice for tile maps due to its local properties, at medium and global scales it'd rarely be one's first choice.

Now, it doesn't have to be.

natevw | 13 years ago | on: Amazon Glacier

I'm not seeing this at all for my use case. Unless I've figured it wrong, if I were to use this for an offsite backup of my photos, my ISP's Acceptable Use Policy limits my rate enough that I'm seeing only about a 10% penalty beyond normal transfer costs. See http://n.exts.ch/2012/08/aws_glacier_for_photo_backups for some sample "real-world" numbers.

natevw | 14 years ago | on: We're in an icon-sharpness limbo

I've always wondered if adding something like "font hinting" would cover most use cases. Although I suppose for e.g. icons sometimes at the smaller sizes the actual graphic is pretty much a completely different image, rather than just a hand-tweaked rasterization.

natevw | 15 years ago | on: Building a single page app with Backbone.js, underscore.js and jQuery

Care to explain what you mean? Given that...

- Crockford originally thought it worthwhile to emulate classical inheritance

- so many, many other frameworks (and technique essays) provide various flavors of class-based inheritance

and that:

- even embracing true prototypical inheritance requires additional helper functions (or at least did in EcmaScript 3)

...I'm a little confused that you disagree that "there is no self-evident approach" for dealing with JavaScript's 'conflicted' (as the linked article correctly states) way of being a so-called prototypical language.