past's comments | WingNews

past | 13 years ago | on: Firefox debuts new developer toolbar

This is fixed in Firefox 18.

past | 14 years ago | on: Firefox – tons of tools for web developers

That comment taken out of context can be quite alarming, indeed. Firebug, until recently, had two developers who were paid to work full time on it (jjb from IBM and Honza from Mozilla) and a number of people who contributed in their spare time. Now it's down to one full-time developer paid to work on it (Honza) and a number of people who still contribute in their own time.

past | 16 years ago | on: App Engine JavaScript SDK

Erm, narwhal actually uses rhino as its default engine. Perhaps you meant to say that you can now target the narwhal API, instead of waiting for rhino to expand its API offerings?

past | 16 years ago | on: App Engine JavaScript SDK

Besides being an incredibly powerful combination of a functional and an object-oriented language, I just adore the fast redeployment cycle during development. With appenginejs, I test every change in the backend code by simply refreshing my browser. Not jaw-droppping per se, but certainly a breath of fresh air for a long-time "enterprise" Java developer, like me.

past | 16 years ago | on: Reddit IAMA. An ex Google programmer switched to a job in the lumbering industry

Ah, the void of non-existence is certainly filled with emptiness. It's what happens to the living that matters, though. Put another way, is Schrödinger's cat alive or dead? Does it matter if you don't intend to open the box?

past | 16 years ago | on: So long, euro?

Actually the recently announced austerity plan has been the hardest ever for the people here, at least since democracy was restored in 1974. And the soon-to-be-announced revised austerity plan mandated by the IMF is rumored to be the hardest thing since WW II. It's not certain that the plan's goals will be met of course, but you can be sure that this time the politicians are not only caring about their re-election.

past | 16 years ago | on: James Gosling leaves Oracle

I don't remember having seen his name for a long time in any technical discussion or decision involving Java, besides Closures, where he co-authored the BGGA proposal. Although it appears that Gafter and Bracha put more work in that one. Even then he did not apparently have enough say on the matter to make his blessed proposal official. His main role seems to be an evangelist for the platform and perhaps researcher for some more involved areas, like real-time systems and numerical processing, AFAICT from his blog posts.

past | 16 years ago | on: GDrive is coming, 1GB free storage

I wish Windows supported WebDAV in a sane way. They seemed keen to do so around Windows XP, but they apparently changed plans. They have two stacks, the more standards-compliant one (Web Folders) is deprecated and won't run in many new versions of Windows and the old one is way too buggy and suffering from bit-rot.

past | 16 years ago | on: Picard : A Micro-framework for node.js

There is an explosion indeed, with two main directions IMHO: - frameworks like yours on top of Node - frameworks like helma-ng and nitro on top of Google App Engine (via Rhino)

These offer the best scalability guarantees and I'm still torn on what is the best approach for my personal projects.

past | 16 years ago | on: Vi in JavaScript, in your browser

It can be used for adding a vi mode to any web page editing scenario you might have a need for. If you want to edit local files from your browser, I've made a Firefox extension that does just that:

http://past.github.com/despin/

It doesn't have a vi mode (yet) and lots of other things, but I'd be interested to see if people found it interesting and useful.

past | 16 years ago | on: The HTML5 drag and drop disaster

I think Thomas Broyer's comments in the post are a good rebuttal. It's also important to note that even ppk appears in a comment to consider writing a more constructive post, after further reflection.

past | 16 years ago | on: Tell HN: Chromium nightly (linux) appears to have stable support for Flash

Moreover, when running on a 64-bit OS nspluginwrapper is mandatory, so I have pretty much forgotten how bad Firefox stability used to be.

past | 16 years ago | on: Paul Buchheit: Left brain, Right brain, and the other half of the story

This made me realize why I prefer watching a movie before going to bed, instead of having a late night coding session. After keeping my mind occupied for a while with lots of left-brain thinking, I can't just flip a switch and see life in a holistic, right-brain way. I'm usually laying on the bed, sleepless, thinking about every little problem in my life in excruciating detail. It's only after I make some conscious effort to switch to right-brain thinking that I finally relax and fall asleep.

I face the same issue when I drive home from work, too. It's usually when I see my daughter's face that I can power-down the left brain and start seeing the big picture.