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Mar 14
Dec 30
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Presentation Patterns
Fascinating upcoming book in development which aims to operationalize new trends in Presentation methods into helpful patterns and (humorous) anti-patterns. It is being developed in the open with comments and reviews elicited via twitter (@ppatterns).
Dec 23
Oct 29
the ground (and vegetables) shift under my feet
While learning up about how to do messaging in a python stack (and it is quite confusing) yesterday - I was reading up about how to use celery (python distributed task manager which is messaging-controlled) and carrot (python message creator) and suddenly realized that the alpha release (while I was reading) of celery 2.2 basically deprecated carrot in favour of kombu, a vegetable I have yet to try.
When you add to the situation the fact that I’m setting up devops using chef… you can imagine some of my web search retrievals are starting to get irrelevant…
Oct 28
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How Celery, Carrot, and your messaging stack work
helpful to anyone (like me) getting their head round how celery and carrot coexist in the python view of AMQP
Aug 19
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Save The Words
Lovely concept from Oxford Dictionaries to stop old words going out of our vocabulary. Adopt a word. Order a tshirt for it (umm if you live in malaysia). Beautiful but highly un-ergonomic flash interface.
(via chip & VSL)
Jun 30
Sharing the pain…
After hours of wrestling with what should have been a trivial integration with facebook (facebook share button), have finally worked out what was going wrong for me.
Facebook share ends up calling a url (what looks like a php page - sharer.php) which is provided with a u param for the url you are trying to share (there’s also a t param for the title, but see below).
Many people are probably using this to integrate as a widget into their wordpress or other blog, for which the rest of this is largely irrelevant, but If you are trying to integrate facebook share into a localhost runinng app, then there are certain anomalies.
If facebook can’t access the url being shared, but the url ends in a typical extension (like .html) then the url appears as normal (as above). However if it looks like a path, it doesn’t include the url.
I assume this is to do with not being able to guess the mimetype of the document. When facebook can access the url, then it connects to the server (to grab meta tags which override the t param for example), and can then include the document.
Simple fix, but hard won - unfortunately I went through a number of other possible problems (unicode issues, javascript conflict) before the lack of extension hit me as the obvious solution.
Jun 14
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CodeKata: Kata Nine: Back to the CheckOut
Did this “code kata” last week as part of getting onto a contracting recruiter’s books. Much more interesting than I suspected. I kind of get the point of kata now. Let’s hope it leads to interesting contracts!
Note to self though: don’t try to combine python work and ruby katas in the same day - can be braincrunching.
Jun 02
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"Bruce Eckel is Wrong" (on Checked Exceptions in Java). Not.
Good quality debate on the design (and use) of checked exceptions in Java. Eliotte Rusty Harold argues for the use of Checked Exceptions and why in general they are a Good Thing. I tried to hard to get behind this, but having been doing so much python and ruby for the last few years, can’t get my head back into this. In fact when I used Spring I found that there’s always loads more “throws Exception” which then spreads everywhere like a bad rash (Rod Johnson (like Bruce Eckel) doesn’t like Checked exceptions either, apparently).
May 03
