January 2011
2 posts
Separating good design and good behavior (and...
As I continue to use Twitter, I find I have more to say about it. I’ve collected some additional thoughts below.
But first, the elephant in the room is of course Gruber’s response to my original post. In a nutshell, he says that yes, OS X is changing, and Apple is the banner-bearer for that change by themselves discarding the HIG and forging individual UIs for each of their apps.
This...
The failures of the Mac App Store's UI, and that...
I’m astounded that there hasn’t been a peep from Gruber about the problems and inconsistencies in the Mac App Store application, and those of the apps sold on it. My first experience with the Mac App Store was a purchase of the new Twitter app, of which Gruber had this to say:
My new favorite Mac Twitter client.
I had a remarkably different experience upon opening the app. Much like...
June 2010
1 post
The perils of community-based spam filtering
OK, so unlike the rest of the world, which uses Gmail, I run my own mailserver. I do server-side spam filtering with SpamCop, a community-based spam-filtering system. Lately Facebook has been nagging me every time I log in: “We require a valid email address for all our users. Please enter a new email address or reconfirm your existing one.”
I opted to reconfirm the existing one a few times, but...
May 2010
2 posts
“Did you play Super Tetris? It came with a book about the Russian circus because...”
– Rachel Myers
Things I dislike on the Internet
Websites that use your referrer to highlight your search terms when you click on them from Google search results. This is a pretty useless feature. When I search on Google, I am generally not searching for words, I am searching for concepts. It’s not necessary for you to highlight every occurrence of the words install, air, and conditioning on your blog entry about how you installed your air...
April 2010
1 post
First draft of an upcoming eBay listing
Warning: This product is for serious gamers only. Casuals need not apply.
How do you know if you’re serious enough for the Cougar? Let me pose you a couple of examples.
For the sake of example, let’s say your name is Chad or Jake. And let’s say today is Friday night, and your buddy calls to say, “Hey Chad or Jake, my buddy just got back from Europe with a truckload of...
December 2009
1 post
Rachel’s best rant yet
Rachel: On Wednesday is the Ruby party; I get to go and you don’t!
Me: Oh, look at this email I just got! “Hi, I found your resume online. We are seeking Ruby and Rails developers for an exciting opportunity—”
Rachel: Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! I hate you.
Tim: You were trying to make me jealous of your party, so I tried to make you jealous of my employability.
Rachel:...
A commit message
commit f71fccccb97f6d0d1bf31ef8adc137ad8dd974a6
Author: Tim Morgan
Date: Thu Oct 29 01:17:01 2009 -0700
Who the fuck thought it would be faster to re-implement Git in Ruby? This
fucking crap has been timing out my admin pages because all these fucking
packfiles and blobs and diffs are being processed in Ruby, the Slowest
Language Ever Invented. Boy, that's way better than doing it in...
November 2009
2 posts
The aerobatic “final exam”
Riding to the airport, you’d think this was not the sort of day one does an aerobatic flight. A thick layer of stratocumulus choked out the sky from horizon to horizon, and although I had not gotten a weather report, it was obvious this was more than just a morning fog layer that would burn off later. The weather was changing; a front was passing through.
Still, I knew that Jeff is emboldened...
October 2009
1 post
August 2009
1 post
Some Rails notes for my Scribd peeps
In the latest What’s New in Edge Rails, there comes about a few interesting features in the works.
For Tyler … apparently ActiveModel (the superclass of ActiveRecord) has a state machine implementation? I wonder if it’s better than EventMachine which you oh-so-loathe?
ActiveRecord now has easy access to ActiveModel’s StateMachine implementation. I don’t know about...
July 2009
1 post
“Has anyone had anal, oral or vaginal sex on these pieces? We would like to use...”
– In response to our FreeCycle post advertising an old bed frame.
June 2009
1 post
The tailwheel “final exam”
I showed up at the airport early, 9:30 AM, as was the small price I paid for getting a ride to (but not from) the airport, courtesy of Rachel’s mother’s rental car. With thirty minutes to kill, I plopped down on the couch outside the Oakland Flyers office and played with my newly-3G’d iPhone.
Some time thereafter, Rodrigo’s recognizable white Dodge Stratus cruised into a front-and-center parking...
May 2009
1 post
Things my flight instructor told me about...
Today I had the opportunity to fly to Lake Tahoe as part of my mountain checkout. The plan was to awaken at 6:30 AM and spend 8 AM to 1 PM flying about the Tahoe area, learning about mountains and their effect on flying.
Unfortunately, the plan was thwarted by thunderstorms, forecast to be forming over the Sierras from 1800 to 1900Z. Instructors Rodrigo and Khaled seemed to be pretty OK with...