Links from 2010

Far be it from me to always be chasing and advocating the new hotness, and declaring the ignorance of the dark ages (ie. 5 years ago), because it's very very rare in technology that something is so utterly and dramatically superior in every technical aspect as Git (or Mercurial, or Darcs) is over SVN. [...] Now I understand there are many many valid reasons why it might be necessary to use subversion, but an easier transition from CVS is not one of them. [...] Version control is a developer's bread and butter. Investing in using one of the good ones may be the single greatest skills ROI a developer can get. Unless you understand both git and svn intimately, you won't grok this, but let me state from hard-won experience that in SVN you can occasionally hit nightmare scenarios requiring days or even weeks to sort out a problem that could be solved in under an hour in git.

The world of management theorists remains exempt from accountability. In my experience, for what it’s worth, consultants monitored the progress of former clients about as diligently as they checked up on ex-spouses (of which there were many). Unless there was some hope of renewing the relationship (or dating a sister company), it was Hasta la vista, baby. And why should they have cared? Consultants’ recommendations have the same semantic properties as campaign promises: it’s almost freakish if they are remembered in the following year.

Fairly hardcore.

Nothing particularly surprising, a few contentious parts: pretty decent round-up of ideas that are in reasonably common usage.

I mostly hate myself for saving this.

There are two useful types of meetings: alignment and creation. Briefly, alignment meetings are tactical communication exchanges that rarely dive into the strategic. These are fine meetings that have a weekly cadence, and while there are lots of ways to screw up these meetings, their tactical repetition often keeps them on the rails. Creation meetings — diving into solving a hard problem — involve, well, more creativity. Each hard problem requires a unique solution, and finding that solution is where creation meetings can go bad.

Some git best practice.

DevOps is hard, we can help. Simple and automated development environments. Experiment, collaborate and deploy with confidence. From $7 per month.

Sync Google Apps with MS Office.

A product manager enables the team to execute the company vision.

You can use a woolly smartphone 'sock' as an improvised windshield. One with a fairly open weave will produce less muffled results than a sock with a microfibre lining. Pulling the sock about half way down the phone lets you get at the touchscreen and also creates a small but necessary air space around the microphone.

A JavaScript library for image- and vector-tiled maps using SVG.

Use grep to recover files removed with rm. Clever.

With distributed version control, merges are easy and work fine. So you can actually have a stable branch and a development branch, or create long-lived branches for your QA team where they test things before deployment, or you can create short-lived branches to try out new ideas and see how they work. This is too important to miss out on. This is possibly the biggest advance in software development technology in the ten years I’ve been writing articles here.

Here's how to make sure other people can't tag you on Places.

"Theoretically, if you are on ATG 9.x, you "can" use whatever front-end you want."

This is super.

Dark Patterns are [...] not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind. The purpose of this site is to catalogue various common types of Dark Pattern, and to name and shame organizations that use them.

418 I'm a teapot: The HTCPCP server is a teapot; the responding entity may be short and stout.

Foursquare for media.

"Proximity is a location-based alarm that allows you to set *where* you want to wake up, as opposed to *when*." Close, but would like to see something a little more general that could trigger a range of actions depending on location.

A few months ago, the London bartender Tony Conigliaro told me that weak cocktails can be more aromatic than stronger drinks. That observation provoked me to play with the proportions of alcohol and water in spirits and wines. Then this month, a barista showed me that I could make tastier coffee by brewing it with less ground coffee and more water. It’s true, as it turned out: Water is indeed a useful flavor enhancer, exactly because it dilutes other ingredients and can change their balance for the better.

Riffing on the excellent Yahoo GBS.

Gives developers the ability to leverage cloud computing to build very precise streams of data from the millions and millions of tweets sent everyday.