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Recently I used Fog Creek’s Copilot software to attempt to help a family member import some favorites into Firefox. I followed the original Project Aardvark team two summers ago and knew what Copilot was in broad strokes.
So I ran the two minute trial and things seemed to work as expected. I bought a day pass [...]

I really like Ruby’s idiomatic use of ? and ! token characters at the end of method names to indicate the method’s purpose: a predicate or a mutator (or otherwise destructive method), respectively. The benefits can be seen with examples.
If the task is replacing a substring inside of a larger string, JavaScript would have it [...]

Pamela Fox of the Google Maps API team recently released a driving directions game based on the Google Maps Driving Directions API. It’s neat, but, especially in areas with which I’m intimately familiar, the routes I choose are far better (more direct, faster) than what Google chooses.
It would be pretty awesome if they built a [...]

I’m hesitant to agree with Paul Graham’s definitions:

‘Wise’ and ’smart’ are both ways of saying someone knows what to do.

I would say that wisdom is moderation and decisiveness over time, which does keep the spirit of Paul’s definition, but that intelligence or “smarts” are simply the capacity or aptitude for problem solving.
That said, applied [...]

What follows is the briefest of summaries about my feelings on parenthood.
Most people suck. My parents were (separately) very good at teaching me relevant things for life and now I’m a pretty good person for it. Kids are expensive and time-consuming, but I feel a little guilty not imparting good sense and knowledge on at [...]

Usually I don’t do roundup type posts, but there has been a lot of awesome recently and I felt it was prudent to catalog some of it.

Review Board
A Django-based web app for managing code reviews. I have yet to try it, but it looks awesome. I’m going to see if I can work it into [...]

I took a quiz that was supposed to tell me who I should vote for in the 2008 election. He’s a dirty long-haired cowboy from the looks of his picture, but he’s a straight shooter when it comes to the issues. A true libertarian.
Now all he needs is a shower, a haircut and a new [...]

I do a lot of developing for the web, which makes sense seeing as though I’m a web developer. If I were developing with my ideal set of tools, the following things would be in that set:
Serving

FreeBSD 6 or Mac OS X Server
lighttpd — serving static files and running a reverse proxy
Apache 2
mod_python
Python 2.5
Django

Authoring

HTML 5
CSS [...]

A Mac software company, Panic, just released their newest product: Coda. I am thoroughly impressed by the extreme attention to detail and quality paid by those developers on both the website and the product itself — it’s nothing short of a work of art.
That said, I don’t think I’d use Coda myself because I already [...]

There’s a simple coding (logical, not syntactic) style difference found when writing code with conditionals. The first form prefers positive checks to screen for error conditions which are handled later in else clauses. The second form prefers negative checks at the beginning of a routine to throw error codes and escape before the body of [...]