h3h.net

Sometimes when I write an article I know that there is a low potential value for comments directly on the article. In these cases, I close comments and encourage linking to the article from other sites, hoping to encourage more thoughtful replies and a richer discourse. Well that’s great, but it’s not much of a [...]

Does anyone else find it strangely unsettling that Guido van Rossum’s blog runs on Java? Presumably, at least: the URL has .jsp in it.
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=212259
It’s not the end of the world or anything, but I think eyebrows go up when the CEO of Ford drives a Toyota or the BDFL of Python publishes his blog on [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

Engineers like problems and businesspeople like solutions. When was the last time you heard any executive say, “let’s sit down in front of this whiteboard and try to better understand the problem at hand”? If it was recent, congratulations, you’re in a lucky minority. The truth is that the majority of executives want to hear solutions, not problems; sales, not internal struggle.

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 [...]

I recently signed up for a Highrise account because I already use Backpack and Basecamp on a daily basis and I find them quite useful.
It’s worth noting that Highrise is brand new from 37signals, so there’s some expectation of “not quite polished” going in. I manually added two contacts to Highrise a few days ago [...]