The iPhone 3g is upon us, and it’s the only thing the Interwebs will be able to talk about for the next week or two. I’m not a fan of OSX, or an Apple fanboy, so it might surprise some people that I will be waiting in line on Friday to get one of these things. Sure, there are plenty of valid criticisms of the iPhone. It’s not anywhere close to being perfect, but I still think it’s the best thing out there.
It might be surprising, but despite my high level of connectivity, I don’t do so well with the social web applications. I started with Orkut back in the day. We got all of our friends onto it, then we got tired of it after a few weeks. I have a Facebook account, but I don’t actually use it for anything. I primarily just use e-mail, IM and web forums for communication with the new world, and the telephone to communicate with the old world. Twitter is the first thing to put a kink in the works in quite some time.
If you are someone who participates on the web in any way, you must be familiar with the concept of spoilers. The general idea is that learning information about a work of art prior to experiencing it for yourself will negatively affect your personal experience with that work. The question of why spoilers have become a big issue is fairly obvious. What is more interesting is what the proliferation of spoilers says about the state of contemporary popular culture.
This is going to be an uncharacteristically short post for this blog. I have something important to say, but it isn’t very complicated. Basically, I want other software developers to remember that people sometimes want to write code when they do not have an Internet connection.
I ride the train to work every day. While I am commuting, it would be very nice if I were able to work on various software projects. It is very easy to setup a development environment on my laptop to actually get work done, but it is not easy to get the documentation. Most documentation these days is, understandably, done online, often in a wiki.
Online documentations is awesome, and definitely needs to stick around. However, offline documentation should not suffer. It’s not too difficult to make some sort of weekly, or even monthly, cron job that exports the online documentation into some sort of offline format. Even just static HTML with proper links is enough. Yes, I know there are scripts to download wikis, and also wget -r, but they are usually not satisfactory.
Not everyone has an Internet connection all the time. When working with new frameworks and libraries, documentation is a necessity. I’m sure there are plenty of other developers out there like myself who would very much like to have documentation available offline. Please don’t forget us.
I’m looking at you Javascript library and web framework people. You know who you are.
If you give me a new hammer, I will suddenly have a strong urge to hit nails with it. As I walk around a hardware store, the tools sing out to me as if they are all Excalibur. They so desperately want me to use all of them. I do not think I am the only person who experiences these feelings. Continue reading
Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron Beta is out. I’ve installed it on my laptop, and I can definitely say this is the best Ubuntu yet. There are many changes I am very happy about. There are a few things that didn’t get changed which I am upset about. Best of all, none of the changes made anything worse. Typical awesome Ubuntu action.
When Apple announces a new product I am typically among the first to proclaim how few rat anuses I give. Not only am I not an Apple fanboy, but I actively dislike OSX. I have also been known to make fun of people who purchase overpriced computers with far more horsepower than they will ever need. Given all that, I can not deny that I am excited about the Mac Pro. Given that it is so out of the ordinary, I think I need to explain this excitement not just to others, but also to myself. Don’t worry though, I won’t be buying one anytime soon.
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