Don’t Steal Ideas, It Is Discouraging

Don’t Steal Ideas, It Is Discouraging:

Don’t Steal Ideas, It Is Discouraging
As the dust is settling from the Svbtle vs Obtvse debacle, I’m left feeling a little discouraged. The reason I feel this way is because a consensus had been made between part of the community that communicates: “It’s okay to steal and duplicate an idea as long as you write your own code.”  If you don’t already know the story, read the summary below and check out some of the discussion on Hacker News.

[What I find discouraging is the knee jerk reaction. in the end it’s just another blogging tool. As the proof that it is commodity item, for the most part, something extremely similar was written in no time. And even then, I don’t deny that subtleties matter, and that the thinking behind Svbtle changed the way the he thought about writing, it was just that. the technique, whether reinforced or not can be applied to many tools that are already out there. Don’t title, don’t publish seem like the core initial impulses. So with that in mind, why all the upset because this code wasn’t released? Yet another subtle bit. In the original post about it, there’s an implication that he was about to release it, and then he pulled it back in order to create an invitation only blogging network. So he pushed the buttons of a community that demands openness in code with this bit. If he was looking for attention, this might have worked, although I suspect it is more tempest in a teapot than viral explosion… in the end, the visual design similarity is troubling to me. It flies in the face of what he was trying to do in the end, which is create a network where the visual sues stand for quality. Making it hard to discern by making use of the design is what I find unfortunate here.]

How Apple.com will serve retina images to new iPads « Cloud Four

How Apple.com will serve retina images to new iPads « Cloud Four:

One of the more interesting questions raised by the new iPad and its retina display is whether or not web sites should deliver higher resolution images when there is no way to know the connection speed. AppleInsider found that Apple.com is being prepped to deliver high-res images and documented how you can test it in Safari on your desktop.

As you can imagine given my research on responsive images, I was keenly interested to see what approach Apple took.

What they’ve chose to do is load the regular images for the site and then if the device requesting the page is a new iPad with the retina display, they use javascript to replace the image with a high-res version of it.

[Oh boy. I’d carefully consider the importance of a hi-res image, take a careful look at my traffic stats, and go from there…]

Should you skip college?

Should you skip college?:

To me that was like playing video games. It was something else to get a degree in playing. I think for everyone who discovers something they love it’s like that.

[Yes! It is like that for me too, when I’m interested in what I’m learning about. The biggest problem I see, is that some crafts, trades, or skills are valued over others. It’s crazy. We need them all, and we need people who are good at them, who love them, who advance them to practice them. Don’t send your kids to liberal arts college just because, make sure there’s something there that they care about. If your little girl loves building cars, or welding, or swinging a hammer, if your boy loves to sew and design clothing, if your kid loves to build robots, or plant gardens. Make sure that there is time to indulge that desire. I assure you it’ll pay off for them in a happy life, and for all of us in that they’ll do what they love for living.]

Source: Scripting News

Matt Langer · Stop Calling it Curation

Matt Langer · Stop Calling it Curation:

If people want to be celebrated for being smart or for having exceptional taste that’s all fine and good, everyone can go right on congratulating one another in their little mutual admiration societies. But please spare the rest of us all this moralizing on why we should be giving people who share links anywhere near the same amount of credit we afford that singularly special act of original content creation.

Separating the Baby From the Bath Water

★ Separating the Baby From the Bath Water:

The actual larger truth — underage workers, unsafe conditions, grueling hours, crowded dormitories — are all real problems, and all deserve our attention. But that’s exactly what Apple itself has been saying for five years. It’s also what journalists from the Times to ABC Nightline have been reporting for years.

Daisey impugned the integrity of Apple — and the journalism of ABC News — in order to work people up regarding problems that don’t exist. This only served to draw attention away from the labor, health, and environmental issues in Apple’s Asian supply chain that do exist.

He has hurt the true cause, not helped it.

[Roight. Nothing beats the truth. And a lie is never warranted if your fighting for what’s right. Daisy got all this wrong.]

Source: Daring Fireball

More Consumer Reports sensationalism

More Consumer Reports sensationalism:

Any reasonably competent, well-intentioned writer or editor would assume that most people reading this would think the new iPad gets hot, implying severe discomfort and a significant flaw that will affect nearly everyone who uses it, rather than merely warm, which would imply an occasional minor inconvenience for the few people who might notice and care.

Clearly, no such editor is employed by Consumer Reports.

[I haven’t trusted them for unbiased reviews in many years.]

Source: Marco.org

d: A build light

Build light

I have a long history with build lights. A build light is as indicator that displays the success or failure of a software “build” where all the parts are integrated, the tests run, and if all right all the tests pass and to the best of out test suites knowledge, everything is working.

It’s a confidence enhancer to be sure. The light just makes it obvious, and in fact, with my current team we have a number of indicators since we’re a virtual team. Test runs show in our group chat, are visible via ccmenu, and email. But nothing seems to bring as much joy as green build light. In one former place there was a build “bunny” a WiFi enabled device that would play some audio and move it’s ears, but it never seem to catch on as good indicator of the build.

I was looking for something to install with this group when I ran across this article. And while our setup is different, this seemed like an excellent start. Here’s how I wired it up:

There’s a gem called blinky. Blinky relies on libusb-compat, but that turned out to be only a “brew” away: brew install libusb-compat. And then gem install blinky. They’re designed around this usb powered light. They’re not far away in Portchester, NY. Nice. A few lines of code later, and my light was flashing on and off. It’s warning mode seems to be a little hinky, but everything else was perfect. A little parsing of the ccmenu xml that Tddium delivers, and I was off to the races. But I couldn’t afford one light per project just for myself so I decided on a pattern that would be obvious about a failure of any of the projects. Next I wanted things to run periodically. OS X uses launchd for stuff like this and here I ran into an issue.

I do lot of Ruby development, and use rbenv to switch between runtimes. And it works just fine. But in this case a standard call to ruby wouldn’t work because launched doesn’t know anything about my shell settings and so would try and run the system ruby which has nothing installed (no gems and it’s an old version I don’t often work with at this point). I couldn’t figure out how to get launchd to use a shell that would respect my settings.

In the end my launched command is sh -c /Users/daniel/buildlight/run.sh and in there is a line that points directly to the ruby executable I wanted to run with this file /Users/daniel/.rbenv/versions/1.9.2-p290/bin/ruby ~/buildlight/light.rb. That worked. While slightly inelegant… I’ll take “works” any day. And maybe someone else can explain to me how to make launchd respect rbenv. I use Lignon (app store) to control a number of things under launchd, and it makes it really painless to load stuff and set the params. And that’s it. Now every 5 minutes it checks the builds and lets me know what’s going on. I didn’t find a lot of articles about creating a build light when I looked, so I thought I would write this up. Happy coding…

Other folks I know are using this setup to display sales and other successes over the course of the day. It can be a great way to bring some celebration to the little wins that make up our days.

These are OK Telling a true story, with objectivity and…

These are OK:

Telling a true story, with objectivity and…:

Mike Daisey could have performed a monologue about going to Taiwan to visit the Wolfconn factory where they make the Orange ePhone. He could have played a character not named Mike Daisey, or he could have presented his story as “inspired by real events” rather than as some new form of investigative theater. The artistic value of the piece would have been the same, though it may have received less attention. But instead, Daisey put himself in the story, he made up stuff about China and Apple and Foxconn, and then, offstage, he told everyone it was objectively true.

[This story continues to make my blood boil. It doesn’t seem like much of the media understands how destructive this is to them. CBS gave the whole thing a big pass Sunday morning.]

Source: venomous porridge