Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

Peter Norvig – Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years: “Why is everyone in such a rush? Walk into any bookstore, and you’ll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 7 Days alongside endless variations offering to teach Visual Basic, Windows, the Internet, and so on in a few days or hours. […] The conclusion is…

Henri Sivonen – HOWTO Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML: “There seem to be developers who think that well-formedness is awfully hard – if not impossible – to get right when producing XML programmatically and developers who can get it right and wonder why the others are so incompetent. I assume no one…

François Joseph de Kermadec – I’m wikied out: “Wikis and Forums are awesome. They allow the community to improve the documentation, build upon it, provide feedback to the developer. But they cannot replace the documentation. By definition, a Wiki is written by someone who feels comfortable enough with the application to need “tips“, forums require…

Marc Hedlund – Etsy’s Excellent Visualizations: “I had seen Etsy, the marketplace for handmade goods, but not its excellent visualizations, until Upendra showed them to me this week. Check these out: * Etsy ColorSpace * The 3d Etsy Time Machine (I love that the clock runs backwards) * The Etsy Geolocator“

“The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding („TNG“) is a powerful way to manage and display your genealogy data on the Internet, all without generating a single page of HTML. Instead, your information is stored in MySQL database tables and dynamically displayed in attractive fashion with PHP.”

Joe Gregorio at XML.com – Dreaming of an Atom Store: A Database for the Web: “Imagine that you just have a huge glob of storage that you can store Atom Entries in, and which you can edit using the APP, and then search over using OpenSearch. That idea, that big blob of Atom Entries, all…

Tony Marston – An activity based Workflow Engine for PHP: “This document will describe the activity based workflow system which I have constructed as an extension to my Development Infrastructure for PHP. […] In order to implement a workflow system it is first necessary to find a suitable means of designing and modeling a workflow…

PostgreSQL Gotchas: “PostgreSQL is a fully-featured, robust open-source database with strong SQL standards compliancy. As with all RDBMS products it has its odd little idiosyncracies, which while documented, are not obvious, counter-intuitive or just head-scratchingly odd.” I’ve already run into some of the problems described there – “unquoted object names fold to lower case“, and…

Neil Kandalgaonkar – Links to essays in Best Software Writing I: “Joel Spolsky has compiled a book of essays on software, which he calls The Best Software Writing I. The essays all came from online sources, but when Spolsky released the chapter listing, I didn’t see anywhere online where he posted links to the originals.…

In “On Browser UIs”, Richard S. Tallent has a comprehensive list of reasons “why web apps suck“. On “missing widgets“: “Tree views: even the best ones out there suck. MSDN, for example. They also almost invariably lead to using frames to avoid population and rendering on each page refresh. […] Context menus. This alone is…