Idiotprogrammer: Texas Literary Blog

Category: Programming

  • Systems Approach v. User Approach

    I wanted to follow up on Bruce Eckel’s thought about “thinking in zope” (or thinking in a particular idiom or computer language). Previously he argued that one cause of bad design is a developer’s failure to appreciate customer problems and what they really want. The problem, he argued, boils down to gathering and heeding user…

  • Perfection-oriented v. Performance-oriented

    Robert Strandh writes a piece about two different kinds of learners: perfection-oriented learners and performance-oriented learners. He writes: The people in the category perfection-oriented have a natural intellectual curiosity. They are constantly searching for better ways of doing things, new methods, new tools. They search for perfection, but they take pleasure in the search itself,…

  • Thinking in Zope

    A list of (primarily php-based) open source CMS’s and web application platforms. It includes links to some php survey tools also. A longish 5 page chapter excerpt from Ed Yourdon’s book, Death March. A death march project , for those of you don’t know, is one whose “project parameters” exceed the norm by at least…

  • JEdit and Python IDE’s

    Still learning the Python thing. From David Mertz’s Charming Python articles, I get this article about Python IDE’s. In summary he says that if you can live with Jython, you can be happy with JEdit. Now if only I can get the debugger to work!

  • The Python Paradox

    Slashdot discussion of Paul Graham’s article about why Python programmers are smarter than Java programmers.

  • Links for Learning Python

    I’m gathering links for learning python. I’ll be adding links over the week. First, Uta Priss’s Python Course & Exercises, Python FAQ, Guido’s Tutorial , and PlanetPython . Also, here’s an interesting piece by Ted Leung about how languages can be community-friendly.

  • XML Editors, FO, TEI and XSLT

    Survey of what XML editors people are using and why (PDF). Also, list of XML tools by category. XML and TEI Tutorials. TEI and XSL .

  • Paul Graham on Hackers

    Paul Graham on Hackers.

  • htaccess generator

    Here’s a free online htaccess generator.

  • Open Ebooks & Big Media Cartels

    David Rothman has been explaining the advantages of the openreader. Here’s a longer piece by Jon Noring on the dangers of DRM overkill., and open ebook standards. On their implementation roadmap, I see that they are emphasizing xhtml/css and basic oebps, but not TEI-lite or Docbook (not immediately at least). That is both good and…

  • Web Standards and Flash

    Using Flash while still supporting web standards.

  • Zope Photo Installer and Photo Galleries

    A Photoalbum product for Zope. It doesn’t seem to be plone-friendly yet. Check out this feature list. It looks like the yet-to-be-released version 1.4 will make it plone-friendly. Alex King has a photo database. The neat thing about his product is that it is platform neutral. Basically you run a web server on your local…

  • Various Technology Posts

    Help, this weblog is quickly turning into a literary/cinema blog! I go in spurts about various subjects. For a few weeks, I’m crazy about python, another week I’m ranting about world affairs, then the next two weeks I’m into mythology and wacky photoshop sites. This week, everybody has been publicizing the Internet Explorer exploits. From…

  • 20 Questions (For the Web)

    From JOHO, here’s a lovely online version of the classic game 20 questions. I tried blowjob, prayer, goggles, birthday cake, sitcom, a pomegranete, a podium, a will, a signature. Guess which ones the online game guessed correctly?

  • Shirky’s Nomic World

    I know that slashdot and boingboing will catch this on their radar: Clay Shirky on the nomic world. (Link not available yet, but it will be shortly). In fact what often happens, both online and off, is that structures are created which look like citizen input, but these structures are actually designed to deflect participation…

  • Ton of Bricks

    Added Jim Roepcke’s Have Browser Will Travel to my permanent links. He gave a good intro to python at a plone conference. (The other slides/presentations are archived here). Roepcke alerted me to the amazing interview with soldier Jim Massey about his participation in the killing of innocent Iraqi civilians. There are chilling quotes everywhere: Q:…