Syntax is easy. Languages are a bit harder…
(A note to would-be designers and developers, and to myself.)
You don’t really know a language till you know the library and the tools. Syntax is easy.
(A note to would-be designers and developers, and to myself.)
You don’t really know a language till you know the library and the tools. Syntax is easy.
Mike Loukides hits most of the right notes (pun intended) over at O’Reilly Radar, even if his ending goes a little wide of the mark:
So the notion that creativity can be owned, and that any use of someone else’s ideas requires compensation, is nothing but an attempt to steal all of creativity. Whoever can pay their lawyers the most wins. Anyone smell pirates in the room? I am not willing to sacrifice this generation’s great artists on the altar of Hollywood. I’m not willing to have the next Bach, Beethoven, or Shakespeare post their work online, only to have it taken down because they haven’t paid off a bunch of executives who think they own creativity.
Trent Walton is one of my favorite developer/designer types. In a class he taught at a recent conference, he challenged people to make good use of the best CSS3 and modern Javascript tools to reproduce movie poster titling with nothing but web interface tools. You’ll have to see the results to believe them. My favorite? Toy Story. New Adventures 2012→
Turns out that authentication can be a bit of a bear in web applications… especially when you’re dealing with two different database backends, and all the more so when the functionality you’re adding on wasn’t even a glimmer in someone’s eye when they built the first chunk of the application. I have a headache, thanks to this particular implementation challenge.
It is even rarer for me to gush with praise for Democrat politicians than for Republicans (rare enough already). But Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) deserves serious praise for being one of the few voices on Capitol Hill who consistently opposed SOPA and PIPA on principle. This editorial at Wired is yet another example of his being right on target:
While some have derided the events of last week as a departure from the way we do things in Washington, I believe last week is an example of the way Washington can change for the better. If more Americans took the time to be informed and call Congress when something matters to them lobbyist and special interest power would be greatly diminished.
So the question is, did Congress learn anything? Will Washington lament last week like it was a bad review that cost it business or will it recognize what happened as an opportunity to learn and do better?
Point of minor hilarity: wherever I type “cookie” for web dev, I want to spell it with an extra e, because that’s how you spell Wookiee.
For the record, last week was an extremely unusual week in terms of posting frequency. Between launching the site and the unusually provocative points for discussion prompted by PIPA/SOPA, there was a lot of extra content last. I generally hope to have around one post a day up on one of the sections of this site, so each section will get a post only every three or four days on average.