Based on Doug Crockford’s chapter in Beautiful Code, I wanted to take a crack at implementing Top Down Operator Precedence in Python. After all, Python and JavaScript are quite similar, right? Not really. As you can imagine, Doug’s code makes great use of JavaScript’s strengths, in this case the ability to assign new methods to…
If it’s been quiet on this front it’s because I’ve been engrossed in my continuing education. Andy Oram sent me a copy of Beautiful Code, a thoroughly enjoyable work from O’Reilly. If you like stretching your brain by reading code-intense essays from top-tier coders, I recommend this volume. In particular, I’m been digging into Douglas…
No iPhone for me. No waiting in insane lines. No paying $600 to beta test first-gen hardware. And definitely no signing up for two years under the AT&T regime. Now when does the 2nd gen iPhone come out…? -m
I just finished an online version of SICP, the famous computer science text Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (link to full and official text online). What do I mean by “finished”? Well, there are online video lectures (link to iTunes-ready RSS video feed), expertly delivered by SICP authors Sussman and Abelson themselves in 1986….
I fell asleep one night while reading Ray Kurzweil, and had this crazy dream where the internet called me up (over VOIP, naturally) to complain that none of my web pages made sense. Par for the course, I thought at first. But then I told the internet a few things, to let me worry about…
Still more mobile news. Yahoo! Go is shipping. No alpha, beta, gamma, etc.–the real deal. Give it a whirl. If your phone, like mine, can’t handle the awesomeness, you can visit the slick web-only version at m.yahoo.com. -m
America’s Finest News Source has the scoop. -m
Have a look at these new Samsung phones, especially on page 2. Still limited to Asian territories, but this sort of thing has to be coming to the US and Europe as well… -m
The big buzz today is news that Terry Semel has stepped down as CEO of Yahoo, and Jerry Yang has stepped up. Believe it or not, Y is the first place I’ve worked at that’s large enough that I’m not on a first name basis with the CEO, so this kind of thing is much…
I have an older iPod. I don’t go G numbers, but it’s 40 gigs and a black and white screen. The battery life is measured in minutes. Hmm, 40 gigs, same as the original Apple TV. We don’t have a TV in the place, but we do watch movies on the computer screen. As long…
Once again, I am a judge for this year’s First-Chapter-of-a-Novel Contest hosted by The Writing Show. We’re looking for unpublished, less-than 4000 word entries. Final deadline for submissions is June 15, so there’s just enough time left to put together your masterpiece and get it in. This year, there’s some serious prizes, and the top…
The approximately seven readers of this blog have probably already heard this, but just in case: I have a new role at Yahoo!–working on next generation search. Lots of details are still falling into place. For now I describe it: “Imagining, specifying, prototyping, developing, and evangelizing next-generation web search experiences leveraging the full and unique…
Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. –Gertrude Stein …the solution to the overabundance of information is more information. –David Weinberger in Everything is Miscellaneous. Weinberger’s book is a great read, taking you to lots of different places–from a prototype Staples store to the underground Bettmann Archive, and…
I thought this article was interesting in overall tone and a specific quote: Modifying the software for each phone’s display is a matter of brute-force labor. There’s no intellectual way around it. Yahoo! is one of the few companies that’s been able to pull this off, but only because they have an army of Ph.D….
I started writing this post back when doing tech editing the “Rich Client Alternatives” chapter on Web 2.0, the book. Now, with Apollo getting some attention, it’s worth revisiting. What do XUL, Yahoo! Widgets, OpenLaszlo, Silverlight, and Apollo have in common? All of them mix content with presentation to some degree. Years of experience on…
Havi Hoffman at Yahoo! gave me an advance copy of David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous. I’ve been a fan of Weinberger for years–I even quoted him in my book. I’m just getting in to the reading. I’ll report back when I have more to say. -m
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but just after installing Thunderbird 2, deleting emails started taking 5 seconds, then 15, then 30, then a full minute. Then it quit working alltogether. Also 14,000 old mailing list messages materialized in my Junk folder. My inbox has hundreds of unread, and drastic measures might be needed to get things…
Here’s a NYT article on Yahoo! Mobile, including a picture of the “warroom” where I spend a few hours on a typical day. The sign on the back wall says “platform team”, and on top of that “Maru” in Kanji and roman characters. -m
James Clark is blogging. A few zillion people have already mentioned this. A slightly tangent observation: I had trouble reading through an entire article in web form, but had no problems returning later to the atom feed. At first I chalked it up to early morning grogginess, but it seems to be a repeatable phenomenon…
I don’t remember ever spelling this out, so: Any posting that adds to the discussion shall be accepted Any posting by a spammer/robot/pay-per-post flunkie shall be rejected Any posting that would offend my grandma shall be rejected Any posting that takes too long for me to categorize per above MAY be rejected These aren’t hard-and-fast…
I can’t talk on the phone right now. Can you follow up on email? Consider it placed on my todo list. Let me give you my new address. Hmm, I don’t have it. What are you talking about? (If you get the pattern, post below…) -m
Here’s a great comparison site. Try out some searches you might run from your phone and let me know: which one did you prefer? Why? -m
Today Yahoo! launched oneSearch on their other front page, m.yahoo.com. OneSearch has been available for a while, but only from within Yahoo! Go. Now it’s available to millions of mobile devices equipped with a data connection and XHTML browser. The basic premise behind oneSearch is to replace the tri-modal search box, where you have to…
Big surprise, huh? More evidence that the XML namspaces spec is out of touch with the reality of developers ‘on the street’, a.k.a. it has cracks in the foundation. I disagree that aggregator developers are “bozonic”, as the title of the first cited article indicates. Why should any developer need to keep all that extra…
Go read it for yourself. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is all too widespread in the industry. -m
OK, RESTafarians and HTTP experts, here’s a question. Is it kosher to send a Location: header back with an ordinary, say 200, response? Scenario: the server knows better than the client what the client needs. ‘I realize you asked for http://foo.com/x, but instead I’m sending you http://foo.com/y — ready or not, here it comes..’ -m
Last week I did something pretty foolish: I placed an order with Amazon. A few days later six new books arrived–two on math, two on brewing, Dreaming in Code, and one on guitar playing. All of these went directly to my toread list, a huge library of books that probably wouldn’t remain standing if I…
Sun Java Wireless Toolkit 2.5 is out of beta. Can anyone explain to me the logic of making a Java toolkit that’s Windows-only? Sheesh. -m
Spotted under the headline Windows Live Search for Mobile Goes Final, Still Great (like they were expecting it to suddenly plummet in quality?) on Gizmodo. It’s a 114k jar file that runs on my SLVR, where Yahoo! Go isn’t yet available yet, so points for that. Search suggestions show as you type, hugely useful on…
ERH’s comments on XForms, as part of his predictions for 2007. Worth a read. -m