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SEARCH KEYWORD -- RANT

  XML Abuse

It’s everywhere. XML Abuse. From Domain Specific Languages to Data Serialization, XML is the most commonly abused data format I’ve ever encountered. XML is perfectly fine for (because it was designed for this): First of all: XML was designed to be written by humans and read by humans. Nearly all generated XML I’ve seen sucks badly. I think this is because XML cannot efficiently represent common data structures found in programming languages.XML is good...

   XML,Abuse,Alternative,Serialization,Data storage     2011-12-14 07:12:10

  The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy

I came across an article yesterday about programming languages, which hit on one of my major peeves, so I can't resist responding. The article is at greythumb.org, and it's called Programmer's rant: what should and should not be added to C/C++. It's a variation on the extremely common belief that C and C++ are the best languages to use when you need code to run fast. They're not. They're good at things that need to get very close to the hardware - not in the efficiency sense, but in the...

   C,GCC,Fallacy,Evolvement     2012-01-09 08:54:46

  Why do people hate Windows?

Windows brought us into PC era, it becomes the most widely used OS in the past 20 or so years. But unfortunately there are still many people hate Windows. Is it because we may encounter the notorious blue screen issue now and then?  People hate Microsoft Windows for the same reason they hate Comcast, United Airlines, or Paypal.Once Microsoft gained a dominant market position, it completely and utterly took its customers for granted. It became arrogant and complacent, causing customers to fe...

   Windows,Hate     2013-08-02 21:13:53

  Multi-master,NoSQL and MySQL

The MySQL family has been innovating rapidly. New features need names and sometimes those names are confusing. Describing something as multi-master or a NoSQL solution has confused me.Multi-master requires one of conflict prevention, conflict resolution or faith. MySQL Cluster provides both conflict prevention and resolution as described in these great posts. Regular MySQL has minimal support for conflict prevention (auto-increment-offset can prevent insert conflict...

   MySQL,NoSQL,Comparison,RANT,Master     2011-10-17 11:30:42

  Building an iPhone application.

One of my New Years resolutions was to finally learn the iOS SDK and build a 'real' application.I am happy to report that progress is going really well and wanted to share something that I have noticed about iOS programming.It only looks scary... it's not. It's actually very easy.Now, I am not building Mail, Angry Birds or Photosynth or anything, but the core concepts of the SDK are not that bad once you spend some time learning delegation. If you don't understand delegation, iOS programmi...

   Apple,iOS,Application development     2012-01-28 07:03:36

  Open Source Needs a New UI

As a freelance web developer, I’ve seen and used my fair share of open source web applications (and desktop software), and I’d like to point out something that I see all too often in open source projects: the user interface almost always lets the project down. Let me explain… The Problem I’ve used a considerable amount of open source software (web-based and desktop), and I feel that a large portion of them are let down by their UI. The functionality is brill...

   Open source,Problem,UI,New paradign     2011-12-09 07:53:19

  The Death of .NET and the Power of Perception

One of my long-standing issues with Microsoft is its inability to control the perceptions surrounding its own products. One of the biggest examples was during the Windows Vista years when, even after the product had been fully patched and worked fine, Apple continued to do a better job to define the image of Windows (compilation of ads here) than Microsoft did, costing Microsoft billions in lost revenue for the millions it saved on a strong advertising campaign. The firm has a history of being p...

   .NET,future,death,bottleneck,development     2011-08-10 03:13:40

  FTP Must Die

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is specified in RFC 959, published in October 1985. The attempt in this specification is to satisfy the diverse needs of users of maxi-hosts, mini-hosts, personal workstations, and TACs, with a simple, and easily implemented protocol design.That's from the introduction. Does anyone here know what a TAC is? I don't. I had to look it up, since the acronym wasn't even expanded in the RFC. It took three tries in Google, and I finally found it in some obscur...

   FTP,Future,Death,Trend,Protocol     2012-02-06 08:13:36

  FUCK PASSWORDS

I'm so tired of passwords. So, so, so tired. Most people don't understand this. Most people use the same password everywhere. Most people can just mechanically type out password3 in every password box, smirking to themselves at how clever they are, because who would ever guess 3 instead of 1? I don't do that. Let me tell you what i do. I generate a different password for every service, based on a convoluted master password and the name of the thing. I do this because it's what you're...

   Security,Password,Random generation,Hard to remember     2011-12-05 11:32:45

  Your Code is My Hell

It occurred to me recently that my experience as a Rails developer may be somewhat unique.I often get brought in to help preexisting Ruby/Rails projects evolve and mature in a sustainable way. As a result, the vast majority of Ruby projects I’ve worked on have been well-established by the time I arrived. In fact, offhand I can only think of one commercial greenfield Ruby project I’ve participated in. All the rest have been “legacy” from my perspective, in the ...

   Code style,Clean code,Code paradigm     2011-09-15 08:39:16

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