Reviews, speculation, and other idle thoughts on hardware, software, firmware…
JavaScript is a wily beast: optional semi-colons and braces 1, sneaky performance hits, promiscuous equality operators and other dirty tricks… If you’re not careful, you could get yourself in trouble. Fortunately, there are tools out there to help. One of the recent additions to the JavaScript developer’s code quality toolkit is jshint. 2 Even more […]
Last night, I opened a pull request (my second) on the JSHint project. I created a wrapper for Apple’s JavaScriptCore (JSC) engine, which ships with (effectively) every Mac that’s out there. Why JavaScriptCore? That’s the obvious question, right? Why even bother creating a wrapper for JSC when JSHint is already out-of-the-box ready for Node.js, and ships with […]
Back in February, I wrote a little Ruby script to deal with sorting version numbers as they’re dumped out of the git tag command. The problem (in a nutshell) is that “1.0.2” < “1.0.10” — except that git returns these as strings which sort alphabetically. Hence the original Ruby script. Now: if you’re behaving yourself, and following […]
As Mike Fogus described it: I think this book is more important than it’s good. And I’m somewhere in that same vein: I like the idea of this book more than I like the book itself. That is difficult to say without feeling as though I am coming across harsher than I mean to be. […]
“Can everyone stop writing JS micro-libraries for a second. I need to catch my breath.” 1 There are a few posts (on both sides of the fence) about this shit-storm 2 of “micro-frameworks” that seem to be getting announced every other day lately; and while I’m not sure if the following referenced post is the […]
The Joy of Clojure: Thinking the Clojure Way by Michael Fogus and Chris Houser became available today. I had the good fortune of getting to read an early draft last year and got to provide some feedback. True to its title, the book is a joy to read and I do not know of many […]
Ever feeling lost in a sea of not-exactly-ordered tags when you enter git tag at the command prompt? It seems that a common tagging idiom in a lot of git repos is to tag important milestones or releases. Some repos use <major>.<minor>, others <major>.<minor>.<version>, still others <major>.<minor>.<version>.<patch> (and so on?). And as those repos get […]
In March 2007, I released the Ortho theme for WordPress, and it has served me well on this blog since then. But times change and technologies advance, and it seemed like a good idea to get familiar with those, and brush up on my skills in the process. Thus, this evening I deployed the Orin […]
Spoiler alert: toString has its mitts in everything. This all started when we saw a candidate put the following into an exercise we had given him: if (arrayToTest == ”) Our first thought was well that seems wrong… And though it seems like something that shouldn’t work, it did–when the array contained a single item, […]
…or: a reprise of the “thoughts on replacing our iMac G5” thread. Though discussed here before, I think that this is the real thing this time. As Malkovich 1 approaches its sixth year of service, it is getting close to completely shitting the bed. Gone are the days of the annoying random shutdowns, but they […]