Super Mario Kart++
Debt Metaphor (via WardCunningham)
“Ward Cunningham reflects on the history, motivation and common misunderstanding of the ‘debt metaphor’ as motivation for refactoring.”
What does it mean to be a professional software developer? What rules do we follow? What attitudes do we hold? And how can we maintain our professionalism in the face of schedule pressure? In this talk Robert C. Martin outlines the practices used by software craftsmen to maintain their professional ethics. He resolves the dilemma of speed vs. quality, and mess vs schedule. He provides a set of principles and simple Dos and Don’ts for teams who want to be counted as professional craftsmen. (via Keynote-Bob Martin - Øredev)
I came across this post today and must say that the author, Ron Garret, really spoke out what I was thinking the whole time: It is just stupid how difficult it is to layout a web page using only CSS. The funny thing is, it was just today when I was trying to align some simple elements using CSS. I failed miserably. This would have been a no-brainer using tables but with CSS-only I couldn’t get it to look the right way.
I usually don’t even have a clue of what could be wrong with my layout. It’s like you’re trying to find a bug in code which gets executed nondeterministically. So I end up trying out a few things: I throw in some div’s or shuffle the order of the elements. Then maybe by chance I have fixed the problem. But with tables you wouldn’t even have these problems. Because they behave like you think they should.
Now, we can’t go back to tables-only designs anymore. But the current state of CSS is also not acceptable. And don’t even think of that cross browser thing, which makes matters even worse. Currently I’m glad that I’m working on an iPhone web app where there are no such problems. Only problems with CSS.
“A tale of suspense, intrigue, corporate greed, and the stupidity of an authorization mechanism that isn’t turing complete. With code.”
After migrating the database I have now converted all files to UTF-8 as well. I’ve used this script as a starting point and extended it to walk recursively through all project folders. Filenames containing spaces are accepted as well.
My solutions for the excercises in chapter 1.4 of Essentials of Programming Languages 3rd Edition. Took me quite some time to finish this.
I’ve just finished migrating a database (200+ tables) from Latin1 to UTF-8. Fortunately MySQL did most of the work for me. I only had to recreate all tables in another database with UTF-8 as default charset and then copy all data from one table of the source database to the same table in the destination database. MySQL automatically transformed the data into the right character encoding which is quite nice.
Here’s what to do: You first create your new database and then do an INSERT INTO for every table you want to migrate.
