Jeremey's Weblog

Downtown Photo Walk

Doorway, Tritone
Originally uploaded by jeremey.

I met up with some other photogs last Saturday morning and did a photo walk in downtown Houston. I was pretty happy with the stuff I got, here's a link to the set on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremey/sets/72157600376441880/

Ah, Language Wars...

...makes me pine for the heady days of emacs vs. vi.

Anyway, I've been tasked with trying to prove that development environment X is a better choice than development environment Y. Along the way, there will also be discussion about whether database system A is better than database system B, so forth, and so on. In the ensuing discussion, we will have to visit the topic of whether "XML databases" (whatever that means) and XSLT are good ideas.

In researching other people's opinions about XSLT, we came across some old blog posts here and here. The first makes the claim that XSLT is the spawn of Satan, with which I wholeheartedly agree. But more amusing to me are the comments, especially from XSLT proponents.

Why is it that XSLT proponents claim that one must "get the functional programming mindset" before one can get XSLT? I think this is a tool they use to postpone the inevitable. The inevitable being a realization that XSLT is actually just a PhD student's wet dream, and not a programming language. But it is used to deflect discussion until, presumably, the anti-XSLT party has come up to the intellectual level of the pro-XSLT party. Since so few programmers are prepared to discuss functional programming, the odds are that the real discussion is averted.

So I would like to say this: why would "getting the functional programming mindset" convince anyone that it's a good idea to write hundreds of lines of syntactically excruciating code to accomplish what one or two lines of Lisp or Haskell would accomplish?

The claim seems to be that in some parallel universe of which most programmers are unaware, this actually makes sense. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no such universe exists. Could be just me.

Technorati Tags:
programming, languages, xslt

Ruby, Rails, Asterisk, RealTime...

Cackle with glee, cackle with glee... if only I could tell you. :)

Keynote, Keynote, Keynote

It's another joy-filled keynote day! Catch the frenzy on Mac Rumors Live. This is a developer conference though, so I would expect a presentation more tailored to developers. But hey, we can dream big, right?

Ruby and Rails R-O-C-K

Check out my automatic breadcrumbs. This could be expanded on, no doubt, but this will work for any CRUD-based model and controller. This kind of dynamic programming is just sweetness. This code lives in the main layout.

I uploaded the code to Pastie: http://pastie.textmate.org/68999

NetNewsWire

Well I've ditched endo in favor of NetNewsWire. With 3.0 it has a clean, simple interface and I've found that most things go unread in endo because of its design. As I subscribe to more and more feeds, the aggregated approach is losing its appeal, and I split my time between aggregated group views, all latest news, and individual subscriptions, which is where NNW beats the pants off endo.

Caching

This is a great model for caching in web apps (and elsewhere).

More N800

So I'm really liking the n800. Typing is fast for me, much faster than on my e61 (with fingers, not stylus). It's very usable. I'm writing this post on it in fact. What I really love is the touch screen experience, which I was a little surprised with. Dragging web pages around with my finger is pretty sweet. The web browser is good, not great (I've never liked Opera much).

I'm noticing that as I type more I'm having to think about wheree to break paragraphs because I can't see my complete post, but that's not a knock on the n800 in particular. I use the IM features a LOT.

All in all, pretty dang cool. The UI is far from perfect, but there are some clever little things. For instance, if you tap on things with your finger, you get a finger-sized menu, whereas a stylus tap will get yoy a stylus-sized menu. Sweet.