Tabs vs. spaces:
It’s a big back-and-forth between developers, with lots of us swearing by the use of spaces, but I’m here to explain to you why everyone who uses spaces instead of tabs for indentation is not only wrong but seriously inconsiderate of their fellow developer.

First though, we must consider what a tab is and what a space character is. A tab is a typographical element specifically designed for the indentation of text to various levels. A space is a typographical element specifically designed to separate individual characters so as to distinguish words from each other.

Next we must consider the individual coders we work with. Each of us has a personal preference about how much indentation looks good, and is most readable to our eyes. Many of us like about four spaces worth per indentation level, but some prefer two or eight. What’s important here is that what’s readable and good looking to you is almost guaranteed to not look good to someone else working in the same codebase.

When you use spaces you are misusing a typographical element to emulate one that already exists. Not only that  but you are enforcing your personal aesthetic on your co-contributers. However, if you were to use a tab for each indentation level then everyone else who works in the same codebase would see each level of indentation at a depth that they prefer. Every code editor out there allows you to specify how many spaces of indentation each tab should emulate. People who like it wide can set it to eight. People who like it skinny can set it to two. Everyone gets to see the code indented in a way that is aesthetically pleasing and readable to them.

There’s only one thing worse (in this discussion) than enforcing your indentation aesthetic on your co-contributers, and that’s combining tabs and spaces. When you do that it’s almost guaranteed to look screwed up in other people’s text editors. So turn on invisible characters in your editor (or at least have it display tabs).

In summary:

• Tabs were invented for indentation, so stop misusing the damn space bar for something it was never intended to do.
• What looks good to you doesn’t look good to everyone elese.
• Everyone gets to have indentation at a level they want if you use the freaking tool that was designed to indent instead of the one that was designed to separate words.
• Turn on invisible characters so you know when some idiot’s mixed tabs and spaces.

Every week I, and millions of developers like me, have to put together a status report for our bosses, letting them know what we’ve been up to for the previous week. Like most of the developers I’ve encountered I’m always a little unsure of what *exactly* I was working on, and typically I just open up git to see what commits I made, and try to remember any non-code stuff I’ve

Thinking it was silly to keep wading through everyone’s commits for the past week to see what I worked on I’ve put it all together in a script (in ruby) called git status-report, which you can grab from github here.

It outputs a bullet list of all your commits for the past n days, or the commits of one of your fellow contributors. I think I’ll find the latter a great way to keep up on what other folks on my team are working on at the moment.

Usage: git status-report [-e <email>][-d <days>]
Generates a status report for what you worked on for the past n days.
-e, --email <email address>      The email address of the committer to generate a report for.
                                   Defaults to your "git config user.email" address.
-d, --days <num days>            The number of days to generate the report for. Defaults to past 6 days (one week)
-s, --simple                     Simpler output. Doesn't include the dates
-v, --verbose                    Verbose output includes details on each commit
-r, --reverse                    Displays output in reverse chronological order`

Please don’t hesitate to fork the repo on github and make improvements. I’ll happily merge them in to the main one.

git-status-report supports will check for commits in all the branches and supports multiple repositories. Check the README for full details.

I love my DODOcase. Money very well spent. Throw an iPad in it and it just looks like a big Moleskine (love that look) instead of some techy $500+ block of “steal me”.  Plus, it’s about the only case out there that I feel is actually worth the $50 they all seem to cost. But, there’s one problem: nowhere to store any papers. I had to go to City Hall the other day and needed to bring some papers with me. “I’ll just fold them in half and throw them in my DODOcase.” I thought. And it worked, kind-of. The problem is, that every time you open you have to move them to use the iPad, and you’re stuck like that till you get home again and have somewhere real to put them.

“If only it had an accordion pocket like the Moleskine it’s emulating.”

The next day at work I grabbed a manila folder, a pair of scissors, and some scotch tape and made one, and have been loving the results. I’m posting them here so that other DODOcase owners can do the same. Maybe the DODOcase folks will even consider adding an accordion pocket like this in future cases (only without the scotch tape ;). If so, I totally want a free one. ;) Just kidding, actually, no, not kidding. ;)

When I initially made this I left the flap over the opening simply because the folder was wider than the cover, but I’ve been using it for about a week now and have come to realize that it is essential. Frequently when I open my DODOcase I remove the elastic and flip the cover around behind the iPad in one swift motion. If there wasn’t a flap there any documents held in the accordion pocked would be likely to go flying out.  And yes, before you ask, because the iPad is smaller than an 8 1/2 x 11 or A4 paper you’re going to have to fold “normal” sized papers in half to fit them in the pocket.

Pictures (followed by instructions):

Instructions:

• Take a manila folder. Turn it so that it faces left and center it vertically on the inside of your open DODOcase’s cover.
• Make a mark where the red paper stops on the top and the bottom.
• fold the top and bottom edges of the folder inwards at those marks.
• Close the folder with those edges folded inwards and rub the crease down with something hard.
• Put the folder on your dodocase and mark on the top and bottom edges of your folder where left side of the red paper is.
• Cut off the left edge of the side of the folder that is facing you from the top mark to the bottom. You may want to make a crease, or draw a line between them so you have something to follow with your scissors.
• Fold a vertical crease in the far side of the folder so that it folds towards you over the edge you just made with your scissors. Crease this fold with something hard. You need it to really want to fold inwards as much as possible on its own.
• Open the folder back up. You will see the edges you previously folded inwards poking up. Place tape on the far side of the left half of the bottom one so that the bottom of sticky side is half stuck to the back of the edge poking up and the top of the sticky side is facing you and not stuck to anything.
• Now, mostly close the folder, and starting at the inside fold the tape over to stick to its counterpart.
• Repeat for the top.
• Your folder now has an accordion fold.
• Tape the far top and bottom edges to your DODOcase. I used Scotch tape for this but I think I’m going to switch it to Medical tape where it’s held to the DODOcase.

Voilla. You’re done. :)

Drop me a comment if you do this, or if you think of a way to make it better.

I was listening to Ray Mailman’s I Didn’t Know the other day and realized it’d make a great Mind Map. So, this morning I grabbed MindNode for the iPad, put on some headphones, and whipped this out.

And, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Ray Mailman…

I wrote a rant the other day about AT&T’s MicroCell. A lot of people just don’t get why I’m so upset, and in explaining it to someone I came up with this metaphor:

Why should I have to pay AT&T anything (for a MicroCell) to compensate for their failed service promise that we’ve already been paying ~$100 a month for?

That’s like telling someone you’ll come cook them dinner every day (no matter where they are in the US) if they pay you $100 a month, but then you only show up occasionally, and sometimes you leave half-way through the cooking, and then you ask them to pay you an additional $150 to get you to show up, but only at their home, and only if they’ve gone out and bought all the fixings for dinner and paid someone else to make sure they can have access to the stove.

Would ANYONE, EVER find that acceptable?

No. You’d get fired and they’d hire a cook that actually did what they were paying them for.

Feed is not about zombies. Yes, they play a significant role in the book, but the book is simply not about them. It is a gripping book about journalism and journalistic integrity.

It starts out with a dramatic zombie escape sequence, as all books involving zombies must, which honestly left me feeling… “um. ok. And?” The scene was good but it didn’t seem to have a real point beyond acting as a hook. Immediately afterwards she sets about the task of building up the world of her main characters, not a “zombie! zombie! fear! fear!” world; a world where two twenty-something siblings go about their life of being professional bloggers / journalists in a world       where The Infected are an everyday part of life that has been, to varying degrees, contained.

When The Rising happened people stopped trusting traditional media, because it let them down so badly, and began to trust Bloggers who spoke the truth about the dead rising and what people needed to do to save themselves. By the time of the story Bloggers have become organized themselves into a very real and serious form of journalists categorized by the type of stories they produce: news, opinion, fiction, real-life action, etc.

Our main characters get a gig following a presidential candidate on the campaign trail, which sounds rather incongruous with a zombie book, and doesn’t make you say “oh my, this will be good!” But trust me, it is, and it gets better with every page. It’s just a matter of time before you’re stealing extra minutes in the bathroom just to see what happens next. It’s a little slow in the beginning, and some of the “clues” are discovered a bit too easily, but this is the best book I have read in a very long time.

The poignancy of the climactic scene in the van will stick with you for a long time, and you will love, and hate how it all ends.

Read this book. Read this book if you ever thought it’d be cool to be a reporter. Read this book if it bothers you that our media outlets are hamstrung by governments and over-litigious societies. Read this if it bothers you that people keep giving away their freedoms every time something scary happens. And… read this book if you like a little zombie spice in your tales.

—
Four out of 5 stars, only because the intro sequence left me feeling meh and the real story took a little bit to get going. You could *almost* delete the first two chapters and have a better book, but the end of the second chapter sets up some important details on how the main characters do their job.

Background:
My left foot had been hurting me, and I hypothesize it was due to my shoes. Last weekend it moved from being an occasional discomfort to outright pain. I could only hobble. My left’s a bit wider than the right, and sometimes it feels like it’s been squeezed to the point of hurting at the widest point. Additionally, my pinkie toes splay outwards in an attempt to create a wider base upon which to stand. Unfortunately normal shoes prevent this and I end up with a hole on the outside of each shoe where my pinkie tries to push its way out (and eventually does).

One solution would be to simply find wider shoes. Another would be to go with a shoe that’s actually shaped like a foot, where my pinky toes can do what they want, and where I can really grip the ground. That is to say, Vibram FiveFingers. The second option sounded much more fun.

Sadly, I can’t claim to be one of the many barefoot runners who’ve been discovering the joys of these shoes, but I will be walking a solid two miles in them every week-day. It should also be noted that I’m a total tenderfoot. I’d love to have been able to walk around barefoot in the woods, and down trails, but I have no calluses and pretty much every tiny pokey thing on the ground makes me say “ouch”.

If you want to skip the details there’s a summary at the end.

Day Zero:
The selection process was interesting. I wanted to go with the Bikila, but it was only available in the Teal / Green which is even more hideous in person than in pictures. I’m sorry but I’m not showing up to work in shoes that ugly. Actually, I’m not showing up anywhere in shoes that ugly, and I’m not a serious runner so the extra features it has won’t be a huge benefit to me. Next on the list were the Flows and the KSO Treks because they would do a better job of keeping me warm on the colder days out here. Unfortunately the Flow’s neoprene and I had a falling out when I attempted to insert my foot. That is to say, I couldn’t without a fight. Somehow I ended up trying on the KSO non-Treks next and they fit like a glove… literally.

I had gone in thinking. “I may get these, but they may just feel weird.”  Two steps after putting them on there was a massive grin on my face and we knew there was no way I wasn’t getting them. I did end up trying the Treks but after wearing the normal KSOs their thicker tread pattern left me feeling… disconnected. When trying on the Treks I highly recommend you find a nice hard floor to walk around on. The difference is much more pronounced there. On grass and dirt I’m sure that it’s a non-issue, but I live in the city. Except for when I walk the dogs in the park, my feet don’t encounter natural surfaces.

So, I was sold, but they didn’t have a color I wanted, so it was down the street to the next retailer, and a call and subway ride to REI before I had the black and gray ones you see above. Without the extra trip it was all black, or icky gray and “palm” (pale ¬†green). The blue and gray were pretty tempting, but Dachary and I were both of the opinion that they’d look a bit out of place with the stuff I tend to wear.

The Beginning:
I wore them for the rest of the evening and made a rather disturbing discovery: I don’t know how to walk without shoes. Yeah, I putter around the house without them, but normal striding walks? Nope. I’m effing clueless and this disturbs me greatly. Our bipedal stride is one of our most significant evolutionary traits and I’ve forgotten how to use it. How whack is that?!

When I stop thinking about it I seem to get around just fine, but the moment I do think about it… Well, put it this way: Dachary said I looked like I was walking with a limp at one point. At the time, I was thinking something along the lines of “Am I supposed to land on the side of my foot? My toes?” These are not thoughts an adult human should ever have to have!

As for the shoes? So far lots of fun. The city’s textures are even more interesting. Standing still on concrete for twenty minutes waiting for a train is just as uncomfortable as it is without shoes though. This is not a surprise.

Still irrationally paranoid of someone stepping on my toes. This is irrational because normal sneakers don’t provide any protection from that either and I don’t worry about it in them.

Best discovery: I can stretch my toes! I’ll frequently stop in the middle of a walk, put one foot back and press my toes against the pavement; bending them upwards as far as I can to stretch out the tendons on the bottom. I could do an OK job if it in normal shoes, but in VFFs the only limitation is the tendons themselves. It feels awesome.

Day Two:
I’m walking on everything I can just to walk on it: large rocks, the asphalt bump that surrounds some bushes by the park, the grass, the mulch, curbs, bricks, roots. It is awesome being able to actually feel the ground. When you walk through grass you can feel it brushing across the top of your feet. Streets and sidewalks are about as boring as they were in normal shoes though.

Tried running this morning. Just playing with the dogs. Felt awesome. Every now and then I heel-strike and that’s just as uncomfortable as it is barefoot. I find that when I’m running I don’t have time to ponder how my foot is contacting the ground. Each step happens too fast. The end result is dramatically more natural feeling. I’ve just had a glimpse into why the barefoot runners seem like a fanatical cult.

…

Walked my first mile. Toes were a little hurty. It appears I haven’t really been using them for quite some time. Half way through the day I noticed my outer calves were tired. Apparently I haven’t really been using them either.

…

Walked home through the rain. The first drops were a bit chilly, but after a minute I stopped feeling them. Can’t explain why. Some puddles simply couldn’t be avoided. My feet got dunked, and I just smiled. Unlike your standard sneakers, VFFs don’t feel like you’ve got a wet sponge strapped to your foot. It’s just a little cooler for a minute.

When it’s finally time to get a new pair I think I’ll try the neoprene ones again because cold rain in cool weather is understandably chilly. Maybe after living in a pair for months the Flows and I will be able to come to an understanding. When I put them on this morning my right foot slid in without complications. Some of the toes on my left foot were still a little confused about what hole they were supposed to go in. Still haven’t tried them with toe socks. Tomorrow’s going to be rainy again so I may have to wait another day.

Traction on these is superb.

When I got home I slipped into my house shoes, because it doesn’t matter how comfy the shoes are, I want dry feet. They felt huge! This old beat-up pair of Vans I’ve been wearing for a year feel like they’re too sizes too big now. They’re all loose and floppy feeling. Bleh!

Day Three:
I transgressed. I went back to my old sneakers this morning. But just for a few minutes, I swear! It was a cold, icky, and wet morning outside and the idea of  the grass soaking my feet as I followed my dog through the park did not sound pleasurable. I just wanted to be back in my cozy bed.

I put my VFFs on when I walked the mile to work though, and threw some toe socks in my bag in case they were wet and chilly when I got to work. Never put them on. My feet were comfortable and warm all day.  I have noticed that my gait has changed, and as a result my messenger bag is now bothering me. It used to swing behind me and gently bounce against my butt with every step, but that makes it harder to walk now. I’m having to keep it against a hip, but it doesn’t want to stay there. I’ll have to either adjust it or switch to another bag.

The outside of my calf is still sore. Not in a bad way, just a reminder that I’m working muscles that haven’t been used in a while. I’m still learning to walk again, and every now and then I slip back to a lazy heel-strike only to be quickly reminded by the impact that that’s not a natural way to walk. It seems that the most efficient way to land is to come down just behind the ball of the pinky toe and then spread the weight out across the ball of the feet and down towards the heel at the same time. It’s very comfortable when I do it correctly, but getting into the habit is taking some doing. Walking on the balls of your feet requires too much muscle and probably isn’t good for you anyway.

I’ve noticed that when I’m walking correctly I feel like a ballerina. It sounds a little silly, but ballerinas are all about graceful movement, and I’m down with that.

I was wearing my now ginormous feeling Vans around the house again, and when I stepped outside in my VFFs for the late night dog walk I just felt so good to move in.

Running is brilliant in these.

Day Four:
Worked from home today. Hardly did any walking. Possibly a good thing since my calves are still sore.  My left foot has finally started sliding in as easily as the right. A little poking of my odd toes to get them into the right slots. Normally I’m all about shoes that just slip on with zero effort (thus the old Vans slip-ons), but for some reason the extra effort required to get these on isn’t bothering me. Maybe the benefit just outweighs the small trouble, especially since it’s getting less each time I put them on. I really do look forward to walking in them. It’s kinda weird. I’ve never looked forward to using a pair of shoes before.

Day Eight:
My calves stopped being sore once I finally gave them a chance to recuperate. Both feet slide into the toes easily now, and walking is back to being so automatic that I’m back to reading books on my walks to and from work. I’m not a runner, but every time I do a little sprint across the road, or across the park my feet just don’t want to stop. “Why don’t we just keep going for a bit?” they say. “Maybe a quick spin around the block?” I’ve never felt this before. I may actually start running in the mornings before work.

Summary:
Traction is astounding. Comfort is great when you’re moving. Standing still on hard surfaces is uncomfortable (just like it is without shoes), and I forget I’m even wearing them when at my desk, until I wiggle my toes and smile. The tiny bit of running I’ve done in them just makes me want to run more.

I can honestly say that no shoe has every made me as happy as these. I’m finally using my feet the way they were intended and loving every minute of it. Worth. Every. Penny.

As we all know, AT&T has been having serious issues with their quality of service thanks to the iPhone. What most people don’t know is that it isn’t a problem that can be solved by simply putting up more towers*. But that’s not what I’m upset about. I’m upset about their handling of the “3G MicroCell“.

I live in Cambridge MA, just across the river from Boston. There are millions of people here (literally), and, like many AT&T users my calls get dropped even when outside, on bright sunny days, with five bars of service. In my house maybe eight feet from the windows I’m lucky if anyone can understand what I’m saying, or can even hear me in the first place. My girlfriend works from home, and for the most part, I don’t attempt to call her, because it’s not worth the frustration, but then I get my hopes up, call, can’t understand her, and eventually have the call dropped. But she’s just screwed if she needs to call someone on her cell. But, like I said, I’m not actually that upset about the crap service. It’s like being mad at someone with a broken leg for not being able to run. Of course, their leg was broken years ago and they still seem to be hobbling around acting as if it were fresh…

But AT&Ts handling of the 3G MicroCell is absolute bullshit. In the promo video on their web site they’ve got a guy attempting to make a phone call by holding his phone out the window, before being told by his wife that he doesn’t have to thanks to the 3G MicroCell.  ”So, no more leaning out of the window or standing on the porch to make a call?” the man says. Ok. You’ve got service so crappy that not only do people have to lean out their windows to use it, but you explicitly use that problem in promotional material as a reason for getting the 3G MicroCell and then you have the gall to charge $150 for the privilege of getting the coverage iPhone users are already paying at least $100 a month for? Even worse, you use our bandwidth to do it. Even worse than that, while users or the MicroCell have gone out of their way to take themselves off of your overloaded network by using the MicroCell AND giving you free bandwidth that they’re paying someone else for you’re still going to make any minutes used talking that way be removed from their account. On top of all that, if we want the privilege of getting the service we’re already paying for, and give you free bandwidth, but don’t want those minutes to count, we have to pay you another $20 a month?!

Fuck you!

Your proposal is essentially that your service is such shit that your customers should pay you $150 and give you free bandwidth?! And let’s not forget the option you’ve given us of paying you a recurring fee (and give you more free bandwidth) if we find that we like talking to the people we were paying you to let us talk to in the first place, now that they can actually hear us.

In what universe does this make any sense? You should be giving them away to anyone who wants them and giving people unlimited minutes for calls made on them. If your service actually worked it would be reasonable to charge for it, but it doesn’t, and it’s not reasonable for people to have to pay you to compensate for failing to give them what they’re already paying you for. This is bad economics and it is utterly disrespectful.

If all of that wasn’t bad enough. I’m probably going to have to buy the fucking piece of shit because I can’t use my fucking phone without it. If I didn’t think the iPhone was a brilliant piece of technology that I loved using I would cancel my service and pay pretty much any termination fee just to get away from you, your blatant disrespect of your customers, and your shit service. I’d go to tiny little T-mobile in a heartbeat, even though they’ve got less coverage than you, because where they have coverage it actually works, and they try and do the right thing for their customers.

Shit like this gives AT&T an even worse name than they already have, and makes me seriously consider ditching the iPhone. It will be a monolith of my hatred for AT&T. It will glare at me saying “sucker” until the day I finally cancel my contract with you and joyfully smash it to pieces with the nearest hammer.

Fuck you AT&T.

Yours truly,
- All the people you’ve been shitting on for years now.

P.S. While I have you: I already bought an iPhone from you. You’re charging me a hundred bucks a month for it. Stop trying to sell me an iPhone!

—–

* With regards to putting up more towers. Someone with a good understanding of the technology described it to me like this: Imagine that you’re at a table with 4 other people all talking. With a teeny bit of effort you can listen to what any one of them is saying. You are the cell tower, and each of the other people are cell phones. Now, imagine there are a thousand people at the table. They’re all talking, they’re all within hearing range, and they’re all speaking at roughly the same volume. You’re going to have a damn hard time listening to any single one of them. It wouldn’t matter if there were fifty “towers” in the room attempting to listen to the people’s conversations because they’re all going to have the same problem. It’s just too hard to listen to a single voice in that cacophony. Other cell phone providers don’t have the same problem because they use different technologies.