weblog.masukomi.org

We took a test run this weekend; seeing how the gear works for the big trip in December. It was only three days, but now I’m back, out of the shower, and about to start my morning routine. And, the truth is I feel a bit overwhelmed at the prospect. So much…. internet.

So much data. So much news. And so little of it actually matters.

I’ve already falling back into the mindset of being on the road. Just ride…. grab half way through the day and guess how far you can make it before dark. See if there’s a campground nearby ride some more. Try and find as many beautiful things to see and photograph as possible. Repeat.

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.

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.

I love my DODOcase. Money very well spent¹. 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.”

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.

Future Edit:

The song is from his Sideways album. It’s kind-of hard to find as he seems to have disappeared from the Internet in 2014, but here’s a link to it on YouTube Music.

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.

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 towers¹. 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…

Rebase is one of the most powerful tools in Git’s arsenal, but it can trip up people coming from centralized version control systems. This is just a quick example of why, and when, you’d want to use it.

Let’s say we’ve got a team of three developers. Monday morning they all come in, Bob makes a quick commit, and shares it with everyone. They all do a git pull and suck it into their repos.

A flow chart of How to Sell…Anything.

The Problem

When you check out the iPad at an Apple store they’re all lined up on little lucite stands with a grippy top and a slight angle so that they’re simultaneously easy to view and easy to type on. I love those stands. I’d totally buy one, but I can’t. [Update: now you can buy something even better. Check out the Loop from Griffin and their A-Frame

the goal here was to create a stand that would hold your iPad securely, would let you easily read the screen, and type comfortably on. Also, it had to not look like crap, so duct tape was specifically excluded, and this is the result.