I just got my copy of Joel Spolsky’s new anthology, “The Best Software Writing” (volume 1). I had read or heard of many of the pieces before, but it’s nice to have them in book form.
Somebody has already done the work of digging up links to all (or nearly all) of the pieces as they originally appeared online.
Alex Bosworth offers a sensible list of Ajax Mistakes.
I recently encountered an amazingly stupid outsourced Adobe.com “how was your support experience” survey. I got to the end of the survey and there was a single button with text above it saying something like, “Click the button below to submit your survey and close this window.”
I looked at the page source – the button does not submit the survey, which is already complete; it’s just a Javascript action to close the window. And the script is broken! So in Safari at least, it does nothing at all. Some poor schmuck is going to be sitting there futilely pounding on the button trying to “submit” the fifteen-page survey he just completed.
I have a webserver with about a dozen active domains. Sometimes I want to take a quick look at the ongoing action on a particular domain. I have an alias called “watchlog” that takes the domain name as an argument. It shows me the last 25 lines of the log for that domain and then new ones as they come, until I kill it.
It’s a tcsh alias (sorry, bash users):
I’ve been a confirmed Mac Person since at least 1992, when I bought my first PowerBook, if not since 1984, when I first doodled in MacPaint.
But I’ve used a lot of different platforms over the years, from CP/M to MS-DOS to Windows to Classic MacOS to OS X. I play with other operating systems to retain perspective on MacOS’s strengths and weaknesses; to learn things relevant to my work as a web developer; to hedge my bets in case I decide to jump ship someday; and, of course, to waste time in classic geek fashion.