(Expanding slightly on my response to this HN thread.) First: to be on all shared hosting everywhere. I.e. you need to be really easy to install, and preferably not involve long-running processes that shared hosts might choke on. Second: to be beginner friendly. No requirement of understanding MVC, or running commands in a shell (hi …
Category Archives: programming
Inane, random, and opinionated
I need to bear in mind that the threshold for the Hacker News front page is a bit lower late at night on Friday, and perhaps only submit my less inane, random, and opinionated stuff in that timeframe. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s great for getting views.
Why not just use an IDE if you want IDE features?
After I posted about my Sublime Text 2 git plugin I got one response which I thought was worth responding to. That looks helpful, but I often wonder why not just use an IDE if you want IDE features. Obviously I have a bias here, but I’ll try to be fair to IDEs… An IDE …
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Sublime Text 2 git plugin
I wrote a git plugin for Sublime Text 2. I’d decided to try Sublime out for work to see how it compared to TextMate… and thus some degree of git integration was required. Given that it’s been out since January, I was surprised that there wasn’t already a solid git plugin. I did find this …
A shadow is upon us
Other people contributing to my projects is often the cause of my improving them. This is because people tend to contribute something that works for the case they care about, without necessarily testing how it combines with the rest of the product. There’s nothing wrong with this. They did some work and wanted to give …
Hiring developers
It turns out to be quite difficult to hire good developers. I’m involved in the hiring process at deviantART, and it has opened my eyes to just how unqualified the majority of applicants to these jobs are. To give an example of this, I estimate that we hire perhaps 0.2% of the people who apply …
Maphilight 1.3
I released maphilight 1.3 just now. (Though really I consider github the more authoritative source.) So, IE9 broke maphilight because it was finally exposing the has_canvas codepath to IE. Turns out all the canvas stuff worked beautifully, but one call to setTimeout was relying on a non-IE feature. So that’s fixed! Also changed since the …
Unintuitve effect of overflow:hidden
I found myself having to fit a textarea into a space which had user-provided CSS (“skins”) applied to it. This worked surprisingly well, but someone found a skin which had a right-floated sidebar which was playing hell with the textarea, since the textarea needed a fixed width and textareas refuse to overlap floats. So the …
Change your surroundings
I work from home. I like it. However, it’s easy to get distracted and slack off. I find that the longer I spend with my workplace set up in one location at home, the less productive I get. I seem to come to associate that spot with being distracted, instead of working. So I move …
Ooo capitalism
“Clickable Maps” is selling pre-made maps explicitly for use with Maphilight. The pre-purchase samples are pretty good examples of what’s possible. This USA map shows remote triggering of a hilight, for instance. Note: I wouldn’t have released under the MIT license if this sort of thing bothered me.