Bitwise Evolution

Musings of a Seattle-area hacker with a bent on improving digital lifestyles.

Month: September, 2008

It’s called a docking station, Joel :)

The venerable Joel Spolsky asked recently why someone hasn’t made a device that clips to the back of a desk and:

* It’s a power strip * It’s a network hub * It’s a USB hub * You clamp it onto the back [...]

StackOverflow: Endorsing(?) content theft from day one

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood just launched the public beta of Stackoverflow today, with the intent of building a community for high-quality technical questions and answers. I’ve been using the site for about three weeks now, during the closed beta, and I’ve noticed a disturbing trend that was outlined in Joel’s announcement post today:

Want [...]

Breaking away from Visio

The ‘proper’ way to do user interface design is hotly contested in the OSS software development world, and the discussions usually boil down to three suggestions:

“Just write it — it’s not that hard” “Use [glade|qt designer|netbeans|...] — all the widgets are there” “Just use pencil/pen/whiteboard/etc — it’s faster”

I don’t agree with any of these — (1) is [...]

Wrestling Python

With the launch of the StackOverflow beta I posed a question about python static analysis tools, as I have been playing with python and django recently for some side projects. The responses at Stack Overflow quickly pointed to PyChecker, PyFlakes and PyLint.

Over all, it was a disappointing experience. My experiences are outlined below, [...]