http://blog.ciscavate.org Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:41:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The venerable Joel Spolsky asked recently why [someone hasn't made a device][1] 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 ... http://blog.ciscavate.org/2008/09/its-called-a-docking-station-joel.html [Joel Spolsky][8] and [Jeff Atwood][9] just launched the public beta of [Stackoverflow][1] 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 ... http://blog.ciscavate.org/2008/09/stackoverflow-endorsing-content-theft-from-day-one.html 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: 1. "Just write it -- it's not that hard" 2. "Use [glade|qt designer|netbeans|...] -- all the widgets ... http://blog.ciscavate.org/2008/09/breaking-away-from-visio.html 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. ... http://blog.ciscavate.org/2008/09/wrestling-python.html A groggy morning in Seattle started with the typical regional sunshine forcing its presence through heavy cloud cover--the first overcast day in nearly a week of clear, scorching weather. Seattle to Newark, hustle off the plane, bad coffee, hustle to the next gate, and then encamp for the next 9 hours ... http://blog.ciscavate.org/2008/07/traveling-to-patras.html There was once a time when your home directory was treated as a nearly sacred place, a safe haven where you had near complete control. This trust was only breached for very special reasons: user specific settings and background storage for applications could go in "dot-files"--the hidden files or ... http://blog.ciscavate.org/2008/07/cracking-down-on-application-clutter-or-my-home-is-my-castle.html A recent project at work required building a multi-step dialog to manage the interface between a user and an expert system (and some fairly advanced NLP to boot). On the surface this looked like a fairly standard Wizard problem -- design a bunch of screens with questions, and then ... http://blog.ciscavate.org/2008/07/creating-wizards-in-java.html Memoization (not **memorization**) is the process of remembering the results of a computation for use later. (I think of it as "making a memo" to look back on later.) Memoization is the core to any dynamic programming implementation, and allows many simple algorithms to run in linear or polynomial time when they ... http://blog.ciscavate.org/2008/01/day-to-day-memoization.html This is the first in an n-part series about web authentication for a system where user identification and attribution is important, but content protection is not. This entry assumes that a secure method has been used to negotiate a shared secret -- as the result of username / password ... http://blog.ciscavate.org/2007/09/creating-a-secure-webauth-system-part-1-hmac.html There are many small apps that I wish I had, here's a short list of the ones that come to mind at the moment: ## A process monitor that shows the top consumer. I often tack my system(s) to the max, and therefore run out of cycles frequently. While this is ... http://blog.ciscavate.org/2007/08/things-i-need.html