ATI’s New Cards Offer a Better Value than nVidia
Posted by Random | Filed under Random Stuff
The latest cards from ATI stomp all over nVidia…for half the price! Also, in my personal experience, ATI’s Vista drivers seem to be more stable than nVidia’s. Ars also has a first look at the upcoming AMD+ATI Shrike chip that includes an on-die GPU.
Time to get a new video card…
Random
Really Useful Software
Posted by Random | Filed under Random Stuff
If you haven’t checked out our Really Useful Software page yet, you can download some useful software for free (stay tuned for more to come). Make software, not war.
Random
Fun with Wordle
Posted by Mr. ANSI Pants | Filed under Random Stuff
Being a subscriber to TEDBlog, I found a really nifty applet this morning called Wordle. I took the story of Captain Constructor and fed it into the machine. Here are a few examples of what came up.
How about another? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: captain constructor, fun, wordle
C# 3.0 Encourages Rubyisms
Posted by Random | Filed under Essays, Random Stuff, Software Pick of the Month
C# 3.0 (.NET Framework 3.5) adds some great features, such as extension methods and lambdas, that let’s you write magical code that looks suspiciously Rubyish. Extension methods let you dynamically extend your types so you can do things like this:
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OperationResult ParseCustomHeader(WebResponse response)
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{
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string header = response.Headers[Globals.CUSTOM_ERROR_HEADER_NAME];
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return header.Base64ToBinary().UTF8ToString().FromXml<OperationResult>();
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}
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Also, have a look at Sergio’s XmlBuilder to see lambdas and reflection put to good use. I like it when the language does work for me so I can keep my code beautiful.
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Effective Writing Online
Posted by Random | Filed under Random Stuff
In school we are taught to write for print, not for the web. Jakob Nielsen has a great article on how to make the transition. This should be required reading for anyone serious about their online presence. We will see what we can do to follow his guidelines in future Nerd Fortress posts.
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Tags: writing online print guidelines
RoR is NO Silver Bullet
Posted by Random | Filed under Random Stuff
Fábio Akita talks about being pragmatic when deciding whether to use Ruby on Rails:
It is here now and many people are already benefiting from it. But, does it make it suitable for every web application? Definitely not. For that you have to decide yourself through hands-on experience. The result for your situation will differ from someone else. There are several reasons to choose one framework over the other: some are technical, some are economics, some are cultural. Whatever the case, there is no Silver Bullet. How many times do we have to repeat that. Fred Brooks warned us 3 decades ago! And this time is no different: RoR is NO Silver Bullet. Nor is ASP.NET for that matter.
Is RoR right for you? Choosing a platform is rarely a simple decision. However, you have a good chance of making the right choice if you start by putting down your requirements for your project. Write down what you want your application to do for users, and then start looking for a framework that will help you accomplish those goals.
Choosing the technology first is like buying a spring form pan before finding out whether your customer prefers pie over cheesecake, or perhaps would just like to buy a loaf of bread, thank you very much. There’s a very good chance you will guess wrong.
RoR is a great framework and has sparked developers of other web application frameworks to get their act together. Just make sure you look at the pros and cons surrounding Ruby on Rails and any other platform you evaluate.
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Ruby on Rails: Let’s Get Real
Posted by Random | Filed under Random Stuff
Good, somewhat objective summaries of the pros and cons surrounding the Ruby on Rails platform are rare. What you do find is plenty of buzz. What is Ruby on Rails all about? Why do people love it? Why do people hate it (yes, these people really do exist)? And why does it make certain people (Bigslow Traditional, Inc.) very, very afraid? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: ruby on rails development scaling programming web appli
Hackers Need Good Books
Posted by Random | Filed under Random Stuff
It seems that we are not alone in our opinion that great hackers read books:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001108.html
Jeff makes a great point about there not being a lot of really great programming books out there. The bad news is that it can be hard to get at the information you need without a lot of trial-and-error and about 23 million google searches. The good news is that your reading list is actually tractable.
Please, vote with your wallet and reward great book publishers such as the Pragmatic Programmers.
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Life-Changing Books
Posted by Mr. ANSI Pants | Filed under Random Stuff
Last week I ran across a quick little article entitled “Life-Changing Books: Recommendations from 17 Leading Scientists“. Few things in life excite me anymore the way a really good book does (I could tell you “tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago”), so this definitely piqued my interest.
I knew I was in for a treat when I noticed that the fourth one down was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. I was a big Asimov fan “way back” in high school. If I had been asked to participate in the making of the aforementioned list (alas, I am not yet considered a “Leading Scientist”), I might have selected Asimov’s I, Robot. Let me tell you why.
- I was and still am fascinated by how literarily fertile his 3 laws of robotics are. (If Asimov can invent the word “robotics”, I can invent “literarily”.) I lifted the following from Wikipedia: “SF scholar James Gunn writes, ‘The Asimov robot stories as a whole may respond best to an analysis on this basis: the ambiguity in the Three Laws and the ways in which Asimov played twenty-nine variations upon a theme.’”
- I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but it now occurs to me that the stories in I, Robot are engineering at its finest. Here’s a problem, now solve it. That’s really what I’ve been doing since I got my first programming job.
- Who doesn’t like robots?
Random Boy posted a few days ago asserting that “Great Hackers Read Books“. I totally concur. It’s really one more way to exercise your mind. Not only that, books are a great source of ideas! New ideas, for the most part, are just new combinations of existing ideas. The more combinations you have available in your brain, the more likely you are to be able to come up with something new and cool.
Some of my recent favorite nerdy-ish books are:
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter
- I Am a Strange Loop, also by Douglas Hofstadter
- Chaos - Making a New Science, by James Gleick
- Code Complete 2nd Edition, by Steve McConnell
- Machine Learning, by Tom Mitchell
- The World Is Flat, by Thomas L. Friedman
- The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman
In the famous words of Levar Burton, “don’t take my word for it.”
-ANSI Pants
Tags: nerdy books
Great Hackers Read Books
Posted by Random | Filed under Random Stuff
Great hackers continuously expand their minds and discover new principles that make them stand out among their peers. Books, blogs, lectures, etc. are all great sources for new ideas. Just remember to take everything you hear with a grain of salt, and compare it to what you already know. Read the rest of this entry »