Where Are The Wise Men?

Matt, Kyle, and I having lunch together yesterday and Matt brought up the concept of Tell, Don’t Ask.  Matt was saying that you shouldn’t have to examine an object to figure out what method to run, instead give your data to that object and let it figure it out.  Later we were continuing our conversation and Blaine piped in on on the Pragmatic Programmer’s article OOP in One Sentence (PDF). I read it and I couldn’t remember ever seeing it before.

All of this bounced around in my head during the night and, on the way to work, I decided to stop being frustrated on the code I inherited [...]

I had hoped to be past 100 now, but things got busy.  But this weekend I finally got my 75th cache!  So it’s not quite the 100 milestone, but it’s one I’m proud of.  Especially since I was at 50 in mid-September (Gina reminded me of that).

Park Tour #1 was one that I had tried [...]

I read it on Bray’s blog first.  This gives us a way to validate XML with a method that is understandable.  Human-readable schemas?  That’s not possbile!  Oh, but it is. . . .

A week or so ago, I needed to play with some PHP apps on my MacBook Pro. The hosting provider that this may go up on uses PHP5 but OSX comes standard with PHP4. So I decided to install it myself. I thought that this would be an easy task and I was quite wrong.

The [...]

Aptana is a cool, open source Eclipse plugin that a co-worker pointed me to.  It’s a HTML/JSP editor with lots of JavaScript capabilities.  The syntax coloring is good and it lets you know if you have invalid HTML.  Autocompletion works with both HTML and JavaScript.  Adding Aptana with the Eclipse Webtools Project make a very [...]

Open Emacs and hit f2 2.  Your window will be in two columns Type something in one column, and then switch to the other column and type. Hit f2 1.  See what happens.

Once upon a time, Matt told me about someone who had been keeping notes in Emacs for years, and now has his own personal wiki/knowledge base in Emacs. I was a Vim user then, but the idea interested me.

Fast-forward four or five years.  I’m now at a new job with lots of processes and things to remember, only those things aren’t written anywhere.  Or, if they are, they are spread out all over their Intranet and, in come cases, woefully out of date [...]

This morning, about 3:45am, I woke up to a loud beeping.  I thought it would go away, but alas it did not.  I felt Gina wrestle and move in bed.  Well, I decided, it’s time to be a man and take care of it.

I first thought that it was just a smoke detector and I [...]

The above picture is from our first visit to the Omaha Children’s Museum.  It’s in the Third Birthday photo set, one of two new photo sets in our gallery.

I chose the Gallery again because we simply had too many pictures for iWeb to handle.  And, really, a page of 97 pictures (or 108) would take a long time to load.

The above picture is one of many taken by our friend Amy  the OPPD Arboretum, which I think is one of the unknown treasures [...]

In an addition to this post I want to say that I still prefer Django over Rails.  I’ve spent a few hours the past couple of days going through the Django tutorial again and then started writing an application for it.  I feel like Django flows better for me.

Why is that?  Not just because it’s [...]