Tag Archives: tips

My biggest problem with Wikipedia

Posted on June 22, 2007 by David Megginson

Summary: You can’t partition a web site’s users into discrete groups by language. I don’t worry much about Wikipedia’s objectivity or reliability — no sources (especially not newspapers or Britannica) are objective or reliable, and at least Wikipedia preserves its … Continue reading →

Tagged architecture, tips, web | Comments Off

REST, the Lost Update Problem, and the Sneakernet Test

Posted on June 9, 2007 by David Megginson

Dare Obasanjo is giving a bit of pushback on the Atom Publishing Protocol, but the part that caught my attention was the section on the Lost Update Problem. This doesn’t have to do with REST per se as much as … Continue reading →

Tagged architecture, tips, web | 11 Comments

Anonymity and freedom

Posted on April 9, 2007 by David Megginson

Elliotte Rusty Harold is right that anonymity goes together with freedom, and I was happy to read his excellent posting How to Blog Anonymously. Rusty distinguishes three different kinds of anonymity — roughly “I don’t want to be embarrassed”, “I … Continue reading →

Tagged blogging, rights, tips | 1 Comment

REST: the quick pitch

Posted on February 15, 2007 by David Megginson

Now that the Java world is noticing REST, the low-pain alternative to RPC standards like WS-*, people are starting to blog about it again. Gossip with other IT folks also tells me that people’s customers are actually asking for REST … Continue reading →

Posted in REST | Tagged architecture, tips, web | 19 Comments

XML 2006 pickled and preserved

Posted on January 19, 2007 by David Megginson

The XML 2006 site is now pickled and preserved for long-term storage. Almost all of the presenters got their papers or slides in for the proceedings, if not on time, at least in time. Unfortunately, if you want to see … Continue reading →

Tagged conferences, tips, web | 5 Comments

Templating languages and XML

Posted on December 23, 2006 by David Megginson

Erich Schubert is talking about web templating languages. He’s looking for a pure-XML templating solution, but that might not be necessary for simple web-page design, where we don’t need all the extra benefits of heavy-duty transformation standards like XSLT. Keeping … Continue reading →

Tagged programming, tips, web | 10 Comments

How not to suck at your presentation

Posted on November 21, 2006 by David Megginson

So you’re going to speak at a conference. Congratulations! I cannot help you much with making your presentation interesting, but at a minimum, you want it not to suck — “suck” is what happens when you annoy dozens or hundreds … Continue reading →

Tagged tips | 7 Comments

Gap buffers

Posted on June 7, 2006 by David Megginson

Tim Bray updated an old piece on binary search this morning — I missed it the first time around, so I was glad that it popped up in my blog reader. Tim’s taking some flak about data abstraction from people … Continue reading →

Tagged programming, tips | 1 Comment

How many environments?

Posted on May 2, 2006 by David Megginson

Assume that you are a lone developer, maintaining a small web site in a shared hosting account. How many software environments do you need from development to production? One environment On the simplest level, you could develop directly in your … Continue reading →

Tagged programming, tips | 7 Comments

Two small, useful Nautilus shell scripts

Posted on March 29, 2006 by David Megginson

If you use a Unix-family operating system with the Gnome desktop and its default Nautilus file browser, you might know that you can extend Nautilus using simple shell scripts. Here two short and simple scripts. Terminal window This script, which … Continue reading →

Tagged tips | 2 Comments