Demian's Tech Blog

Pretty interesting app.

Stackoverflow has a great list of terms programmers have come up with where the standard jargon just didn’t cut it.  A few gems in here, see if you can guess what the following might be:

• Yoda conditions – arrg, right up there with with leaving off the ?> in PHP, “training wheels best practices” …
• shrug report – I get this on a daily basis
• Egyptian brackets
• Refuctoring – one word speaks volumes
• Stringly typed – one of my favs – check out Yii framework if you’re unfamiliar with the concept
• Heisenbug – an old and painful classic, I get them all the time
• Fear Driven Development – I think we’ve all been there
• Baklava code – this one is just begging to enter your vocabulary

Recommended reading

• The Technium: 1,000 True Fans – A very inspiring piece that suggests that artists and small businesses creating their own products actually only need about 1000 true fans to generate a decent revenue
• Mac & the iPad – Another really interesting and inspiring article about Steve Jobs, it gives an insight into his design process

Recommended reading

• Khan Academy – An amazing collection of 1200+ videos on anything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance
• JWB’s blog: Joel on Software – a summary: 2000 – Joel's blog is required reading for anyone in the tech sector – here's a nice slice to pique your interest

I was surprised today when attempting to confirm a flight with Ryanair that I was being told my flight details were invalid.  As usual I had copy/pasted in the details so I didn’t think there was much margin for error.

Using a web developer’s insight I guessed the validation of my reservation code contained some invisible whitespace and that this was causing the error.  Unbelievable this turned out to be the case!

Stripping whitespace from form input fields is basic, website 101 best practice stuff.  Typical users who don’t have a background in development are extremely unlikely to notice that 1 or 2 mm of space on the screen is in fact an invisible character that could cause input problems on submitted forms.  To think that all these unwitting souls will be send to paid support phone calls waiting in automatic queues for 40 minutes or more because they typed in their CORRECT reservation number is unbelievable.  But apparently Mom & Pop over at Ryanair think this is ok.

Moments later in the Ryanair checkin process I got an obscure warning in big red letters across the screen.  Maybe they use Dreamweaver to build their site?  Hold on, the warning fails to use basic English grammar correctly!

When you check-in online if you are issued a sequence number of 190 or above (located at the top right of the boarding pass). Please go to the airport check-in desk on arrival at the airport.

I actually remember in grade 4 when we were learning how to write and the teacher would often correct students for fragment sentences like these.  Have Mom & Pop even graduated from secondary school?

Recommended reading

• Rare Steve Jobs videos now online – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech – Fascinating set of video interviews with Steve Jobs from 2003-4, interesting to hear his views on what would become iPhone and now iPad
• Kickstarter – Wow this is interesting, could be a run for the money for our VC friends

It seems a lot of folks are unhappy about Facebook’s lack of scruples around privacy, and with good reason.  This Wired article nicely summarises the current concerns, I’d say it’s mandatory reading.  It’s always interesting to hypothesize if corporate culture really is set by a few individuals on the top.

Every few weeks I go in and try to discover if some of my private stuff has now been made public, not an easy task, it’s a fulltime job keeping up the the continuous redesigns of the site

Recommended reading

• Gowalla Adds Real-time Feeds and Activity Streams For Maximum Mashup Action – The implications of being to run feeds connected to alerts for specific venue checkins are quite cool, put on the thinking cap …
• A Freelancer Marketplace | Pick.im – Wow, nice site for finding freelancers
• Convert HTML to PDF | Online HTML to PDF API – Quite a cool API that allows you to transform HTML to PDF programmatically
• 9 Reasons Why Many Smart People Go Nowhere | Life Beyond Code – This is quite a thought provoking article and may help with some reality checks in terms of your career!
• Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs : Observations of a Nerd – Fascinating article describing how natural selection has optimised behaviour of dogs in urban environments
• Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps | Carsonified – Some solid ideas here about what drives success in web apps in 2010
• Hacker News | Ask HN: Interesting (Non software) books? – Book recommendations from the HN readers – added a few to my wishlist