I think this is a debate I didn’t intend to start – I concur that yes, there are lots of formats you can send over a socket and you can wedge most use cases into most of the formats if you try hard enough. A meaningful discussion of protocols though would recognize that “could possibly […]
Miguel, that’s cool, I know SOAP (with a library) doesn’t involve a ton of application code. My point is more that (to me) it’s just not worth learning about for this sort of thing. If you want to get a couple of pieces of data on an Amazon product you just do “get url contents” […]
Regarding GTK+ themes, I think the metacity approach to themes worked out pretty well. You could definitely improve on the details (inventing my own little expression language was kinda weird, and there are lots of feature requests for the format). But metacity themes are “just data” rather than code while remaining reasonably flexible. Arguably you […]
Over the holidays I thought I’d play with the Amazon and eBay web services APIs. What a contrast! I got Amazon working in a couple of hours, and eBay… well, it’s two days later and I’m starting to feel stupid. For Amazon, to get information on a product you just register to get an ID […]
Ben, interesting that Europe has different sales numbers. For purposes of thinking about product design though, to me the $50 flash players are a distinct product category from the iPod or the Toshiba. People buy the small solid-state players for different reasons (and at $50, the reason need not be as compelling as the reason […]
It blows my mind that you can go to Apple’s web site and just read what makes the iPod a better design than most music players, but their competition can’t seem to figure it out. So Apple continues to crush them. It’s just not that complicated: the iPod lets you listen to all your music. […]
Thinking about Morten’s comment, one of the main goals of GtkTextView was to keep everything better than O(n), because I’d seen so many posts to gtk-list where people inadvertently wrote quadratic code with GtkCList and the old GtkText. (Those widgets also had the evil freeze/thaw convention, where you could “freeze”, do stuff, and “thaw” and […]
An underappreciated song. (This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005-11.html#2)
The official listing is up, you should submit your resume online there for HR tracking if interested. Feel free to also email me with JOB in the subject, as mentioned before. (This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005-11.html#1)
Quotes I enjoyed today, first from Steve Jobs here: This stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t … Technologies can make it easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in a radical new light that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have […]