Pito’s Blog

Welcome! If you're interested in the same kind of things I am, consider adding this site to your favorites, or better yet, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed (using BlogBridge, of course) . Welcome, and thanks for visiting!

I just came across Dave Dupre’s blog. Some good reading there, for example:

“[…snip] If the single test does not show a huge improvement, the project is considered a failure and scrapped. This happens all the time, and it always stifles innovation. Why propose something new if you have to be right all the time?

Innovation does not proceed on a schedule. To maintain a culture of innovation, occasional failure must be allowed - even encouraged! As long as you learn from your mistakes and move on and get better, the team and the company will be better off.” (from Fear of Failure)

Technorati Tags: softwaredevelopment management

Popularity: 7% [?]

So my little toy pedagogical application needed a pretty popup box. Actually I wanted one so I could see close up some of the alternatives. In the process I came across three different code snippets, each one doing it in a little bit different way. For you and me, here are the links:

• The DOM-popup kit, by Stuart Rackham
• The FAMSPAM Facebox package by Chris Wantrath
• The Bubble Tooltip kit by Alessandro Fulciniti with an assist by Annalisa Afeltra

I tried the first two, but the third looks cool too. I liked Facebox the best. Your mileage may/will vary.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software gave an outstanding talk at Yale which he has written up on his blog. For budding Computer Science majors, people getting into the computer world or business, there is a lot of good wisdom to be found here:

My favorite passage is the discussion about the value put on software, from the perspective of those who are involved in creating it. Here’s how he introduces the topic, but you should really read the whole thing:

“Currently, in the battle between the geeks and the suits, the suits are winning, because they control the budget, and honestly, I don’t know if that’s such a bad thing. The suits recognize that there are diminishing returns to fixing bugs. Once the software hits a certain level of quality that allows it to solve someone’s problem, that person will pay for it and derive benefit out of it.” (from Joel on Software)

The talk is in three sections, read them all!

1. Talk at Yale: Part 1 of 3
2. Talk at Yale: Part 2 of 3
3. Talk at Yale: Part 3 of 3

Popularity: 9% [?]

I’ve been living inside a couple of Google groups lately, posting questions and waiting for answers. (Which ones? Ruby on Rails: Talk and Active Scaffold: Ruby on Rails plugin)

Much to my surprise and productivity-loss, it’s not possible to request an email alert when someone posts an answer to your question. Odd, this is a oldie-but-goodie feature in many many mailing lists. So I am reduced to checking manually every day or so. (You can see it annoyed me sufficiently to bother writing this

Popularity: 10% [?]

Technorati Tags: Google groups, Active Scaffold, productivity-loss

I’m an on and off Ruby developer, and recently I’ve been trying to decide whether I should use Eclipse for Ruby development or whether TextMate (I am on a Mac) is better.

Why even think of Eclipse? Simply that I know it well and it’s very rich for developing Java. It’s also cross platform. From my investigation though, Ruby support in Eclipse is still immature.

On Mac, TextMate is the hero of Ruby developers. But given that Ruby doesn’t have a debugger and nirvana to Ruby developers is the interactive ruby shell, IRB, I’m not convinced yet.

• Here’s a good article on maximizing TextMate for Ruby: “Exploring TextMate … a Ruby Perspective.”
• The book “TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac” is excellent, and written by James Edward Gray II, one of the TextMate developers who is also a ruby guy.
• Here’s another article by the same author about Customizing TextMate.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Technorati Tags: Ruby, Eclipse

Check out “Forget Photoshop: 15 Online Graphics Generators“:

“Shiny edges, reflections, neat 3D effects - you love them and can’t get enough of them. Well, there’s no reason to spend any time in Photoshop creating them since there are so many tools out there that will do the dirty work for you. Without further ado, here’s a roundup of 15 online Web 2.0 graphics generators.” (from “Forget Photoshop: 15 Online Graphics Generators“)

Read the whole thing!

Popularity: 10% [?]

I just came across Dave Dupre’s blog. Some good reading there, for example:

“[…snip] If the single test does not show a huge improvement, the project is considered a failure and scrapped. This happens all the time, and it always stifles innovation. Why propose something new if you have to be right all the time?

Innovation does not proceed on a schedule. To maintain a culture of innovation, occasional failure must be allowed - even encouraged! As long as you learn from your mistakes and move on and get better, the team and the company will be better off.” (from Fear of Failure)

Technorati Tags: softwaredevelopment management

Popularity: 10% [?]

I don’t know why it don’t. I don’t know why the error message doesn’t just say: “Hey dope, Ruby has no ++ operator”

Popularity: 8% [?]

I’m getting a little fascinated with Ruby and Rails so I’ve been getting acquainted with it. Just want to share a handy link with detailed instructions on how to build and configure all that stuff on a Mac. Handy if you are in the .01% of the world who cares

Popularity: 6% [?]

Heard a lot about Ruby? Ruby on Rails? Wonder what the heck it is? Here’s a good intro.

“This is not yet another “Ruby is better than Java” article. Nor is it intended to bash Java or Java programmers. Rather, it is an attempt to aid Java programmers who are investigating Ruby by helping them quickly get over the “Writing Java in Ruby” syndrome and to discover the Ruby Way.” (from “10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know about Ruby”)

Technorati Tags: ruby

Popularity: 6% [?]