Mr. Softwarepants

I give up. Maybe code that works today is better than code that the next person will be able to maintain without screaming. It's not like person A is "the next person".

And much to my surprise, Live Journal is still slightly a thing, even in 2012.

Entirely too much Eclipse all up in here.

Huh, I sure haven't done any Windows development in an increasingly long period of time.

So if anyone here (LiveJournal) isn't here anymore... what's your blog or twitter?

My last day at The Amazing Society was on Friday. In a couple of weeks I start as a Server Engineer at Amazon. (Maybe you've heard of them?)

So yeah I guess I haven't been following the news at all for a while.

Having finally watched all of Arrested Development straight through (A) yep, it was funny but (B) the 3rd season is non-essential.

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2010/12/i_dream_of_gree.php

Wait. How can Little Fockers be a "Franchise Killer"? That would suggest that someone, somewhere thought anything about the previous two movies was at all funny.

It rained like a summbitch this weekend, with potentially a bit more to come. I now appreciate every cent we spent this summer on landscaping, drainage, and siding repair.

If there's going to be a firedrill at work on Sunday, it might as well be the best kind: one that doesn't involve me, and that I didn't find out about until well after the fact.

So my other web space got hacked in some way. Many pages included a hidden IFRAME that forced out a malware download (in certain browsers.)

Since I wasn't running anything over there, I can only assume that it had something to do with the default PHP install on the host.

Rather than "fix it", I just took down all my content, which essentially means my resume and two technical articles that still get a lot of traffic for reasons I can only imagine.

I suppose I ought to clean out any PHP settings and re-up my resume, but ugh, system admin crap in my free time.

If you listen to the Tron Legacy soundtrack, but don't see the movie, then it can remain as the imagined soundtrack to a better movie.

I'm letting some domain names expire, so I have that going for me right now.

So, uh, The Venture Bros was a coming of age story about Henchman #21 the whole time?

Took a break from hacking on someone's OSS project to spend some time hacking on someone else's OSS project.

Open any random page of documentation for Django and there are almost certainly some improvements that can be made. These include putting in the appropriate Sphinx xrefs, fixing typos, alphabetizing lists that should be alphabetized.

To say nothing of documenting classes that aren't even documented yet, or fixing existing but incorrect technical information.

Now I (still?) use TextMate as my primary editor, which means finding out that the reST bundle could use some work. So I spent some time yak-shaving on the bundle. This had the benefit of now being able to find certain basic errors in the Django docs based on color highlighting alone.

As it stands, making nit-picky fixes to docs (like this) isn't particularly rewarding, compared to "actual programming", but I do need to get back in the habit of doing more technical writing.

As I understand it:

* JavaScript is built into browsers, and is essentially the only way to script a page on the client.
* Web apps started doing more and more fancy scripting on the client side as browsers (slowly, then more quickly) improved their client-side capabilities.
* A lot of JavaScript was being used, and JS engines were slow, so let's make some new JS engines.
* Hey, V8 is pretty snappy, and people already know JS, so let's build out some SERVER-side stuff that uses JS.
* Things like Node.js are the new hotness.

So while Node.js is a pretty neat piece of work, as is V8 and other JS engines, that doesn't change the fact that JavaScript as a language kinda sucks. Right?

Fixed and deployed a minor bug in a QA page in the time it took for the email thread about it to spin up and die down.

Apparently some architecture (not mine) hit the fan while I was away on vacation.

I've been working on a side-project (someone else's that I'm a committer for) that uses Ruby, for over a year, and I still don't know Ruby.