Well Said
by paul on September 18, 2011
One company that just launched at Disrupt is trying to fix medical bills. Another wants to bring fresh produce from farmers direct to households. Another company built the universal translator from Star Trek. Good software developers invent the future.
This is what matters: launching products, getting them in the hands of users, and hearing them get value out of it. That’s why we stay up late, ruin our wrists and our eyesight, and drive our families crazy. It’s all about shipping.
Creating things…
by paul on September 5, 2011
When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. so create.
JW Player and Internet Explorer
by paul on August 22, 2011
At work we use the JW Player for all our online video and it’s great. The only problem is, for the longest time, using custom skins on the player causes IE 7 and 8 to lock up in a very bad way. Like, “we can’t use this we’ll have to use something else” bad. I thought it was a bug with the player but a couple versions have passed and I was still having the same problem. The frustrating part was that it worked in IE 9. So what was the problem?
Turns out, Apache was set up to gzip everything – including zip files, which is how you load skins into the player. That’s fine right? Well, no. Apparently…
Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8 report deflate support but do not actually accept RFC 1950 format, making actual use of deflate highly unusual.
Source: Wikipedia
Turns out, IE 6, 7, and 8 all hang when loading a gzipped zip file.
Sure the zipping is redundant, but when all else fails…so does IE.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
by paul on August 20, 2011
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes.
From Wikipedia
This could be quite possibly one of the scarier things that I’ve read. How can I ever be sure that I’m truly right about anything!? Darn you incompetence and lack of metacognitive ability!!
People who can code…
by paul on August 19, 2011
People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines.
WordPress 3.2 Dashboard update
by paul on July 15, 2011
A great post on the redesign of the wordpress admin dashboard. It contains my new favorite quote:
“No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it.”
I was wrong
by paul on April 17, 2011
For a while there in 2010 I was red hot on the “Flash is awesome for everything” side of the debate started by Steve Jobs infamous “Thoughts on Flash” memo. Frankly, I must have written a dozen red hot posts blasting Apple about their reasons and decisions to not run Flash on their mobile devices. It’s reviews like this though that make me think I was dead wrong:
“For the PlayBook, that edge is support for Adobe Flash, a feature that the iPad is famously lacking. RIM says it took over two years of working with Adobe to bring Flash to its tablet.
Two years may not have been enough. During a round of Plants vs. Zombies, gameplay bogged down whenever the animation got intense. Every time I tried to access a Flash game on Facebook, the browser crashed. Yes, every single time.“
If you want animation on your pages to run on mobile devices you really should learn some HTML5. If you want to play a game, write some thing in the native language (or use a really good framework like Corona.)
Sorry Flash, can we still be friends?
Save your Cleverness…
by paul on March 30, 2011
“Take the shortcut. Build the product. And if later, it turns out you made a design mistake, refactor the code. But at least you will have a product that your users love.”
A Collection of Odd Things…
by paul on January 11, 2011
For the 3 people that read this (my wife, my mom, and some unknown lurker in Romania) this is actually version 2 of my blog – I had one before this where I would draw…well, things. There was no theme – if it could be defined as stream-of-consciousness art then that’s what it would be. Anyway, I ran across a bunch of it when cleaning out some old files and thought I’d throw them up here.
