Posts for November, 2008

Nov 29, 2008

Is Web The Default Development Platform?

Joe Walker says Web is the default development platform today. It sure has gained a lot of popularity and attention from everyone in the software world. However, I wonder how much of it has genuine reasons and how much of it is because of the hype surrounding it. [Continue]

Nov 27, 2008

Challenges With Refactoring

Refactoring is quite well accepted in the software development circles. However, some things that are not acknowledged are the challenges with it. No, the refactoring v/s rewriting has been dealt with quite in detail. [Continue]

Nov 26, 2008

Beating City Traffic

I am happy to know that Infosys is taking initiative to encourage their employees to beat the traffic. The system of financial rewards is a good incentive. However, I wonder if companies will be willing to let their employees work from home whenever possible. [Continue]

Nov 25, 2008

W3C Validator Supports HTML5

I had used the Henri Sivonen’s HTML5 validator when I started using HTML5 for this blog. The W3C validator now integrates with that engine. So you can test your HTML5 validation on the W3C validator. [Continue]

Nov 21, 2008

Control Search Results With SearchWiki

Google has finally allowed you to modify the search results - SearchWiki. Of course the modifications will be only for you, otherwise rest of the Google would not make sense. But you can now improve the search results by reordering/deleting/adding individual entries. [Continue]

Nov 19, 2008

Is Typing A Necessity For Programming?

Jeff Atwood stresses on the importance of typing for programming. Though I whole heartedly agree for myself, this issue can be as personal as religion. I was pretty much a two-finger typist when I started my professional programming career. [Continue]

Nov 17, 2008

We Need Firefox Inside!

How do I convince these sites that I do use Firefox? It gets called something else because of some stupid reasons, but it is really Firefox and nothing else. Every time I visit hotmail or orkut or some site which thinks that it is doing something so special that it needs to warn users about their browsers, these messages that make a mockery of my setup. [Continue]

Nov 15, 2008

Faster Horses And Open Source

Software sees a very high frequency of newer versions everyday, more so in the open source world. I have heard claims that this is just a way of the software developers/owners to continuously engage the user. However, reading faster horses (a must-read piece by JP) made me think that this is just the after-effect of engaging the user. [Continue]

Nov 13, 2008

On Failures Of Agile Projects

The proponents of the agile methodologies wanted to change the way software development was done. I think that changes have happened, but unfortunately most of them are superficial ones, leading to failures and more notoreity for the underlying philosophy. Scott Nelson explains how some aspects of agile methodologies can be wrongly used. [Continue]

Nov 8, 2008

Bash Editing In vi Mode

I was discussing about how some applications have adopted some of the vi key bindings. Like Google Reader, some tiling window managers like xmonad, and even bash has excellent support for editing in vi mode. Surprisingly not many know about this. [Continue]