Binary parsing in Javascript

Cool! Very cool!

Seriously: a binary parser domain would really be useful. Gotta do some thinking on this.

Gamification as cargo cult

But a lucrative one! [article]

Seriously: larger strategies like "Web 2.0" or "social" and now "gamification" are quite reasonable collections of patterns - but pattern without content, in this case motivational content, is an empty thing.

I need a term for "site strategy patterns" or something like that.

Your Code is my Hell: Musings on Ruby project maintenance

Interesting article looking at maintenance of Ruby-on-Rails projects and how they are likely to recapitulate their phylogeny. Which tells me really (since I like software maintenance) I should be learning Ruby on Rails as the cool kids move on to whatever the hell they rabbit off to next.

Twitter Bootstrap

A ... what? CSS boilerplate distro from Twitter to make the assembly of Webapps easier. Neat - and should be pulled in wholesale. And studied, really, because a higher-level Webapp (or app) domain should be built on top of the HTML and CSS domains I finished last month.

Spamularity

Language Log post from last year on spambots (or actually lack thereof). Siren song to my ears.

Deployment configuration: static site on e.g. S3

There's been a little run on the notion of publishing static sites to high-availability cloud servers that's kind of cool. Definitely a nice tool for the toolbox.

• "High Scalability" blog (follow up!) has a strategy post to this effect with good analysis.
• Jekyll is one such option for blogging.

OMG! CodeMatch!

CodeMatch is apparently a search-based Eclipse plugin that seems to have organized an unknown number of small snippets into parameterized macros described by pattern-like sentences. As you code, you search for those snippets, and the code is built before your eyes.

This rocks. If it retained the pattern-level semantic information it would rock harder - I wonder if those snippets are open source? This is a service - the snippets are online in their own database and seemingly accessible only through their plugin, so it looks like the answer is no.

The "getting started" page [here] is a good textual rundown of how things work. This is an incredibly fascinating development.

Kind of a milestone

I have Decl templates working today. That only took over a year. There are some fiddly bits I'm still polishing, but - it's a template engine, and it has some special features that make it a good one for me (chief among them preservation of indentation: Pythonic literate programming at last). So it's a good feeling.

Application mining

So a developer puts 200+ hours into an app, the customer fails to pay dime one, and the developer open-sources the app. Classic! Your mission, if you choose to accept it: parse the app.

Well, except it's Ruby on Rails, which is not yet one of my targets. But still - interesting enough to bookmark.

Learning NoSQL

Good article. I should follow its advice.

Website strategy

So for a while I've put strategy kinds of things over on the startup ideas blog. And insofar as strategy regards the underlying business, that's probably a good thing. But some Website strategy is a question of proper deployment - proper design of the environment that a site is operating in. And that should be here, I think.

To that end:

• Agiliq's quick Website checklist [part1] [part2] - part 2 has a list of other checklists.
• A neat trick: Using Adwords to comparison test different names for a service.

OK, so especially the checklist is something that should probably be in a semantic domain. I think really the whole business-process-and-strategy domain should be a Decl domain in some way. Whatever the hell that means for the future.

And certainly some of it should be in a list of deployment patterns/boilerplate.

Requests: Pythonic HTTP

The Requests library in Python is a high-level API for HTTP. Interesting philosophy.

Polyglossia

For some reason, the concept of polyglot programming has been popping up a lot on HNN. So here are a few links:

• Perlis languages: languages that change your thinking about programming
• Rosetta stone for various scripting languages (not to be confused with ... yeah)
• Crashing into Python, a really quick overview of Python. Why did I suddenly stop programming in Python, actually? I don't recall.

Quickstarter

Webapp boilerplate! Rocks! Not the tech I'd choose, but it's a sweet idea. [about] [hnn]

CLI musings

And just as my attention was drawn back towards CLIs, here's an article about why they're important. CLI = API = extensibility. (Which is not to say that some higher-level support wouldn't be welcome in a standard CLI interface, but still...)

Noloh

Oh, look, another attempt to do what I'm doing. Noloh: "Not One Line Of Html". A PHP-based extension/framework/whatever.

Scripting CLIs

I got the crazy idea I should script Putty. It doesn't look amenable to scripting, so ... I had the idea of maybe doing something in Perl, and ran across Net::CLI::Interact, which looks frankly fascinating.

Web testing

There is a hugely vast array of Web testing tools, even free ones. Seriously. BadBoy is an example I can't even remember finding. Somebody oughta do a feature comparison list.

A reason to use IE?

Seriously - it has a COM/OLE interface. That means I can script it with Perl.

I kid you not, I never expected to have any reason at all to run IE. And now I do? What's next - Outlook?

How to use git in a larger context

Again: not strictly germane, but as this is my programming blog along with being the Semantic Programming blog, here is a git workflow for larger projects. I can't quite grok it, but that's because I'm a total git noob.