Just looking at the quickstart demo of Meteor, the hot new web framework people seem to be getting excited about. First thought. Seems to me that far more important than using the same language for the client and server is being able to write the client and server code in the same file. That is something I’ve …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
LightTable
Interesting this new surge of dynamic IDEs. First there was Brett Victor’s awesome demo. Now there’s LightTable (promoted on KickStarter, discussed on Quora) Sporadic thoughts. Is this implemented in the browser? (Bespin? CodeMirror)? Perhaps we’re seeing this explosion of innovation as IDE authors move to the cloud. A Kickstarter project? That’s cool. But motivated by …
Quick SFW Generator
Smart Disorganized Individual philosophy is about doing things piecemeal; engaging in small opportunistic actions as and when the inspiration strikes. Today was just such a quick burst with the Smallest Federated Wiki. I love SFW a lot, but it’s a bit of a pain to bring a page or large chunk of writing from elsewhere …
SmallTalk Unix
A quick thought I had a week or so ago on the “failure” of SmallTalk. What if SmallTalk hadn’t abandoned the file system? What if it had become the official graphical shell of Unix? Here : http://thoughtstorms.info/view/smalltalkunix
Nathan's University (Update)
Just to note, I think this course is pretty good : http://nathansuniversity.com/pl101.html
Make Your Own Programming Language
Nathan’s University offers an online course. I’ve signed up.
Project ThoughtStorms Goes Live
ThoughtStorms has been ported across to the Smallest Federated Wiki. Of course, there are plenty of failures, missing pages, bits of markup that aren’t handled correctly etc. But this is wiki, right? It’s never perfect. It’s always living and dying and composting. The problems will get flushed out, or worked-around, or become charming ruins over …
Project ThoughtStorms
As mentioned previously, I’ve been looking into Ward Cunningham’s “Smallest Federated Wiki” concept. And I’m increasingly impressed. So much so, that I’ve re-oriented a lot of my projects around it. What do I mean? A decent follow-up to SdiDesk has been promised for an embarrassingly long time. Over the years I’ve struggled with exactly what …
Unicode
OK. I’m an idiot. So here’s today’s BIG Unicode lesson; understand this and, maybe, half your troubles will evaporate. Unicode is NOT a “code”. No. Unicode is a kind of platonic ideal of which everything else is an “encoding”. ASCII is an encoding. UTF-8 is an encoding. That weird character set you got with Portuguese accented …
Updating node.js on Ubuntu
Node.js in the main Ubuntu repo is fairly out of date. Here’s a useful page on installing the latest. Thanks Yodi Aditya.