really, windows? 2014, and you do this to me?

Posted on July 17, 2014 by ferretfarmer

the most depressing thing to happen to me today, looked a lot like this:

i was holding my iphone at the time.

the anachronism stayed with me for most of the day.

don’t even get me started on the sheer silliness of permanent deletion in an age of near-zero-cost storage. who permanently deletes anything anymore?

check this out, for an even more stark relief.

i think that, in an average year, i spend about as much time dealing with phone apps (100k loc or less) as i do dealing with a random windows version (40m loc). i’ll let you figure out which of the two category of experiences is more rewarding and/or pleasant.

pet peeve #{random()}

Posted on January 21, 2014 by ferretfarmer

downwards growing, web-readable, activity logs, coupled with infinite scrolling. really cloudera? wtf:

this one should probably be listed as a ux anti-pattern. by default:

display the newest log entries at the top of the page
insert newer log entries, as they appear, at the top
allow the user to select a specific entry, and stay focused on that entry, as newer ones are added
propagate these concepts through to the small details

forcing users to scroll to the bottom of an infinite-downwards-scrolling page to see the most recent log entries makes the most common uses for an activity log, the most difficult ones to use

code quality

Image

the only accurate measurement of code quality: wtf’s per minute

whyfore chat, with django, twisted and websockets?

Aside

upon seeing the work i’ve put into writing tutorials, showing how to get realtime chat working in django + twisted/websockets, you might make the assumption that i consider this architecture to be, in general, a good idea.

twisted’s implementation of websockets is, as of this writing, not integrated into the main branch.

don’t use code that isn’t considered, by its authors, to be reliable enough to merge into and release as part of their application distribution.

twisted is an event-driven networking engine
django is a solid, easy to use web framework
websockets, a tcp based protocol, is usually implemented as a strange mix between the tcp and http protocols

it is, generally speaking, not a good idea to mix abstraction levels; adding event-driven components to your application by combining twisted and django is a bad architectural decision. I strongly suggest you consider using twisted.web instead of mixing django and twisted.

websockets are a strange mix of protocols, and can be difficult to work with unless you are very careful with your choice of libraries and application design, scope and implementation. at the time of this post, i would recommend against using websockets, in production, with the standard deployment of twisted. i strongly urge you to consider the following alternatives, in rough order of likelihood to work for you:

use autobahn
look into using tornado. for example, try tornado + socketio. it’s probably your best alternative, if you’ve come this far
look into using socket.io (eg, for django)
look into pywebsocket

Apple vs. downloaded code: quarantined libraries

Posted on October 22, 2013 by ferretfarmer

i do the majority of my work on OSX based machines – which means that i consistently run into a problem that looks like this:

the context always throws me for a bit of a loop – usually, i’ve just downloaded some sort of library, or tool, file, and i can’t seem to be able to use it as i intend to. today, for example, i’d downloaded a javascript library and tried serving it via the osx version of apache, as part of an ongoing project – leading to strange looking 404 errors.

almost always (today is no exception), i find hints suggesting some sort of read permission related problem, and i eventually end up listing the file:

bash: ls -al some_file.ext

only to find that i do have read permissions, but the file has that pesky ‘@’ indicator (or, sometimes, a ‘+’ indicator) at the end.

so i’ve learned to associate the ‘@’ or ‘+’ symbol in a permission listing with ‘read permissions denied’, (despite knowing it’s actual meaning: the file has ‘extended permissions’, which is apple-speak for permissions which do not easily map to the unix-like permission system you’ll see at a bash shell)

at any rate, if you run into this kind of problem, there are two easy things you can do to get unstuck:

use the finder to look at the file, and its access permissions – right click on the file, go to “Get Info”, and then expand the “Sharing and Permissions” tab. whatever problem you’re faced with, is almost always fixable from there.
try finding the same info, only from the bash prompt – try running: