douglasputnam

7 ms·

1.
by douglasputnam 15y ago
DiP3 is a good book, if you are already familiar with Python. It's not for newbies. In fact, when I didn't know Python I disliked DiP3 to the point of making rude and ignorant comments about it on public forums. Now that I have a humble por
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by douglasputnam 15y ago
I 2nd that emotion. If you are interested in Web apps, you might try creating with an old school CGI ecard site. It will introduce many basic concepts: working with the file system (images, thumbnails, etc), CGI, handling form data, doing s
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
I hear lots of smart people arguing that education can be improved by fired low performing teachers, breaking unions, enforcing discipline, raising test scores, etc. What I don't hear is lots of smart people saying, "Hey. I'm smart. I care
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
The Happy Hacking Pro 2 is great if you like a compact 60 key keyboard. The Escape and Control keys are positioned perfectly for Vim and Emacs, so you don't have to bother with remapping them. Works on PCs and Macs. The price is steep but w
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
"word of mouth will kill the phone" Whenever we hear a prediction about "word of mouth" stunting the sales of an Apple product, we have to take that statement with an iPhone-sized grain of salt. Word of mouth doesn't hurt recent Apple produ
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
Mr. Olsen's essay is what we commonly call a rant. Though he doesn't fully reveal in his tirade why he perceives Jason Fried as a dangerous enemy who must be defeated, we can deduce the real reason for his seemingly bottomless anger: oxytoc
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
More power to 37Signals for having the good sense to set their own price and value for their own product. There's nothing controversial about asking $9.99 for a simple app that you can master in 5 minutes and use to sync your ideas with you
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
The title to this post is intentionally misleading and sensational. Using the word "cheats" is cheating and trolling.
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
For someone who espouses grand principles (Rework), David is taking the low road with his petulant ad hominum attacks. Calling Ballmer's stage presence uncool is a little disingenuous when it's clear that Ballmer was just being himself and
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
News items that contain the word "killer" in the title are usually composed by uninformed local TV news writers, or by hack bloggers who want to drive easy fanboy traffic to their site with cheap rhetoric. We see the same motive in headline
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
cashto's post was a "serious" effort to disperse the cloud of dogma surrounding unit testing and TDD. I hardly think that lashing back with "poppycock" is driving the conversation in the direction of "serious discussion". cashto emphasized
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
The last time I checked, no one had to pass an IQ test to use the Internet. Maybe it's time for Twitter (and other social media--you know who you are), to require potential users to pass a "minimal common sense" test. BTW, my remark is inte
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
Every PHP programmer has lamented PHP's TMA (Too Many Ampersands) design, inconsistent method naming, function parameters order, etc. But PHP is the 800 pound gorilla with 15 years of momentum. It is what it is: a DSL written in C that's go
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
The lawyer is going to have to wrest that $5k from the mouths of those orphans in Kenya...you know, the orphans the alleged thief spends his spare time raising money for.
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
I've met Rasmus once, when he generously spoke at our humble community college during his tenure at Yahoo. He came across as pragmatic and opinionated. In his writings and presentations he always stresses simplicity and efficiency (two virt
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
As a teacher I can attest that it's impossible to find decent programming "text books" for Python, PHP, etc for classroom work. Most of the books you see on the bookshelves at Great Big Book Chain may be great books for programming language
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
Wow, what's really excessive and shocking is that a Gawker employee has the stones to claim he's a journalist.
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
Considering we're gossiping on PG's dime, are we allowed to describe his Nerd's manifesto as "a steaming pile of stereotypes"?
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
It's all good.
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by douglasputnam 16y ago
Paying for something to get something "free" is not free by any definition. The title is misleading and smells spammy.