I spent last Wednesday at Benaroya Hall, attending the Seattle edition of Stack­Over­flow’s traveling DevDays conference. It was well worth $99.

Joel Spolsky, owner of FogCreek Software and co-founder of Stack­Over­flow, opened the conference with a keynote about the dichotomy of power and simplicity. People are happier when not over­whelmed with choices. Many of the choices that software forces users to make are es­sen­tial­ly mean­ing­less to the users. However, even though people want simplicity, they also want features and different people use different features. Powerful software sells more copies.

He argues that developers and designers should put in the extra work to make good choices on behalf of the users: don’t make users feel bad …continue.

As part of my personal conversion to Git, I read Swicegood’s Git book. It’s a decent in­tro­duc­tion to Git and you learn how to do all the basic tasks as well as some more advanced topics. The examples are clear and well-paced.

I would have liked to see more about col­lab­o­ra­tion and workflow in a DVCS world, perhaps a few case studies: how is Git used in the Linux kernel de­vel­op­ment process; how a small, dis­trib­uted team uses Git and GitHub; how a collocated team migrates from more …continue.

In Football, dog­fight­ing, and brain damage, Malcolm Gladwell writes of the rather startling findings concerning brain damage that American foot­ballers sustain over their careers.

The constant butting of heads leads to an enormously high rate of chronic traumatic en­cephalopa­thy (C.T.E.), which has symptoms like Alzheimer’s. It’s not just the con­cus­sions that cause it, but all the sub­con­cus­sive contact. It’s almost as dangerous to one’s long-term health as boxing.

I grew up hating rugby and trans­ferred that hatred to American football. I have no time for the game, which I find violent and repellent, nor for the jock culture that surrounds it.

Regardless of my feelings about football, Gladwell’s article (as so many New Yorker pieces do) …continue.

Over the last few weeks, I built a PHP ap­pli­ca­tion that overlays Approve 71 banners on profile pictures. The actual ap­pli­ca­tion is hosted in an iframe and lives on a server in a different domain, eq.dm, than the main server at ap­proveref­er­en­dum71.org.

This works fine in most browsers. Then we started getting reports that it wasn’t working in IE8 on Win7 RC1. The iframe content was blank.

Poking around, I found the problem with the Fiddler proxy. The landing page on eq.dm was supposed to stick some in­for­ma­tion into the PHP session, then redirect to a second page at the same site. The second page was in an endless loop, redi­rect­ing to …continue.

Third in a series, but the first that I’ve read.

Prince Roger and his Marine bodyguard have been marooned on an alien planet for six months. With local allies, they fight their way halfway around the world to the spaceport. And then the trouble really starts.

Well-done military SF: plausible, hard-bitten char­ac­ter­s; good plotting; and exciting battle scenes.

In the last few weeks, I’ve switched over to Git for most of my version-control needs, at home and at work, after putting it on the long finger for months.

We continue to use Subversion at work, but I’ve recently followed Pavel and Eric’s lead in using git-svn. I work locally on my own private branches and git svn dcommit and git svn rebase oc­ca­sion­al­ly. I’m primarily on Windows at work, but I have a Linux box and a Mac Mini too, while at home, I have a MacBook, a Linux netbook, and a Vista desktop. I’m using msysGit, oc­ca­sion­al­ly sup­ple­ment­ed by Tor­toise­Git and QGit. Pavel’s on a Mac and …continue.

Nathan Oliver is a great writer, but a horrible man. Adam Dalgleish of Scotland Yard is called in when Oliver is found murdered on an island that is ex­clu­sive­ly reserved for VIPs. Only a handful of people could possibly be the killer.

P.D. James adds psy­cho­log­i­cal insight to a tightly plotted classic mystery. Dalgleish is both a poet and a detective. Both aspects are required to get to the heart of what happened on Combe Island.

William Gibson has abandoned cyberspace for the present day. No matter. The same elements of paranoia, adrenalin, and tech­nos­peak are present.

His story follows three sets of characters, all of whom ultimately intersect, chasing the same mcguffin.

Enjoyable, if confusing.

Today is National Coming Out Day, a day to promote awareness of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans­gen­der people. For anyone who doesn’t already know: I’m bisexual.

I’m married to Emma. That leads people to tacitly assume that I’m straight. Too often, I do little or nothing to challenge that assumption, either from straight people or gay people.

I came out in grad school, a couple of years after leaving Ireland. It was difficult at first, but ultimately rewarding.

I’m married to a woman, but I could have ended up with a male partner, a partner whom I could not legally marry in Washington state. Emma and I married because anything else is second class. This …continue.

I’m breaking radio silence to explain the un­char­ac­ter­is­tic drought of blog posts. In my last post, I mentioned that I had created a Twibbon overlay for Approve71.org, allowing you to overlay Approve71‘s badge over your Twitter icon.

The next day I went over to Approve71’s head­quar­ters and introduced myself to the tech team, Josh, Joe, and Adam. One thing led to another, and I spent that weekend writing my first-ever PHP code, which allowed you to upload a photo to Approve71’s website, stamp a banner on it, and then save it so that you could sub­se­quent­ly upload it to Facebook for your profile picture.

It’s been a big success, used a …continue.