Social Web Developer
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Meteor is a set of new technologies for building top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time, whether you’re an expert developer or just getting started.
If you work with node.js or JavaScript in any way, you have to watch this video. This looks incredibly useful. The documentation needs some love, I can’t see how to use it with data sources other than MongoDB, but when some more examples roll around, I may see if I can use this.
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I’ll tell you this, friends: It’s hideous and it’s loud and it’s heavy and it’s huge… but I love typing on it. I love the feeling of rattling off a long paragraph of text uninterrupted while the air is filled with insanely loud clacking and I love the way the keys feel as I strike them.
Something about this keyboard is very tempting. I’ve been looking at the Das Keyboards for a while, and now that there is a Mac specific version one coming out, I’d like one even more. A coworker at Maplesoft has the Windows one at his desk, may be worth taking another look at it.
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I’ve been mostly absent from personal blogging since 2010, and haven’t done it seriously for even longer. I’ve been itching to get back to blogging for a while, and was intrigued by Marco Arment’s new blogging platform, Second Crack when he announced it on Build & Analyze.
I read the installation instructions, and decided it was too much work to get going. Fortunately, a friend Nick Wynja created a great script for setting up Second Crack on a Rackspace Cloud server. I already use Rackspace for CastRoller so it wasn’t a problem for me to get started there. It wasn’t a simple setup, but once Nick fixed the script from feedback from myself and other users, it has become a pretty easy process, so now I’ve got a brand new blog up and running on Second Crack.
The old blog has all of the posts in Markdown files set up for Github pages, and I should be able to migrate them over, the syntax for the metadata is a bit different, so I do need to create a script that will loop through them all and update them for Second Crack, until then, they’ll all still there in the archive on Spaetzel.com.
I am a big fan of the Daring Fireball style of blogging with quotes and quick links back to the original source, Marco does the same thing, and Second Crack is perfect for this. It even comes with a handy bookmarklet that lets you select text and start a post from it. Hopefull this system will be easy enough for me to use and will keep me blogging.
I plan to post about anything in my areas of interest: Tech, Gadgets, Programming, Podcasting and Running. Most posts will be link posts, but I may share some original content from time to time.
The layout of the blog still needs work, but that will improve quickly over time.
Welcome!
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Try right clicking GitHub’s logo
Pops up a dialog allowing you to download hi-rez versions of the logos. Potentially very useful. I’m often frustrated getting logos for websites, even sites I’ve worked on myself such as CastRoller and Maplesoft.com have logos that are hard to get to. CastRoller’s logo is hidden in the CSS, so right clicking on it, gets you nothing. Maplesoft’s has styling in it that only works when it is in its original context.
This would make it a lot easier for people to use the logos in their other media, but breaking the right click is pretty annoying. I think in this case the tradeoff is worth it.
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Light table is based on a few guiding principles:
You should never have to look for documentation Files are not the best representation of code, just a convenient serialization. Editors can be anywhere and show you anything - not just text. Trying is encouraged - changes produce instaneous results We can shine some light on related bits of code
This really looks amazing. I look forward to seeing a real product and playing with it. I love the idea of being able to drag functions around on a table and seeing how the variables pass though them.
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The revolutionary calculator that shows the answer only when you also enter a suitable mental estimate.
A crazy idea, that I think would have been really helpful when I was in high school. Forcing the student to estimate the answer first would really help to encourage understanding.