Programming Tweets of 2011

February

• The new Twitter takes the “eventually consistent” principle of NoSQL very seriously: the data displayed is consistent on Judgement Day.

March

• “We cannot predict whether such a query will timeout every time. This will be learned heuristically between keyboard and chair.”
• Switched another web forum over from Latin-1 to UTF-8. The world is now a better place.

Apr

• “We identified a tweak to the algorithm to prevent generation of swastika-like identicons.” http://bit.ly/jJsMgY

May

• Funny how ”foreign” in Prolog and “native” in Java mean very similar things.
• Nutzen von grafischen Tracern, Folge 121: Ein System kennenlernen, um einen grafischen Tracer dafür zu schreiben.

June

• Duh, git users, Subversion has a “staging area” too. It’s called working directory. You’re welcome.
• Wort des Tages: Commitsau
• Heute: Race conditions.

August

• Eine Hochleistungs-Rechenanlage in Stanford hat angeblich einen String gefunden, der kein gültiges Perl-Programm ist.

September

• Vom Push-Paradigma zum Pull-Paradigma gewechselt, Tag gerettet.
• Yay worst practices.
• There’s no StackOverflowError that some randomly added System.out.println can’t fix. #Heisenbug #WTF #Java

October

• “It’s not botchy, it’s *modular*!”
• xmllint is delusional, it thinks it’s cat.
• “This will be done manually and annually.”
• Of all the possible ways to represent a pair in #Prolog, (A, B) is probably the most braindead one. Especially if functor(B, (,), 2).
• You know your bug tracking workflow is broken when Google Alerts is part of it.
• The best things in life start with cat $file |
• 11 AM: type ‚pos_tags = ‚. 11:01 AM – 5:59 PM: read Ajax/jQuery introductions. 6:00 PM: hit backspace 11 times.
• Nicht testen. Denken!
• Immer wieder ernüchternd, wie weit „gut funktionierende Klasse“ von „gut funktionierende und erweiterbare Klasse“ entfernt ist. #OOP
• Class names ending in “Helper”: not helping as far as understanding is concerned.
• “Have you ever felt like you needed to be rewritten?”

November

• Heute: Deadlocks.
• Si creavisses minimum exemplum, non quaesivisses.
• Removed one if (…) { throw …; } – and so there was a new feature.
• Curse you, 80/20 rule in UI design.
• }]); #BeautifulLinesOfCode
• Word of the day: errput (the data a program sends to STDERR)
• Nu nog even lekker formatteren.
• And this is where I fire up Eclipse to experimentally learn yet another fact about Java.
• Wenn schon böser CSS-Hack, dann ruhig pixelgenau.

December

• seize.sh: mv $1 $1.bk; cp $1.bk $1; rm $1.bk
• Welche Programmiersprache hat eigentlich diese Seuche „Ausrufezeichen als Negationsoperator“ eingeführt? Warum nicht gleich das Leerzeichen?
• The one and only major version number: 0. The one and only development environment: production.