See the face?! Ooh, see the cute little baby face, and the other face on top of it?!

Why babies like electrical outlets.

Git is a complicated beast. The Git index, if you’re coming from other VCS’s, is a new concept. Yesterday I described how I use the Git index in my workflow:

These pictures illustrate the multiple locations, or “data stores”, that host a copy of the source tree. These stores are: the working directory, local and remote repositories, and the index. In order to show more of the whole development process, the second picture also includes a “distribution directory”, for code that is being distributed outside of Git. (The distribution directory could be the deployment directory of a web site, or a compiled artifact, such as a binary, that is placed in firmware or on a DVD.)  read more »

Git‘s great! But it’s difficult to learn (it was for me, anyway) — especially the index, which unlike the power-user features, comes up in day-to-day operation.

Here’s my path to enlightment, and how I ended up using the index in my particular workflow. There are other workflows, but this one is mine.

What this isn’t: a Git tutorial. It doesn’t tell you how to set up git, or use it. I don’t cover branches, or merging, or tags, or blobs. There are dozens of really great articles about Git on the web; here are some. What’s here are just some pictures that aren’t about branches or blobs, that I wished I’d been able to look at six months ago when I was trying to figure this stuff out; I still haven’t seen them elsewhere, so here they are now.  read more »

pneu·mo·co·coa ('nū.mə'koʊ.koʊ): A condition wherein the presence of the patient in a room vacuums all the chocolate out of it.

We have a No TV in our living room.

Sometimes I think it’s our most valuable possession.

Our No TV gives the whole family somewhere between one and six extra hours every day. It’s hard to add hours to a day, but the No TV does it.

Miles uses the time for making stop-motion movies and Flash animations. Charlotte uses it to read, and write, and compose pieces on the piano. I use it for writing (code), and writing (English), and to teach myself algebra and geometry and management theory and finance. Margaret uses it for her many projects too. We wouldn’t have time for any of this, if it weren’t for our No TV.  read more »

(Or, a Cobordism of Carbon.)

Here’s my understanding of this (with the energy cost dip greatly exaggerated).

Oops! It takes a village (down) to raise an (American) child.

Anyone want to make one of these with real numbers?

This is an ambigram by Scott Kim, vectorized by Miles Steele, cleaned up by Dan Lewis, and put inside an OpenLaszlo application. (If you don't see it, click here.)

Yesterday I was profiling a page that used jQuery. The page took a long time to initialize. Firebug Profile (a great tool) told me that the time was in jQuery, but that wasn’t much help — the page initialization code had a lot of calls to jQuery, to bind functions to various page elements, and most of them were harmless.

Hence, jQuery.profile. Stick this in your page, call $.profile.start() to start profiling calls to $(selector), and then $.profile.done() to stop profiling and print out something like this:  read more »

Update: I got my facts wrong, to an extent that makes my thesis wrong too. See the comment that begins “Well Vista dropped dos and win16”.

In software, an internally disruptive change is one where backwards compatibility is a major concern for the developing organization at the architectural level (and not just a matter of larger matrices in QA). It’s disruptive because it takes a drastic change to the architecture to cause this degree of disruption; it’s internally disruptive because, when compatibility is a requirement, the effects of the disruption are moved inside the development organization.  read more »

Have you ever written a function that looks like this?

function requestProductDetails(id, k) {
  var value = gProductDetailsCache[id];
  if (value)
    k(value)
  else
    ajax.get(‘/product/’+id, function(data) {
      gProductDetailsCache[id] = data;
      k(data);
    });
}

requestProductDetails calls its callback with the product details, which are stored in a cache. Since it might need to request this information from the server, it has to “return” it by passing it to a callback; in order to present a uniform API whether or not the product is cached, it “returns” the data this way whether it came from the cache or not.  read more »