nodnod

The many faces of Ninja Turtles 2011 Edition

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 21:59:49 -0500

A little over a year ago, I posted a series of images of Ninja Turtles that the then employees of Disqus drew.

Now, there are more people at Disqus. And with that comes more Ninja Turtles. In no particular order, here they are.

jQuery template syntax coloring for Vim 7.1+

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 20:04:00 -0500

We’re using the jQuery template plugin at Disqus for several of our pages, and it waas getting annoying that Vim wouldn’t properly highlight parts of the template language.

As such, I’ve created a fairly small and rudimentary syntax file for Vim 7.1+ that will color some basic elements of the template language.

Get it here: https://github.com/dz/jQuery-Template-Vim-Syntax

I say Vim 7.1+ because that’s what I use, and I haven’t tested with anything older.

Note that if Django HTML is enabled, it assumes you have a Django syntax available.

The many faces of Ninja Turtles

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 20:54:00 -0400

At the office at Disqus earlier today, several of us tried our hands at drawing a Ninja Turtle. Here they are!

Ben

Daniel

Chris

Jarod

Jason

Mac

To Disqus

Fri, 07 May 2010 17:52:00 -0400

Today was my last day at Threespot. Starting on May 17th, I will be working for Disqus as a software engineer.

I will miss the people at Threespot dearly, and not just because I’m losing a supremely awesome lunch mate.

But the future is bright, and I’m really excited to get started on improving a truly neat and interesting service. It’s built with my favorite programming language, and uses my favorite application framework.

Wish me luck!

Knowing your tools

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 04:50:00 -0400

Putting attributes of a selector on one line have been advocated by several high-profile people in the web development field in the past, but uniformly, I’ve felt that the benefits they claim derive almost entirely from a lack of understanding of their tools.

There are a bunch of articles written on the subject, but let’s take this famous one from orderedlist.

The chief reasons to use this method are:

Easier to scan selectors
Less lines to scan through to find the selector

With the primary drawback being:

Harder to scan for attributes

I’m going to add to the drawbacks list later. But for now, let’s take a look at the benefits.

Why are you doing this manually?

I’ll admit that putting CSS all on one line does make it easier to see selectors. Take this, for example:

The selectors are genuinely harder to take in at a glance when compared to a one-line version.

(Of note, I’m using Textmate in this example because it’s typically the editor of choice for many front-end developers writing CSS. But the techniques here also apply to vim, emacs, or any other decent programming editor)

But, what happens if I press command-shift-T?

I get:

This, essentially, duplicates the one-line CSS advantage by using built-in functionality that any capable programmer’s editor provides: the symbols list.

This symbols list has some distinct advantages when compared to the list provided by the ondline-technique: the symbol list is searchable, is filterable, and is completely automatic. Meaning that in the image above, if I wanted to only see those selectors relevant to #feature, typing feature into the input will filter the symbols being displayed.

All without having to sacrifice formatting.

The hidden drawbacks

There are some drawbacks not in the article that I wanted to mention.

Line-level diffs and patches

It’s not uncommon to have a line be very long due to the length and number of attributes on a selector. This means that when viewing source diffs or changeset diffs in your SCM of choice, it becomes increasingly harder to discern exactly what changed.

Syntax coloring helps, of course, but even then, many systems do not show character level changes within a line in a robust manner.

Out of sight, out of mind

Let’s face it, unless you program in a maximized window, most of us will not be able to see the entire one-line selector without scrolling horizontally. This is fine at first, but can become a liability during CSS debugging.

I’ve seen, firsthand, several instances where a bug was not realized because the faulty attribute in question was beyond the horizontal scroll.

Most programmers hate long lines that cut out of view with a passion for good reason.

Speaking from experience

The one-line approach was used at Threespot on a couple projects, so I’m not completely making all of this up. The additional drawbacks were real, practical issues that we faced when dealing with CSS that needed to be managed, shared, and maintained.

Learn your tools

I can’t stress this enough. The articles advocating the one-line technique are certainly acting in good faith, but is promoting the sort of manual optimization that is completely unnecessary given robust editors.

Optimization through source formatting is an important area to consider. But let’s not forget the other big area: your tools.

Video game as art

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 02:38:00 -0400

Ebert’s latest article on why video games cannot be art has been making the rounds recently.

I don’t have too much to say on the subject that others haven’t already said, but I do want to touch one complaint about Ebert’s article, and also one point about what, exactly, he is evaluating when he speaks of “video games”.

Telling me I’m wrong doesn’t mean you’re right.

Ebert’s article is almost a point-by-point rebuttal of Santiago’s bit at TED. While this makes for fun reading, it is almost entirely meaningless in terms of laying down evidence in support of Ebert’s position. Disproving position A does not prove position B unless the rejected proofs cover the entire domain of position A.

Suffice to say that Santiago’s points and Ebert’s rebuttal do not cover the entire domain of video gaming.

The injection of interactivity and gameplay.

The modern video game contains every component that goes into a modern film plus one very crucial element: gameplay.

Gameplay, or more precisely, interactivity is the sole difference between the modern video game and the modern movie.

People may quibble about artistic intent — that movies are made with purpose. But if gameplay is the major difference between game and movie, the more important question becomes:

Does the injection of interactivity into a medium otherwise identical to film prevent that medium from ever becoming art?

This is the question that Ebert should be asking himself.

It could be argued that the addition of interactivity robs control from the creator that is essential to the explicitly crafted nature of art.

But then, aren’t the seasonal renewals of scripted television a macro-level expression of that sort of loss of control? In both cases, the player/viewer has some level of control over the continued existence and direction of the work in question.

I have no good answer.

But I am bothered that people like Ebert also don’t have a good answer, and yet still continue to decree that video gaming cannot be art.

I accept your position. Now back it up.

Wait, I'm thankful for what?

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 04:02:32 -0400

The recent Pyle and Whitman sexting news hits close to home since I went to Whitman for high school.

On the radio this morning, the principal of Pyle, Michael Zarkin, said that parents were shutting down their kids’ Facebook profiles, and that:

“Texting is gone, cameras are gone, and the kids are saying ‘thank you, I couldn’t handle it.’”

It’s infuriating when people — who somehow think they represent the thoughts of an entire external demographic — say: “and they thank us for it!”. It’s doubly infuriating when the action the demographic is supposedly thankful for does nothing to solve the underlying cause, which, in this case, is that hormones make kids do strange, sometimes stupid things.

I want to write a longer blog post about it, but haven’t been able to quite get past the sputtering indignation stage of post formulation yet.

With friends like these...

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:26:00 -0400

As someone who has used Macs since my dad purchased a Mac SE in the 80s, certain segments of the Apple-using population are a constant source of embarrassment to me.

Like this one: Sorry Adobe, You Screwed Yourself.

In what universe not solely populated by overinvested Apple fanboys is it a good idea to anthropomorphize and simplify the complex relationships between multi-billion dollar companies to what is, essentially, not sticking up for your bro?

Or, less flippantly:

Apple in the 1990s without the rosy glasses

I think it’s pretty revisionist to say it’s Adobe’s fault that they started focusing on Windows in the late 90s.

Apple had really crappy developer tools. It took a third party, Metrowerks, to make a usable, let alone decent environment. If it wasn’t for Metroweks, Apple would have been crushed. Meanwhile, during all of this, Apple would release technology after technology that was poorly documented and poorly supported. Does anyone remember Quickdraw GX? OpenDoc? The promises of Rhapsody and Gershwin?

Meanwhile, Microsoft was going on all cylinders with developer relations. For all the crappy Win95 programs, at a certain point it did everything Apple did only with more stability and without the weaknesses. Of course, Microsoft then screwed it all up with horrible security and generally bad PR. But really it was Apple who was the cause of most their own problems in the 90’s. They didn’t need anyone else to drive the nail in their coffin. They were doing poorly enough by themselves. If not for NeXT and Jobs, Apple would have almost certainly ceased operations.

People like to make fun of Ballmer’s “Developers! Developers! Developers!” monkey dance, but it really was one of the things that Microsoft did exceedingly well when compared to Apple. They coddled their developers: provided them with roadmaps, sneak peaks, and resources that Apple (to this day, in some parts) didn’t come close to matching.

So Apple didn’t exactly have the greatest record when it came to thinking and caring about their developers.

But it makes sense if you look at it this way…

John Gruber and many others have very comfortably put themselves in Apple’s shoes. They’ve been able to easily — and rightly — point out that many of Apple’s recent moves make sense when viewed from Apple’s perspective.

Why then, is it so hard to afford that same understanding to other companies?

Adobe, at the end of the 90s was faced with a choice: to continue devoting significant resources to a platform that appeared, from all indicators, to be dying, or to refocus efforts on Windows, which was in no danger of disappearing.

Even OS X didn’t really change things all that much from the perspective of major software houses trying to determine the extend of their Apple engineering resources. Until then, no company in the history of the industry had successfully introduced a new OS outside of Mac Classic and Windows. Be tried it. IBM tried it. NeXT tried it. They all failed.

The logical choice, and in many ways the responsible choice for companies like Adobe was to look towards Windows for growth.

So now to have so people point fingers at Adobe’s decision a little over a decade ago and say “I told you so!” is fairly exasperating and annoying.

Many of them probably hadn’t even used Macs yet at that point.
A person, using knowledge contemporary to the late 90s, could have not reasonably advised a company to stick it out with Apple. Any arguments to do so would almost have to be an argument made from unreasoning emotional investment. Unreasoning emotional investment is great for some. It’s not for a company aiming to keep its employees employed and its investors happy.

These are corporations we’re dealing with here. Let’s not turn this into the equivalent of a spat between once best friends.

Adobe wants to do what’s in their best interest and what’s in the best interests of their platforms (Flash, AIR, etc).

Apple wants to do what’s in their best interest and what’s in the best interests of their platforms (iPhone, iPad, etc).

To crib from the Joker, why so personal?

Why is there a need to point with gleeful fingers that Apple is wreaking vengeance against some gross injustice?

Keep it civil. Keep it contextual. And for all that is holy, keep it sane. Unbridled zealotry is ugly in any form.

Programming languages I've learned in order

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:04:00 -0400

James Tauber has a post up where he goes through a list of languages he’s learned in chronological order. Thought it was neat, so here’s mine. I’m not including anything I only dabbled in, like Erlang or Ruby.

BASIC Apple ][
HyperTalk On my dad’s Macintosh SE. I remember trying (unsuccessfully) to make a Myst clone.
Logo Fear the turtle! I actually taught this in summer camp in 2002. Logo had progressed at that point where you could launch new threads to do things like make a basketball dribble autonomously whilst a player ran down the court.
TI-BASIC On the TI-83. Gave me something to do during Algebra. Highlight? Writing a Legend of the Red Dragon clone. I can still type faster on the TI-83 than I can on most smartphones.
C Picked up a book. It was something like Learn C on the Macintosh. It included a stripped down version of the Metrowerks compiler.
HTML/CSS There wasn’t much of CSS at that point. Ah, Geocities. My first site was about cheat codes for the game genie.
C++ In high school. Using the old Borland Turbo C++ suite. I miss it sometimes. There was a note of elegance to its expanses of pixelated text and blue.
Perl In high school. At Whitman, a bunch of us wrote an online homework submission system in Perl, and tied it in to me school directory. Interesting times, though at its peak, only about half the teachers used it.
PHP In high school. Used it because I wanted a blog and I didn’t like pushing via FTP with Blogger (still operated by Pyra at the time).
Java In college. I use the term “learn” loosely. I’ve forgotten most of it.
C++ In college. More C++ stuff.
Bash/shell scripting I brough my old PowerMac 8500 tower into college. At the time, it was running LinuxPPC. I had a version of mkLinux running on an old-world PowerMac at home, so the PowerMac 8500 felt like a speed demon to me. Eventually switched over to Debian PPC, before dumping it all for a Powerbook running OS X 10.1.
Python In college. Python rocks. I got into it because it seemed to disdain so much of what I hated about Perl.
Javascript Post college. Most of my Javascript knowledge comes from on-the-job experiences. Decent language, if having a larger share of implementation quirks than normal.
Objective-C Again, I use the term “learn” loosely. Like what I saw, even if the super verbose parameter names still drive me batty sometimes.
Actionscript 3 Learned this for a Flash project. In many ways, feels like Javascript Done Right.

Knowledge for front-end developers

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 04:54:00 -0400

Over the past several months, I’ve interviewed a bunch of people for a Front-end Developer position at Threespot. Candidate quality has varied, but I’ve gradually developed an internal list of things prospectives should know going into an interview.

This doesn’t cover Javascript. But I will state here that Javascript is equal to HTML/CSS in the front-end developer’s skill set. The complete candidate knows Javascript and at least one framework.

This also doesn’t cover accessibility and related best practices.

Caveat: technology changes, so really, this list can and will fall out of date. Also, this list is obviously non-exhaustive.

The basic

These are things that every front-end candidate should know well:

The difference between margin and padding, and how margin, padding and width interact with the box model.
float, float-clearing, and the different methods of clearing floats. Also how floats affect the flow, and the uses of floats in general.
The differences between class and id, and how CSS specificity uses each.
CSS sprites, and using :hover and background for rollover images.
Firebug. Really, I’ve not met a single good front-end developer who doesn’t have Firebug in their arsenal.
CSS resets: what they are, why they’re useful. Eric Meyer’s is a common one, but others do exist.
Class composition with multiple classes.
The concepts of semantic markup and progressive enhancement.
Image production. You should be able to get around in Photoshop well enough to cut your own art.
Knowledge of the font stack: what the common web fonts are.

The intermediate

Good front-end candidate should know these items in addition to the stuff above.

Transparent PNGs, IE6, and the use of filters. They should also know where a transparent gif will serve.
Conditional stylesheets for IE browsers.
Using display: block and display: inline to achieve and resolve layout issues.
The use of position: absolute and position: relative to achieve various layout and centering (both vertical and horizontal) effects.
background repeats: where to use repeat-x or repeat-y, and when to anchor background images to corners.
In addition to Firebug, having an IE Debug toolbar, plus being familiar with Webkit’s inspector.
Knowledge of common cross-browser issues. See below for a list.
Form styling: when to use padding, when to rely on line-height, how borders, backgrounds and margins are rendered in multiple browsers.
The traits of image formats like gif, jpeg or png; and where/when each format should be used.
Using the technique of super long or tall background images to do things like decorated elastic buttons or containers.
Faux columns.
Flash embeds. i.e., swfobject and the like.
The use of negative numbers for margin and the like.

The advanced

Ideal front-end candidate should know this stuff. Some of these are more soft and less strictly technological.

Judging and evaluating a design comp for cross-browser issues.
Similarly, judging and evaluating a design comp for places that require disproportionate developer effort for small visual gains.
Deciding when the extra effort required for the two points above are necessary or preferred, and when the extra effort is unneeded.
Developing a balance in the markup between potentially fragile cascades and more robust and verbose containments.
overflow: hidden, and when it should be used to preserve aesthetic integrity.
CSS2 and CSS3 selectors, and when they can be used versus when a more compatible fallback should be used.
HTML5. Should at least be familiar with the goal, if not the nitty gritty.
Embeddings fonts into pages via sifr, custom image replacement, and browser-support font mechanisms.

Terms, browser bugs, and patterns

A majority of cross-platform bugs are caused by a minority of fundamental browser issues. Additionally, certain fixes have been accepted into the standard language of front-end development. The intermediate candidate should have an understanding of most of these. The ideal candidate should know all of these well.

clearfix
IE double margin
IE peek-a-boo
IE select z-index
z-index and position: relative
Unclickable anchors and position: relative
hasLayout, zoom: 1
box model differences
min-height
expanding box problem

Resources and sites

Good candidates are familiar with most of these.

A List Apart
QuirksBlog
Position is Everything
24ways
Smashing Magazine
StackOverflow

Steve Jobs's answer to the emailed question "Will the Wifi iPad support tethering with the iPhone?"

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:13:00 -0500

Ämne: Re: Dear mr. Jobs
Från: Steve Jobs 
Datum: 5 mars 2010 17.01.29 CET
Till: Jezper Söderlund <>
Return-Path: 

No.

Sent from my iPhone.

Because bad HTML is what we use to enhance images.

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:56:24 -0500

Because bad HTML is what we use to enhance images.

Obvious as Profound

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:43:49 -0500

What I occasionally like to do when I’m bored: think up phrases that are completely obvious, but sound cheesy-profound in the right context.

“If you want to drive away the darkness, then turn on the light.”

“Every day is a brand new day.”

“To be unheard, be silent.”

“The leaves grow back every spring.”

“To go through the doorway, just open the door.”

Drawn in a Different Style

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:27:55 -0500

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=373561

There are some great ones. To save people time if you don’t want to wade through the (still rapidly growing) posts, here a sampling of images, organized by source.

These are my top three favorites:

Arrested Development Peanuts:
http://tinyurl.com/ncpoa9

Calvin and Hobbes:
http://i27.tinypic.com/11cgmli.jpg

Mario:
http://i237.photobucket.com/albums/ff110/anghiem/Forums/turnip_murder.jpg

Honorable Mention goes to:

Metal Gear:
http://i237.photobucket.com/albums/ff110/anghiem/Forums/metalgear-1.jpg

She-Ra:
http://i28.tinypic.com/oiy635.jpg

Here are the rest:

Pac Man:
http://i25.tinypic.com/2usjs54.jpg

Arrested Development:
http://i26.tinypic.com/29w0105.jpg

Watchmen:
http://lh4.ggpht.com/_ZJEaI1N-pA8/SfbMlmZrcBI/AAAAAAAABxo/A10lZVyBDUQ/s400/Watchmen:Peanuts.jpg
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/LeslieRodriguez/watchmen.jpg

Star Wars:
http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c273/werewolf2000ad/HembeckFredSWTrilogy.jpg

Disney Princesses:
http://i25.tinypic.com/sbha39.jpg
http://i25.tinypic.com/20ijv2e.jpg

Batman:
http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c273/werewolf2000ad/11brcyu.jpg

Inspector Gadget:
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/9757/1241200021682.jpg
http://members.iinet.net.au/~jez/junk/Gadget.jpg

South Park:
http://www.e-imagesite.com/Files/12366049893819518899.jpg
http://i32.tinypic.com/2dtdlxc.png
http://fc04.deviantart.com/fs42/f/2009/127/8/3/Bus_Stop_by_Kuroi_Tsuki.jpg

Mario:
http://i32.tinypic.com/s65di0.jpg
http://i26.tinypic.com/2ue3bdg.jpg
http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/4793/1111zjk.jpg
http://i25.tinypic.com/2je72mv.jpg
http://i28.tinypic.com/2zz0tbp.jpg
http://i32.tinypic.com/2n1rtz.jpg
http://i29.tinypic.com/20rlhsp.jpg
http://i25.tinypic.com/21ki4ub.jpg

Beavis and Butthead:
http://www.e-imagesite.com/Files/Buttheadfinalcolor2810006.jpg

Futurama:
http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/hh104/1bluedragon23/2hejct1.jpg
http://electricityandlust.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/futurama-anime.jpg http://i26.tinypic.com/30vlyqs.jpg

Simpsons:
http://www.deviantart.com/download/113145526/The_REAL_Simpsons_by_deffectx.jpg

Winnie the Pooh vs Hobbes:
http://i29.tinypic.com/30kwu85.jpg

Calvin and Hobbes cont’d:
http://i25.tinypic.com/23u3i15.jpg

Peanuts:
http://i26.tinypic.com/11170qd.jpg
http://i27.tinypic.com/2l9qpnk.jpg
http://i27.tinypic.com/2v1sqo4.jpg
http://i28.tinypic.com/25qyadz.jpg

Wizard of Oz:
http://i25.tinypic.com/ejy9x.jpg

Dexter’s Laboratory:
http://i30.tinypic.com/xpvj81.jp
http://i30.tinypic.com/27xkx8k.jpg

Failing and Flying

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:59:15 -0500

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Mobile sales and trafficshare

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:22:26 -0500

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/02/the_iphone_obse.html

PPK is much more coherent when sticking to documenting data. Shock and awe is a stupid way to communicate a technical position.

There are two points in his article that bear merit:

Progressive enhancement is just as important, if not more so, in the mobile space as it is for desktop browsers. Sites shouldn’t break.
Don’t automatically assume iPhone. Take a serious look at other platforms.

The rest of it is a bunch of sound and fury, surrounded by the sort of internet machismo that cyclically paints the industry as the spiritual successor to a bad middle school.

As many people in the comments have already pointed out, sales does not equal usage.

PPK attempts to wave this off with the blithe and unsupported remark:

“Next, I’m not so sure if it’s true. Mobile browser detection is really hard. None of the reports I’ve read so far show how they detect browsers. Lots of mobile browsers have iPhone in their UA strings to work around browser detects that obsessed web developers have set up. Do all traffic market share reporters work around that problem? Most probably do, but we can’t be sure.”

What browsers have iPhone in their UA strings?

http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html

The most important examples from his article are Nokia, Blackberry and Opera Mini. And in all three of those, “iPhone” doesn’t appear in the UA string.

So ignoring the “but-you-can’t-trust-those-completely!” red herring, most usage reports paint the iPhone as having 50-60% of global mobile traffic. This is normally followed by Android and BREW.

Globally, Symbian has about the same trafficshare as the PSP, and both are significantly lower than the “unknown” categories that most reports have.

What does this mean?

It means that if a developer is going to spend time optimizing the experience for someone, that someone should be an iPhone or Android Webkit user.

Why optimize?

Because there’s only so much you can do within the confines of the lowest-common-denominator approach to mobile web development. At some point, a developer needs to step back and think: over 60% of traffic can support a much more usable site. And while if I’m going to spend hours to improve someone’s mobile experience, it may as well be the largest and most advanced chunk.

To ignore that segment of your visitors then, is nearly as idiotic as to focus only on that segment.

The annoyances of Drupal, distilled into a single screenshot.

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:39:00 -0500

The annoyances of Drupal, distilled into a single screenshot.

The Books of David Eddings

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:06:09 -0500

David Eddings has always been one of my favorite authors. I remember reading him as a kid in middle school, and savoring every book. He was probably the biggest reason I got into fantasy as a genre.

Due to his death earlier last year, I picked up a set of the Belgariad, Mallorean, Elenium and Tamuli to read through again.

I hadn’t touched the four series in any meaningful way since early high school, and so I was prepared for a bit of rosy hued nostalgia wearing away in the face of a rereading. But even braced for disillusionment, it was still a bit of a shock.

The Good Parts Are Still Good

First, the best and brightest aspect of Eddings’s writing is still present: dialogue and pacing. Nothing ever seemed to linger for too long, and dialogue flowed as well as I’ve seen in a novel; characters sparkled in their wit, and as much as I enjoyed reading it, it was just as obvious that Eddings had a blast writing it.

Second, the names. The character and geographic names in Eddings’s works are probably amongst my favorites. Names just seem to make sense, with a definite pattern for the different conjugations and forms of a particular race or nation. And I love the suffixes of the four series: -iad, -ean, -ium, -uli. The names tend to roll off the tongue naturally and comfortably.

The Rest of It

I’ll only focus on the Belgariad and Mallorean for this part, since the Elenium and Mallorean are, in polite terms, very similar to the former. Also, spoilers.

Race

Blame it on aging, or changing perceptions, or a more sensitive awareness for these sort of things, but the rampant stereotyping got distracting.

For example, take Murgos, a race of people . In both series, they are universally portrayed as evil, selfish, arrogant beings with no concern for the general welfare of anyone but themselves. In the beginning of the Mallorean, a second king of the Murgos is introduced, and at first, he appears to buck the stereotypical person of that race. But soon afterwards, it’s revealed that he’s actually not a Murgo, and so it’s okay for him to be kind and intelligent!

Racial stereotypes are fairly common in fantasy, so it’s expected to a certain degree, but looking back, I don’t know if I’ve ever come across a setting quite as racially defined and motivated as the worlds of Eddings.

Wit and Personality

Again, maybe this has to do with an evolving sense humor. But many scenes that I remembered as being hilarious and gratifying were, this time around, more cringe-worthy.

The characters are assholes.

There’s really no way around it. I remembered them being smartasses, but not actual assholes. But they are: they taunt the defenseless, take pleasure in the agony of enemies, and brush off truly horrific acts of violence.

This is tempered somewhat by Durnik, a mild-mannered calm sort of fellow, but it’s obvious that the center of attention in not on him, but on the more violent, vindictive and mean characters like Barak.

Narrative Impetus or, The Prophecy Tells Them What To Do And They Do It

This bothered me in my initial reading as well, but it bothered me much more this time. For practically the entire length of both series, the main force behind any kind of narrative movement is the Prophecy, an invisible hand guiding them along to each and every destination. The individual characters have no real input as to when or how they approach obstacles or even objectives.

They are given direction, and they follow.

I’d Still Recommend It

The above aside, I still think the good parts outweigh the bad. The books on a whole are a fantastic introduction to fantasy, as it has a very strong core set of characters, personalities, and places.

This is High Fantasy as it should be: broad strokes, epic events, magnified personalities.

Obsession as Process

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:29:00 -0500

Jon makes an interesting distinction in his response to my previous post on the attention that the obsessed have been garnering.

The problem here, I think, is that obsession becomes an easy stand in for meticulousness. It’s an understandable mistake to make, honestly. An artist or craftsman who is meticulous in the details of of their art or craft is generally obsessed; the focus of that obsession is however about something deeper than the number of icons on one’s desktop.

On further thought, my criticism on the praise of obsessives isn’t that obsessiveness—or meticulousness—isn’t a useful tool to the artist, but that the praise is often targeted at the process rather than the outcome.

Gruber and Mann may have meant something else when they discussed obsession, but the message that the blog world at large has taken from it is an idea that, to me, seems both wrong and unhealthy.

We should not be idolizing the journey of the obsessed. It is painful, potentially dangerous, and does not guarantee success. Nor should we imply that it is a prerequisite of success—that does injustice to the innumerable artists who have realized their goals without venturing into the spiraling realms of obsession.

Instead we should appreciate the results of those who are obsessed, and give them praise for their achievements. We should understand obsession. We should not foster it.

Top 250

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:36:45 -0500

I’ve been slowly working my way through IMDb’s Top 250 movies. Some great stuff.

nodnod

The many faces of Ninja Turtles 2011 Edition

jQuery template syntax coloring for Vim 7.1+

The many faces of Ninja Turtles

To Disqus

Knowing your tools

Why are you doing this manually?

The hidden drawbacks

Line-level diffs and patches

Out of sight, out of mind

Speaking from experience

Learn your tools

Video game as art

Telling me I’m wrong doesn’t mean you’re right.

The injection of interactivity and gameplay.

Wait, I'm thankful for *what*?

With friends like these...

Apple in the 1990s without the rosy glasses

But it makes sense if you look at it this way…

Programming languages I've learned in order

Knowledge for front-end developers

Caveat: technology changes, so really, this list can and will fall out of date. Also, this list is obviously non-exhaustive.

The basic

The intermediate

The advanced

Terms, browser bugs, and patterns

Resources and sites

Steve Jobs's answer to the emailed question "Will the Wifi iPad support tethering with the iPhone?"

Because bad HTML is what we use to enhance images.

Obvious as Profound

Drawn in a Different Style

Failing and Flying

Mobile sales and trafficshare

The annoyances of Drupal, distilled into a single screenshot.

The Books of David Eddings

The Good Parts Are Still Good

The Rest of It

Race

Wit and Personality

Narrative Impetus or, The Prophecy Tells Them What To Do And They Do It

I’d Still Recommend It

Obsession as Process

Top 250

Wait, I'm thankful for what?