Categories
Programming ruby

Beautiful code = proportionality, integrity and clarity?

Writing beautiful code is such an elusive subject. I’ve never been able to put into words what makes code great, it’s sort of these things that just is. I even read a book on it once, and while it had some quite tricks and hacks along the way, I never really thought I got closer to a definition of what beautiful code is.

I saw this talk about beautiful code yesterday. The talk is from a ruby conference and starts a little slow, but around 18 minutes in, it gets really interested. His main thesis of the talk is that beautiful code can be defined using only three measuring sticks: proportional – 200 lines to read a simple file (Hello C)?, integrity – does it actually do what it’s supposed to do and in a reasonable fashion (speed, memory usage etc.) and finally clarity – can you grok the code again quickly 2 years after you wrote it in the first place (Hello Perl). Each one of these must be balanced.

Can beautiful code really be captured by three such simple rules? Rules that individually seems to be far from beautiful, instead much more functional in nature.

Categories
On the web

I <3 del.icio.us

Sometimes a new technology comes along and completely changes the way you go about doing a set of things. del.icio.us has done that with information research for me. At first, I thought it was just stupid. I mean, it’s just a glorified online bookmark system. Who cares, really? But as I started using it I became addicted. Bookmarks in browsers just don’t work. It is not just that its a web app, it’s the folksonomy aspect of it that really puts it over the top.

Categories
firefox On the web

How to remove Experts Exchange from your google results

If you, like me, is sick and tired of sites that lure innocent googlers into registering on their site just to view content that is should be freely available. The worst of those sites is probably experts exchange with their stupid blurring technique. Luckily I’m not the only one sick and tired of this. The following greasemonkey script silently removes all links to experts-exchange.com from google results.

Categories
On the web

TED: 50 million views in two years

Wow, amazing! That is about 70k a day. I’m not sure how many I have watched, but it is at least 10. All of them have been on various subjects and all of them have been mind blowing. And even though I thought I have seen it all, out of the top 10, I only watched 1.

Categories
On the web

openstreetmap.org

I was told about the openstreetmap project a little while ago and finally had some time to check it out today. It is indeed a very interesting project. I found out that there are no roads for Nørresundby, so today I decided that I would help make that happen. A little walk with my trusty old n800 and the external GPS bluetooth dongle and I now have uploaded the GPS points of my trip to the site. I used maemo mapper to gather the data points. It’s quite nice to be able to look at the route you walked later by just reimporting the data into maemo mapper. Fresh air, a chance to get to know your neighbourhood a little better and helping making important information free to the world is not a bad combo for a wednesday night 🙂

Categories
iola On the web

2 great links

I’ve been very happy enjoying these two pieces of distractions the last week. So happy I’ll write a small blog entry about it instead of just saving it to delicious 🙂

– Paul Graham on Disconnected Distraction

– David Heinemeier Hansson on starting small

Categories
yayart

YayArt part 2

YayArt has been running for three weeks time now and the number of visitors and art pieces have just been increasing day by day. It’s wonderful to see! One of the things I find quite interesting to see is how people are rating the art, in that regard how one makes sure to best harnessing the power of collaborate filtering without ending up in Groupthink. And it’s quite clear that we havn’t ending up in any groupthinking yet. The YayArt crowd is really a tough crowd but lets see what happens in the future. The deadline for submitting art for the competetion is just a little more than one week away now, so if you havn’t done so yet, come on over and help us find the next Picasso 🙂

Categories
iola On the web

Yayart.net launched

I’m very please to announce that we, at iola, have launched a new site for digital artists today. For the 31 days there’s a competition where you can win lots of nice stuff including an exhibition at the center of Copenhagen. The site is coded in Python (Django) and uses varnish for caching.

Categories
On the web

Wikipedia for data?

Found this extremely interesting blog post today dealing with the need for a wikipedia like approach to structured data. It hits the problem quite nicely and has a ton of comments with interesting links and discussion. I talked about the problem a little over a year ago. Time to take the power back?

Categories
iola nemo

Nemo 0.2.2 released

I made a new release of Nemo 0.2.2 today. It has some nice memory usage improvements and indexing fixes. Plus day view got pagination so that it can handle large number of files on a single day (like an svn update) gracefully. Upgrading is highly recommended.