terrbear.org

Bug-prone if statements

I think I’ve seen more bugs from multi-expression if statements than anything else, especially once they’re combined with either an ‘else’ or if they’re used with an ‘unless’ instead of an ‘if’.

I can’t tell you in <2seconds what conditions result in which codepaths. Whenever I come across code that looks like that, it gets changed into something a lot easier to read, even if it’s more verbose.

Commenting out code…

Is a ghetto form of source control. Just delete it. It’s why you’re using /git|svn|hg|bz|cvs|evs/.

Searching playlists on Spotify

It’s CTRL/Apple+F, in case you were wondering (I’d been for a few weeks).

Finger-detecting buttons

We’ve a TV and a monitor that are both impossible to turn off in the dark because you can’t feel any buttons. The surface is entirely smooth, and by the time you find the power button you’ve already changed the input and enabled SAP.

Easy fix: put a dot of glue by the button, near the edge of the device. Then you rub your finger along the side and when you feel a slight texture change, go 90° and bam, device is off.

The glue also works wonders for chatty kids.

I need a way to enter a negative seed into Pandora

Never play Coldplay. No, really.

Love:

Firefox 8. Way less memory usage. Fast. Pretty. Firebug.

“You have to let people bring *something* for Thanksgiving”

No I don’t.

When you can’t ctrl+c

Not sure why CTRL+C sometimes doesn’t respond, but CTRL+Z almost always responds immediately. If you’re too lazy to look up the process you just suspended, you can do this: kill -9 %1

And bang, it’s dead.

Reducing friction in blog posting

Finally got around to enabling posting via email. I think that’ll end up meaning two things:

* More frequent posting
* Shorter mean post length

There’s still a few things to figure out. I just sent an email with a picture, and it looks like the default email processor drops those, and the email client I use doesn’t allow HTML emails, so I’ll probably need to find a markdown or textile parser for email posts.

Baby steps…

Moved from GoDaddy -> Namecheap

Mostly because GoDaddy tries to upsell a bunch of stuff that nobody wants, and you have to click through 7 obnoxious dialogs to renew a domain for a year. Got the idea from bmenoza.