These are all entries bearing the tag programming.

  • NoScript, No Service
    Posted on April 3 2008 — programming, internet, web — 4 comments

    NoScript is a wonderful little addon for Firefox. It stops any Javascript or embedded objects on any web pages you visit from running unless you explicitly allow them. I can't tell you how useful this has been; no longer slave to slow JS slowing page loads down to a crawl, and no unwanted tracking urchins anyway. My recent experience with NoScript, however, has enlightened me to another problem I honestly didn't think existed in the first place: many web programmers are idiots.

  • Praise for Greenlet
    Posted on January 2 2008 — programming, python, greenlets, concurrency — 6 comments

    Does this situation feel familiar to you? You're writing some kind of system that has to support several clients, or players, or just plain actors, at the same time. A networked multiplayer game would be a good example. Now, the practicalities mean that incoming data (from a network socket, for instance) needs to be handled concurrently; in other words, you can't decide to block for one client while performing some action and ignore everyone else. But you still need to preserve state.

  • User Interfaces: What's so hard, anyway?
    Posted on December 22 2007 — software, ui design, programming — 0 comments

    It's often said that engineers should not be designing user interfaces, and there's a certain wisdom to it. I've seen a lot of interfaces that were clearly designed by someone who has no real idea of what makes an interface useable, but nevertheless probably finds it entirely adequate because he knows exactly what everything does. I find myself compelled to ask: Just what is so hard about UI design?