Living with Windows: Pidgin
May 9th, 2008
I know there are a lot of people like me. Software engineers or other professionals that use Macs at home but are required by their company's IT departments to use Windows at work. As a web developer there are many, many reasons to prefer Mac OS X over WIndows XP (or Vista which we have thankfully not upgraded to). I am not going into those reasons here. I am simply going to share about one Windows application that is very nice.
My biggest problem with Windows is simple usability: most Windows applications don't try to be intuitive and become confusing, slow, button-laden behemoths.
And yet some don't. Pidgin is the old Gaim. It is a multi-protocol (including AIM, Yahoo!, GTalk, and Bonjour) instant messaging client that is simple, usable, and powerful. They used Adium for Mac OS X as their inspiration, and I think they did a really good job. I often work remotely, and use IM as a primary communication tool. Pidgin help me communicate, and it doesn't get in the way.
WordPress: disable smart quotes
May 2nd, 2008
Check out: WordPress > Support >> Please give us the option to turn of smart "quotes"
Smart quotes are performed by the wptexturize function. You can disable them by determining what the filter is and disabling it in your theme.
Example: Your post content is filtered through "the_content". So you want to turn off wptexturize for that filter. You do so by adding this to your theme's functions.php file:
remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
I had to create a functions.php for my theme but it worked perfectly.
The three virtues of a programmer
May 1st, 2008
Being relatively new to the professional software development world, I sometimes hear a smart quip and come to find that it's an old adage (whereby "old" I mean 5-10 years). A month or two ago, when I was in Spring Framework training, I heard this:
"The three virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris (excessive pride)." - Larry Wall in Programming Perl
I don't want to go around tooting my own horn, but that rung true with me. When I find myself doing something over and over again, I try to find a way to automate it. When an application requires too many clicks or too many decisions to operate efficiently, I try to improve the interface. And when my code breaks, I get frustrated; so I try not to let it happen in the first place.
Of course, these three "virtues" are really vices unless you do something about it. A lazy programmer could just continue to do things over and over because they don't want to solve a problem; they just come to work and "do their work". An impatient programmer could be impatient and just get pissed off, or they could solve the problem and make it better. A prideful programmer could refuse to take responsibility for a mistake and push the blame on others, or they could accept the praise and the blame that comes with taking ownership of their work.
- No matter the circumstance you can always improve
- You can always start improving with yourself.
- You can always start improving today.
- Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained