“Idea for a useful webapp: A tool for doing web page mockups that's better than Photoshop because things actually look right (because it's rendered by the browser). It doesn't need to generate good html, so absolute positioning, etc is ok.”
Totally brilliant idea. I write my own bad html mockups in a text editor or whatever IDE I'm playing with at the time, but a tool to ease this process would mean I could get on to abandoning the half-finished project much sooner than usual. :-) - Slippy Lane
Please god no, don't create another "doesn't need to generate good html" code generator. srsly - Jason Wehmhoener
Well, as for the mockups, there is really great Firefox extension called Pencil. You should try it. - Mladen Srdić
using Cappuccino, an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser? - huixing
Paul, have you checked out Axure http://www.axure.com/? I've typically used Visio or resorted to whiteboards/paper as they are easier to edit. - Jauder Ho
Jason, I would be fine with it not generating html at all. As for Balsamiq and some of the others, the idea is actually that it would look more like the final product instead of less. Photoshop gets fonts wrong and stuff because it isn't a web browser, and yet people still keep using it, so it seems that it must have some advantage over the other tools. - Paul Buchheit
Photoshop has two major advantages, multiple uses and precision. Photoshop can be used for more than just web mockups. One person can achieve multiple goals with Photoshop while a mockup tool just makes mockups. The second advantage is the mockups look great in presentations because the author has complete control. Photoshop mockups aren't real they're hyper-real. - Kevin D. White
i would like to take my pencil on paper design straight into an app ... - Gregory Lent
Depends whether your goal is to sketch and idea or create a final design. For the latter, you really do want it to be pixel perfect. For the former, you want a "wireframe" or whatever the cool kids call it these days. - ⓞnor
What ⓞnor said. For "wireframes" a whiteboard is fine, but eventually you want pixel-perfect designs. - Paul Buchheit
Paul have you tried Fireworks, that's what our designers use. - Michael
http://www.balsamiq.com I got this link from Cooper U boards a while back, and a lot of my co-workers have found it very useful. While it's not pixel perfect, it allows for really quick mock ups with the idea that the design of the end product will be done by actual designers. - Sam Ee
I've been looking for something like this for years. Balsamiq is definitely a good start, but I feel like there's not quite enough depth yet. Has anyone had luck with stencils like the ones found at http://graffletopia.com/ (for Omni Graffle)? - Sutee Dee
pixel perfect? The web isn't print. Complete control over the rendering environment is an illusion. Don't submit to it! - Andy Bakun
I'm getting married in 16 days and I can't relate to this at all. I value Reader and FriendFeed now more than ever! Anxiety shared is NOT anxiety squared! - Kevin Fox
I relate. Got married July 5th of this year and my Reader usage dropped sharply because of wedding prep and post marriage fun. I do spend a TON of time on Friendfeed though :) - Mo J
I don't know why this never occurred to me, as there are blogs about every possible subject but... there are wedding blogs? And people subscribe to them?? I can't imagine the content changes much from site to site. "Today my maid of honor pissed me off" or "I gained a pound and my dress no longer fits." And these blogs certainly don't have staying power. Sorry to momentarily hijack your thread; just surprised at this little trendlet. - Carla Thompson
I knew Reader caused stress! I just needed proof. - Dustin
It sounds like she's just unsubscribing from some blogs, not ditching Reader entirely. - Laurence Gonsalves
A good wedding blog would give tidbits on advice learned, like "when looking for a wedding photographer, make sure you find one that includes giving you ALL of the RAW pictures that they took on CD or DVD" - AlexScoble(Robert'sBro)
Serious question - do boys get all freaked out and crazy about weddings like some girls do? - Kaia ♥
Kaia, you know women amplify and project their crazy to make their men crazy, right? - Jason Carreira
I guess I could see that. Like if you're not as freaked out as me about this then you don't care. - Kaia ♥
Now you're getting into the (crazy) spirit... - Jason Carreira
Kevin - The true anxiety hits the night before and during the wedding (and you have to fake smile for the in-laws). Happiness on the honeymoon! Then, return to reality' and .. "Wow, I'm married .. Well, this should be interesting". In Jason's case, it's probably even more interesting. - Charlie Anzman
I've been really happy with feedly. It keeps getting better and better. - Jason Shultz via twhirl
Awesome presentation, but there's a big flaw in his rhetorical argument. He says that if there's no evidence that one of our chromosomes is the union of two gorilla chromosomes then evolution is wrong, but that ignores the scenario where there was a common ancestor that had 46 chromosomes, we branched off, and a 'great ape' branch developed another chromosome pair, and that branch then split into gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutan. - Kevin Fox
Yeah, that statement jumped out at me as well. It's a bit weird, because the logical error he makes is counter to his argument. I got the impression that it was meant to be an odd sort of hyperbole, essentially saying that even when given the benefit of the doubt, creationism still comes out wrong, but I would've been happier if he'd been a bit more "scientific" in his explanation. - Laurence Gonsalves
“Oh man, I enjoyed every last bite of that bunker-busting, colon-choking hamburger. I have no doubt half of it’s still clinging to the walls of my beleaguered bowels, likely furry and fluttering by now, and that my heart is probably starting to resemble a stuffed pepper at this point. But I wasn’t caring about any of that as I lifted that beautiful, delicious burger to my quivering lips. It’s all about the rush, man.” - Amit Patel via Bookmarklet
Living in Vancouver restricts me to basically McDonalds, A&W, and Wendy's for fast food. This burger helps make this small selection of artery-clogging foods bearable. God I miss In-N-Out! - Brett Cannon
Brett: are there any Harvey's locations in Vancouver? I'm from Ontario originally, and Harvey's was my burger place of choice. I hardly ever eat burgers now that I've moved to the US due to the lack of Harvey's... - Laurence Gonsalves
Laurence: Nope, never even heard of them. - Brett Cannon
One of the deleted scenes on the DVD makes it clear that in the world of Cars the engine *is* the brain, so this is inaccurate. :-P - Laurence Gonsalves
I'm surprised to see that "Windows Powershell" supports more paradigms than Common Lisp :). Oz seems to be the Michael Phelps of programming languages, supporting 8 paradigms out of the box. - Sanjeev Singh via Bookmarklet
It seems odd to classify "Visual programming language" as a "paradigm". Tinkertoy is a visual programming language that's isomorphic with Common Lisp (alternatively, it can be thought of as a graphical editor for Common Lisp). Does it have a different paradigm from Lisp? - Laurence Gonsalves
Every language is isomorphic with machine code :). I think it's worth including a "visual" paradigm if the visual aspect of the language allows you to express something much easier than in text (e.g. visual spreadsheet cells vs plain BASIC). I don't know enough about Tinkertoy to know if that counts. - Sanjeev Singh
By isomorphic I mean that you can translate between Tinkertoy and Common Lisp in either direction without any real loss of information. (you may lose spacing when translating from Lisp to Tinkertoy) I've seen Tinkertoy described as a visual programming language, and at other times described as a List editor/environment. - Laurence Gonsalves
Anyway, my point is just that whether a programming language is visual or not seems like it's orthogonal to the paradigm(s) of the language. To me, "paradigm" feels like it should be about deep semantics, while "visual" is about surface representation. Compare BNF to "railroad diagrams". They have identical expressive power, but one is textual and one is graphical. - Laurence Gonsalves
I think it is orthogonal in most cases, but in some cases, the visualness provides important usability benefits and in those cases, it should count as a separate paradigm (it sounds like Tinkeytoy wouldn't meet this bar). I see each paradigm as simply an easy way to express a certain kind of computation. I mean, you can do constraint programming in C too, it's just more painful / less usable, but I wouldn't argue that constraint programming is orthogonal. - Sanjeev Singh
I find "reasoning engine paradigms" (constraint programming, logic programming, rule programming, data-flow languages) unhelpful because you can't re-express the capability above the basic language level, so either all users of your system must program in the core language itself, or else they lose the benefit. Constraints are very useful for visual layout, for example, but a constraint language doesn't help you write a window manager or a GUI toolkit unless you're willing to inject code at runtime. - ⓞnor
(It's more useful, I think, to make that reasoning engine a system service or library that anyone can use when they need it.) I think of the other paradigms as defining things you *can't* do, with machine language as the ultimate multi-paradigm language. Functional, OO, or communicating-sequential-process models all basically prevent you from doing some key thing in order to make analysis more tractable. "Multi paradigm languages" let you exchange one straitjacket for another on the fly. - ⓞnor
I agree that visual programming is not a paradigm. It gets confused with other paradigms, especially dataflow and object/relational data definition languages, that are readily visualized. - ⓞnor
How I wish we have some digg/reddit/techmeme only for wikipedia articles - Varun Mahajan
Laurence, Egnor: what do you guys think is the best way to express that some language has a visual component that makes some operations an order of magnitude easier (like spreadsheets)? - Sanjeev Singh
I'm not sure if I understand the question. I'm not denying that being visual potentially enhances the usability of a language. (I'm actually a bit of a VPL fan, actually.) I just wouldn't call "visual" itself a paradigm, any more than I would call "text based" a paradigm. - Laurence Gonsalves
Sanjeev, I'd call it a visual language, or a visualizable language. I would argue that all languages are deeply visual, at least by conventional usage (which matters at least as much as formal syntax): blocks and indentation and formatting are important and necessary to the process of constructing and understanding programs. Conventional math notation, which almost all languages adopt, is highly spatial, and parentheses and braces have the physical appearance of containment. - ⓞnor
LabView, Lotus 1-2-3, Befunge, and Python all use spatial arrangement to represent concepts in very different ways, and they all offer very different means for the programmer to edit the program under development. Calling three of them "visual" and one "textual" seems like it sort of does a disservice to all of them, or to whatever discussion we're trying to have about paradigms. - ⓞnor
Visual in this case probably means graphics other than alpha-numeric characters, although I don't really think it's a paradigm. - Chris White
Lotus 1-2-3 and Befunge both use alpha-numeric characters, and Befunge programs are text files. Are they "visual"? (Is that question even interesting other than as a definitional exercise?) - ⓞnor
I think there are two parts to the definition of a paradigm: (1) whether it provides some descriptive power (if I tell you a language is functional, how much can you infer about it?) (2) is it really a different enough way of thinking about a problem. I agree that "visual" falls down on (1), but rather than simply excluding it completely from a discussion of paradigm, it needs to somehow be included because it often qualifies under (2). - Sanjeev Singh
For example, given the exact same problem, the Lotus 1-2-3 user probably thinks about and models the solution very differently from the python user (even if they are the same person). So here is the crux of the issue. If you take (1) as the definition of paradigm, then yes, visual is not a paradigm. If you take (2), then it definitely qualifies under some circumstances, though perhaps there is some better terminology that can be used in these cases. - Sanjeev Singh
I think a spreadsheet is a language + something, which I'll call an environment. Other examples might be Ruby on Rails, J2ME, Objective-C + OSX Cocoa + Interface Builder, Javascript + DOM, and SQL + database. The language may be well suited to the environment, but it would be possible to substitute another language and it might even be better. So by my definition, in the visual case, it is often the environment that is a different paradigm. (I realize I made up the definition though). - Chris White
Perhaps we can call visual programming a "paradigm group". Mostly I would call it as the family of paradigms where programs are *not* expressed as a prose-like stream of text tokens. - ⓞnor
Enjoying Generation: Kill, I see? Me too. - Pete Delucchi
Yes, the first episode was a little boring, but I've enjoyed every one since. - Paul Buchheit
This site, http://tinyurl.com/5nbo6y , had an interesting related theory: "'Actual' is a Marine usage, and 'Army folks normally use "6" for the same purpose'. So, is 'Number 6' more than just a lovely name to the robotic ear, but perhaps more of a title than a name?" - Laurence Gonsalves
Is trim level the same? HX is supposed to get better mpg. Driving style or locale (city vs highway) could also be factors. - Laurence Gonsalves
Do you get what the vehicle is rated? Mine is rated 29 highway but I typically get 30 to 35. - Amit Patel
... at 60 psi tire pressure, maybe? - Richard Chen
I need to find out if the trim-level is the same (this wasn't an option when I signed up) but i think my EX may have a V6-like function which could bring lower gas mileage...having a sense of mix of driving (city vs highway) would also be super useful. - Natala Menezes
@amitp uhm...no i think i get below that, but i think i drive too fast...and yes @rchen i should check my tire pressure :) - Natala Menezes
Driving fast in a small car probably isn't that bad, but go gentle on acceleration. If you see a red light ahead, let off the gas. Leave lots of room in front of you so that you don't need to use the brakes as the car ahead slows down. Check your tires and oil. - Amit Patel
It depends on the product. Does "originally to describe an elephant gone mad, separated from its herd, running wild and causing devastation" match what you're building? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... - Paul Buchheit
Trying to find a non-descriptive name... Yes, the association to 'amok' is a bit disturbing but testing if that is what comes to mind when you first see it. So a thumbs-down than? - Bindu Reddy
if you pronounce it in portuguese it would sound something like "ouch! my ass!" (ai! meu cu!) - Leandro Koiti Sato
It doesn't do much for me, but I also sold Apple stock when it hit $44, so I'm probably not the best judge. - Jim Graham
Has a soft non-threatenting Hawaiian coffee drink connotation too. - Michael Muller
try something like avakaya.com in the same spirit of ooyala.com by some other ex-googlers :) - Krishna Gade
My first thought was "amok you", which sounds decidedly unfriendly. - Laurence Gonsalves
Is this like single-bit twitter? "Am ok, you?" If it's something like that, once I get the association, it is memorable. - Neil Kandalgaonkar
Initial gut reaction: "meh". Feels like you spun the wheel of five-letter-words still available as domain names and this one came up. I don't really like that it isn't obvious how to pronounce it. Hard to pronounce can mean hard to remember. - Dylan Parker
Hmm, I like the idea of single-bit twitter. Why not 1-bit ff? At any time, you can add an item to your feed. All items are 1 bit, Like/NotLike. Just like in the real ff, friends can comment, again with just Like or NotLike. - j1m
First time I heard that voice in the hallways, I was so confused. I couldn't tell what was going on. Was it an alert? Was someone's dog making a weird noise? Oh man, there are some aspects of Google that I will always miss and this is right up there. - Sacca
i wish i could fav this more than once. :) this is the greatest thing that has ever been. - jenna
This is so clearly a ploy to flush out all the Googlers on FriendFeed. :) - Matt Cutts
I wonder if other teams at Google had as much fun as the Blogger team in imitating Craig's distinctive yet, Muppet-like alert. It got to the point where just the single word imitation would have us in stitches. Good times. - Jason Shellen
I remember the first time I heard Craig's bread-call my first thought was "who's Brad?" - Laurence Gonsalves
GXP is a templating system used to generate XML/SGML markup (most often HTML). Compile-type type checking and markup validation? Gimme some of that. - Seth
"“This is a key strategy as a path forward,” said Anne Johnson, the director of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, a project of the nonprofit group GreenBlue. “Re-examining, ‘What are the materials we are using? How are we using them? And where do they go ultimately?’ ”
Wal-Mart Stores is already moving down this path. But if the milk jug is any indication, some of the changes will take getting used to on the part of consumers. Many spill milk when first using the new jugs." - Jason Wehmhoener via Bookmarklet
It's funny, I saw them in the store the last couple of times my wife and I went shopping, and I said to myself, I bet they're cheaper to make and use less plastic. The change doesn't affect us though, we buy organic milk and organic soymilk, which still comes in cartons, not plastic jugs. - Raoul Pop
I wonder how these compare to the bagged milk sold in Canada. I'd guess that bagged milk uses even less plastic. - Laurence Gonsalves
Laurence, the article talks about one of the advantages being that these can be stacked on palettes, and therefore don't require milk crates. I don't know how the milk bags are transported in bulk, but if they use crates, it takes a lot of water to keep those crates clean. Personally I'm fond of the glass bottles. - Jason Wehmhoener
"I have a web robot which is a Java app. I need to be able to set the
User-Agent field in the HTTP header in order to be a good net citizen (so
people know who is accessing their server). Anyone have any ideas? ... Thanks, Larry Page" - Jan 7, 1996 - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
Ironic that there still isn't a very good solution to that without 3rd party libraries.. (ie, the system property solution works, but affect the entire JVM which is less than ideal. You can manually set the header, but you'd think this would be solved properly by now) - Nick Lothian
@Nick - you mean, YOU CAN'T SET USERAGENT IN JAVA? :O - Yuvi
@Yuvi - no, I mean it's a lot less convenient than it should be in a platform that's been around for over10 years (which I guess relates to Paul's thing abotu how long it takes software to get good). - Nick Lothian
placeholder comment so @jasoncarreira can take a gander. - Cyndy
@Nick - yup, pretty much any time you need to do HTTP in Java, you should start with HttpClient rather than Java's HttpUrlConnection :) - Patrick Lightbody
Who does things without 3rd party libraries (and why would you)? - Jason Carreira
@Nick - my point, pretty much. In most languages I've used, it's a single line change affecting a single instance.... - Yuvi
@Patrick - yes. @Jason - well there are some cases where you don't want to introduce additional dependencies, or you have clashes in dependencies. In this case it's pretty clear the correct answer is "use HttpClient", but I think that it's sad these simple use cases haven't been fixed. They did fix timeouts, so you can set them per connection in JDK 6 (or 5?), but not the user agent thing. - Nick Lothian
The JDK (especially in its older parts) is full of this sort of global variable disease. The "platform default charset" is my favorite (to hate), though at least most things give you a way to specify an alternate charset. - Laurence Gonsalves
so this whole time the Java/1.0beta2 bot hitting my servers has been google? - Nik Cubrilovic
that is quite odd. It would be even more interesting if you could understand the language and tell which was more accurate. - David Adam
it could be either because of separate licensing agreements & vendors for the subtitles or because one is made for deaf people and the other for non-Chinese. Considering how many "fansubs" there are for Japanese animes, it's not really all that surprising. - Vincent van Wylick
I think there are multiple versions of Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" out there too. One set of subtitles gives you a better sense for some of the Swedish wordplay and makes a couple of comic moments hilariously funny. The other, not so much. - Karim
big up for the fansub-sceners :) how could i get my anime-fix without them? - krz9000
After watching tons of English movies with Spanish subtitles and vice versa, I have lost all confidence in the accuracy of subtitles in conveying the movie's message. As a translator, I also know that the poor quality is a result of the pittance most studios pay for subtitling... guess they get what they pay for. - Shannon Jiménez
Are the dubbed translations any better? - Jim Norris
I love that movie though, on both an artistic and philosophical level. - Colby Olson
One of my favorites: German movies with English titles that are simplified "translations" of the original English title. (Like "Miss Undercover", originally "Miss Congeniality".) - Philipp Lenssen
Dubbing quality varies widely. Disney is pretty well known for their high standards for dubbing, while kung fu movies... not so much. I think that in general dubbing often requires more compromise in translation than subtitling, since the target-language words have to take the same length of speaking time as the source-language words. - Shannon Jiménez
The closed captioning is probably the same as the dubbed translation which, as Shannon mentioned, has extra length constraints. (Aside: it seems weird to me for the closed captions to be in a different language than the soundtrack) - Laurence Gonsalves
We got a Flip a while back, and the "we actually use it" feature is one of the best things about it. - Laurence Gonsalves
Any recommendation for decent AVCHD editing software that's not horribly slow when editing 1080i HD? Ulead VideoStudio 11.5 works, but it is unusably slow (and I have a quad-core CPU at home (overclocked Q6600) and 2GB of RAM). - Tudor Bosman
Other options (convert to MPEG-2 and back? what codecs should I use?) are also welcome. - Tudor Bosman
@laurence Good to hear. So many moments have been lost because I would just cringe thinking about the conversion, editing, export etc. - Dylan Parker
@Tudor In the end I was using Voltaic (yes I forked over the cash) to do the conversions for me and then the latest iMovie app for editing/export. I found the iMovie import pretty unreliable hence the Voltaic purchase. My camera is the Sony HDR-CX7 and I'm thinking of just giving it to a relative. - Dylan Parker
I liked the post-it pad as the pat of butter. Very clever end to end. - Dylan Parker
how did he do that with the wiggly eyes slowly sinking to the bottom? - jenna
For the sinking eyes: I'm pretty sure the eyes are attached-to/floating-on some other surface when they're sinking. If you look at the side of the pot you can see the edge of that other surface moving down the side at the same level as the eyes. My best guess is that the water and the eye-surface are both just sheets of clear plastic. It's also possible that one surface is liquid and the other plastic, or maybe even two clear liquids with different densities -- but I think that last one is least likely. - Laurence Gonsalves
My kids loved this video. Anything with candy corn fire is alright in my book. - Jason Shellen
"We will take skin cells from patients who have a mutation for certain kinds of heart disease (cardiomyopathy, which makes the heart lose its pumping strength) and put them into pig eggs after their chromosomes have been removed. We will then make embryos so that we can attempt to derive embryonic stem cells which will allow us to study some of the molecular mechanisms associated with these heart diseases." - Jason Wehmhoener via Bookmarklet
I'm actually really happy to see stem cell research going forward, but wow that photo of the sculpture used to illustrate the article is disturbing! - Jason Wehmhoener
This has the potential to turn into something nasty if someone grows those embryos. One thing we don't need is some grotesque living thing that looks even remotely like that photo... - Raoul Pop
will this lead to the race of pig soldiers that Kramer predicted so many years ago on Seinfeld?? - felix
Raoul, they're trying to fight heart disease, not create a horrifying comic book plot. It IS a creepy work of art though. - Jason Wehmhoener
Somebody call Scott Sigler. This cannot end well. - Harvey Simmons
Stories like this are why I'm following Jason Wehmhoener on FriendFeed. The picture is disturbing, though. - Steve Lynch via Alert Thingy
Perhaps now the scene at 6:20 in this video can finally come to pass: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ucN... (I'll just nip off and shoot myself... Don't worry, sir, I'll be very humane!) - Kelly Fox
Something off my shoulder perhaps? Braised in a little white wine sauce... - Jason Wehmhoener via fftogo
The picture, btw, is a work of photoshop. Designed to be creepy. - Phil (scribkin)
by the way, that's a sculpture by australian artist patricia piccinini called the young family" - Cee Bee
can I dislike this??? Scared the bejesesus outta me! - Tim Hoeck
Oops, Cee Bee.. I do remember that now. Thanks for correcting me. - Phil (scribkin)
that picture is really freaking me out! - Chris Harris
omg - haven´t seen anything that ugly and scary before!!! - Dieter Schwarz
Wouldn't removing the (pig) chromosomes from the eggs and replacing them with human skin cells make these embryos 100% human in terms of genetics, and not "human-pig hybrids"? Assuming it was able to survive, wouldn't such an embryo just grow into a clone of the skin cell donor? - Laurence Gonsalves
Definitely very cutting-edge. Here in Spain the people I have talked to about this have reacted with shock that the UK approved hybrid embryo research. It will be really interesting to watch the different reactions in different countries around the world. - Matthew Bennett
quack science!! that picture is horrifying... NOooooooo! - Susan Beebe
Laurence I think you are probably right, probably the attention grabbing headline and the bizarro sculpture don't do the subject any service. Susan, why "quack science"? Stem cell research could solve a lot of tough medical problems. - Jason Wehmhoener
It's like a Dr. Who episode come to life - John Frost
Agreed with Susan: horrifying. If pigs don't already have a sophisticated consciousness about their lot the pigman certainly will. This can't be real! - melmcbride
Heh, I'm amused at folks who seem to be reacting to the headline and the photo, but don't appear to be reading the article or my comments on it. - Jason Wehmhoener
A high creepy factor. But that's why it's great. :-) - Chris Baskind
I think it just needs the right marketing. "It's like the movie 'Babe' -- only with REAL TALKING PIGS!" On the other hand, it could lead to some tearful scenes where your breakfast is writing "NO KILL I" in the mud with its snout before being led off to the slaughterhouse. - Karim
Wow-great image before breakfast. Forget the pork sandwhich huh? - Mark Forman
With some exception this is true. Sad, but taking a feature away from even the small subset of users who use it is like taking candy from a baby (which doesn't mean it's easy, but rather that it involves a lot of kicking, screaming, and crying. If they're older they'll also tell you they hate you and never want to see you again). - Kevin Fox
taking cupcakes from a toddler is even more difficult - peter
