There was an interesting discussion on HackerNews last week about the Linux Kernel coding style. During the discussion, I kicked off a minor holy war about whether one should vertically align code. I'm all for it! Let me explain why. What Is Vertical Alignment? Take this trivial example: int robert_age = 32; int annalouise_age = 25; int bob_age = 250; int dorothy_age = 56; I find easier to read as: int robert_age = 32; int annalouise_age = 25; int bob_age = 250; int…
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Update! There's a new way to do this - read my latest post to find out how. Two or three years ago, I was contacted by a recruiter from Google. They wanted to know if I'd be interested in working for the advertising giant. We played the usual game of dancing around salary and schedules, when he dropped the bombshell - they were looking for people to work on Google+. I asked the recruiter if he'd seen my G+ profile. At the time, it had this childish scrawl all over it. We mutually…
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It's always very tricky when people who aren't educators start banging on about what should or shouldn't be taught in schools. My own school days are but a hazy memory of hormones, angst, and boring homework. Yet here I am, pontificating. With the current "fad" of encouraging children to learn to code, I thought I would be worth looking at the difference between coding and computer science. History I learned the infamous Logo Turtle at school and BBC BASIC at home. That is learning to…
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Dave Winer is totally off base when he says "Hackathons are how marketing guys wish software were made." Perhaps it's different in his part of the world, but over here, hackdays are fun! All the hackathon / hackdays I've been to are, essentially, Scrapheap Challenge* for software people. *Note to Americans, Junkyard Wars is the US remake of Scrapheap Challenge. The last hackday I went to was about people learning, playing, relaxing, building, tinkering, bodging, faking, and innovating. All…
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Twitter has announced that it will soon open up a native photo sharing service. Rather than using an external service like Embed.ly to retrieve thumbnails, all the data is embedded within Twitter Entities. So, if you request a status using "include_entities=true", you will be able to grab the image and display the thumbnail using the following code. function twitter_get_media($status) { if($status->entities->media) { $url = $status->entities->media[0]->media_url_https; …
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