Casey Kolderup

Gilt Technologie: The Human Side of Scala

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:33:48 -0400

Gilt Technologie: The Human Side of Scala:

A great post from my team’s lead engineer Peter! I loved his reasons for how Scala empowers you to express yourself:

To put that into a sentence: “Scala empowers you to express what you think is important, not what language designer deems important.” You need to decide what values, preferences and character traits will show through the code you write. To elaborate:
Maybe you are good at holding many things in your head at once, and like to write incredibly long map-flatMap-filter-combinator statements using infix notation for fun and profit;
Maybe you are adept at manipulating complex functional abstract entities like it’s Play-Doh. I am not sure exactly what that would look like, but it sounds like a way to win bets at Functional Programming meetups;
Maybe you have a crush on monads and cannot live without them;
Maybe “Concurrency” is your middle name, and you are physically unable to write code without Actors;
Maybe you love clean code, and confusingly named methods that stretch over more than 15 lines make you cry.

SUPER loving these near-pornographic ads for some dumb network TV show, Tumblr. Thanks!

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:29:01 -0400

SUPER loving these near-pornographic ads for some dumb network TV show, Tumblr. Thanks!

Random Serious Business Avatar Generator As a Service

Wed, 29 May 2013 12:03:25 -0400

Random Serious Business Avatar Generator As a Service:

mwunsch:

Previously, I wrote a simple script to generate random avatars for the discerning businessperson.

Due to popular demand, I’ve now launched a web service that will allow you to request a random avatar suitable for the most demanding enterprise needs.

Point your browser to http://www.avatarpro.biz/ ¹

The service provides an endpoint: /avatar that you can hit to get a random avatar at any specified size.

This is a great drop in replacement for Gravatar. We’re really disrupting the avatar space.

The avatars are provided by the amazing Real Businessmen Tumblr. Now let’s all get back to work on the internet.

Perfect use case for the .biz tld. ↩

Thank God the electric company has a Captcha when I’m...

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:48:01 -0400

Thank God the electric company has a Captcha when I’m trying to register an account. It would be a shame if a spammer wanted to pay my bill for me.

hungarianhorantail: Guys there are people on this site who are REALLY good at computers so if...

Sat, 18 May 2013 20:27:53 -0400

hungarianhorantail:

Guys there are people on this site who are REALLY good at computers so if yahoo does buy tumblr and change it can one of you make us a new tumblr?

No.

Photo

Wed, 15 May 2013 21:33:12 -0400

Kool & Kass - “Pleasance” (2013)

Tue, 14 May 2013 23:23:21 -0400

Kool & Kass - “Pleasance” (2013)

gilt-tech: Today in Pictures

Tue, 07 May 2013 17:15:50 -0400

gilt-tech:

Today in Pictures

One Gross Pit

Mon, 06 May 2013 09:15:16 -0400

For the last few weeks I’ve been working with John Holdun on a new site called One Gross Pit.

Fighting on the internet is fun. Everyone loves to argue about stuff, whether it’s over who would win in a fight between two fictional characters or if a particular assembled food product merits the label “sandwich”. Frequently these debates turn into a binary choice: A or B? Batman or Superman? Post or Homogenic?

There’s not really a safe place for these fights. Twitter has that pesky character limit. Facebook risks pulling in moms, clueless high school classmates, racist cousins, and all kinds of other people who are just going to detract from the meat of the argument. Email makes it hard for people to opt out and clutters up everyone’s inbox.

One Gross Pit gives you a place for these fun, frustrating, friendship-ruining fracas. Anyone can create a topic and give it two opposing positions and then invite whoever they want to participate in that topic. By default, topics are private, so a conversation is limited just to people with the link. Of course, if you want, you can open your topic up to the community. Have… fun with that one.

The site is still very much a work in progress. There’s plenty of aesthetic rough edges to sand down, and we’re still excited about a few different directions we could go with the overall site and the features we have planned. Until then, feel free to sign in with your Twitter account and get down and dirty in One Gross Pit.

FIRST A.D.: Can you type? FIRST A.D.: If you can, they need you...

Sat, 04 May 2013 14:14:56 -0400

FIRST A.D.: Can you type?

FIRST A.D.: If you can, they need you at the hotel.

FIRST A.D.: Can you type?

ANN: Never admit you can type.

It’s about damn time.

Wed, 01 May 2013 19:09:17 -0400

It’s about damn time.

I’m really into nothing right now.

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:42:12 -0400

I’m really into nothing right now.

Emily Short on choice in The Walking Dead

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:39:00 -0400

Emily Short:

Sometimes when you give a player a choice, you’re giving it not because you want to know what they would do, not because you’re testing to see whether they’ll think of the right answer, not because there are multiple possible tactics, not because you want to let them express themselves or create a persona or role-play. Sometimes, you’re giving that choice in order to say, here’s what it feels like to choose.

The Walking Dead is about what it feels like to choose when things are really bad and really out of control. In a hurry; without enough information; because of love, or in spite of fear; with serious repercussions, or with none at all.

Photo

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:52:26 -0400

Phoenix Technologies: Cloning the IBM PC BIOS

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:20:36 -0400

Phoenix Technologies: Cloning the IBM PC BIOS:

With the success of the IBM PC in 1983, Phoenix decided to provide an IBM PC compatible ROM BIOS to the PC market. A licensable ROM BIOS would allow clone PC manufacturers to run the same applications, and even the MS-DOS that was being used by IBM. However, to do this Phoenix needed a strategy for defense against IBM copyright infringement lawsuits. IBM would claim that the Phoenix programmers had copied parts of the IBM BIOS code published by IBM in its Technical Reference manuals. Due to the nature of low-level programming two well-written pieces of code that perform the same function there will inevitably be some degree of similarity. As such it would be impossible for Phoenix to defend itself on the grounds that no part of its BIOS matched IBM’s. Phoenix developed a “clean room” technique that isolated the engineers who had been contaminated by reading the IBM source listings in the IBM Technical Reference Manuals. The contaminated engineers wrote specifications for the BIOS APIs and provided the specifications to “clean” engineers who had not been exposed to IBM BIOS source code. Those “clean” engineers developed code from scratch to mimic the BIOS APIs. This technique provided Phoenix with a defensibly non-infringing IBM PC-compatible ROM BIOS. Because the programmers who wrote the Phoenix code had never read IBM’s reference manuals, nothing they wrote could have been copied from IBM’s code, no matter how closely the two matched. The first Phoenix PC ROM BIOS was introduced in May, 1984, and helped fuel the growth in the PC industry.

“What do you like?” “Funny”

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 18:15:44 -0400

“What do you like?”

“Funny”

"When you come upon a really good tweet in your feed you’re SURPRISED, it pops out, it’s..."

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 12:17:31 -0400

“When you come upon a really good tweet in your feed you’re SURPRISED, it pops out, it’s like a punchline to a long mundane joke that everyone else is telling.”

- @tricialockwood (Weird Twitter: The Oral History)

I feel like this mashup was made just for me, and as such, it...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 23:32:56 -0400

I feel like this mashup was made just for me, and as such, it would be irresponsible for me not to post it here.

Ultimately I decided to remove the fart noise before sending

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 14:16:32 -0400

Ultimately I decided to remove the fart noise before sending

I waited out in the lobby after a Magnolia Electric Co show once...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:16:42 -0400

I waited out in the lobby after a Magnolia Electric Co show once in New York for Jason to come out. He signed my copy of Didn’t It Rain and I told him how much his music meant to me and he listened to me say it in what I’m sure was the dumbest way possible because I was such a fanboy in that exact moment.

There was no one else in the room except my friends who patiently waited for me to meet him. The concert was perfect and this record is perfect and now, today, Jason Molina is dead.