Unstructured Scribbles

Why Can’t Developers Estimate Time?

It’s not just developers that are bad with estimates either. Everyone at some point is just winging it because it’s something they’ve never done before and won’t be able to successfully make a judgement until they have.

Via PatchSpace

Working with the Chaos Monkey

When you work with the Chaos Monkey, you quickly learn that everything happens for a reason. Except for those things which happen completely randomly. And that’s why, even though it sounds crazy, even though it sounds crazy, the best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly.

via CodingHorror

The Facebook hype

Don’t get me wrong, I use social networks and media heavily. It’s painfully obvious that all internet fads die eventually. Staying relevant is hard, because the internet has a serious attention disorder. It’s a matter of time until the current concept of a social network will be replaced by the next myspace or facebook. Check out the article linked below for a well argued opinion.

So it’s not that MySpace lost and Facebook won. It’s that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They’ll go down in the same order.
Douglas Rushkoff

via CNN

Node.js on OSX

Node.js is a fun new technology. If you are looking to experiment with it, here is a quick start guide on how to install it for people using OSX

Macports is so 1995

Install Homebrew, a much better alternative to macports

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://gist.github.com/raw/323731/install_homebrew.rb)"

Install Node.js and NPM

npm (Node Package Manager) is a nifty little tool to manage node packages

brew install node
brew install npm
export NODE_PATH="/usr/local/lib/node"

That’ll do it’s thing and voila!, you now have node installed. To quickly test if this is working create a file called test.js. In the file paste the following contents

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
res.end('Hello World\n');
}).listen(8124, "127.0.0.1");
console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8124/');

Now run and you should be able to hit
http://127.0.0.1:8124/ to view the results

node test.js

A few more packages to play with while you experiment:

npm install expressjs

npm install jsdom

npm install yui3

npm install yql

Handy .bashrc Aliases

By no means a complete list. I find this useful in my day to day. Feel free to comment and add some more

# Interactive/Safe Shell
alias rm="rm -i"
alias mv="mv -i"
alias cp="cp -i"
alias mkdir='mkdir -p'

# Old DOS habits
alias cd..="cd .."
alias ..="cd .."
alias cls="clear"
alias clc="clear"

# Directory Listing
alias ll="ls -lF"
alias la="ls -alF"
alias ls="ls -F"

# Grep

alias grep="grep -rn --color=auto"

# Shortcuts 

alias h="history"
alias home="cd ~"
alias desktop="cd ~/Desktop"
alias download="cd ~/Downloads"
alias edit="mate"

# System Stats

alias up="uptime"
alias sup="ps auxwww"
alias df="df -h"

Awesome street sign

Long Live and Prosper

Long Live and Prosper

RGB

via www.czeta.it