mrclay.org

His latest: Wikileaks To Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects With All That Private/Final Bullshit Removed

Great article on the misunderstood scope of the “Model” in the Model-View-Controller architecture. The takehome: Models are commonly thought of as wrappers for database access/stored objects, but application state and business logic need to go in them, too. Otherwise you get bloated controller and/or views that clumsily try to take care of these concerns.
Earlier today [...]

Google is offering programmers their own personal sandbox application—called Jarlsburg—and hints of how to exploit the common vulnerabilities purposefully left in it. Although Google is basically walking folks through how to attack apps, publicizing this info is a necessary evil in order to build safer programmers. We have to start thinking of each line of [...]

Don’t miss Patent Absurdity, a free half-hour documentary that “explores the case of software patents and the history of judicial activism that led to their rise, and the harm being done to software developers and the wider economy.”
When you open the page, the embedded video begins without human interaction, a violation of an Eolas patent. [...]

At my new job, we maintain a site powered by Elgg, the PHP-based social networking platform. I’m enjoying getting to know the system and the development community, but my biggest criticisms are related to plugins.
On the basis of “keeping the core light”, almost all functionality is outsourced to plugins, and you’ll need lots of them. [...]

OccasionallyVery infrequently, with help from my caffeine addiction and Intense Focus On Writing Awesome Code For Employers Who May Read This, empty Coke Zero cans will slowly accumulate in my vicinity. I couldn’t say how many. In the worst of times enough to not want to know how many.
This morning I stumbled across a 1995 [...]

(Written July 2007)
The digital dark ages is already a reality for a lot of people who grew up with hosted e-mail services like Compuserve and AOL. A lot of those users had no choice but to accept the loss of all their received and sent e-mail when they unsubscribed, the service went under, or their [...]

Miško Hevery gave several presentations at Google last year that are worth checking out, I think even if you’re familiar with Dependency Injections and unit testing. They cover the ways that global state can sneak into applications, how undeclared dependencies make classes harder to test and reuse, and how DI in general eases a lot [...]

Luis von Ahn creates simple games that have people solve problems that computers can’t (Google video). Every time you play a game of Taboo, the hinter generates associations between words and the guesser, by guessing the correct word, is verifying the quality of those associations. By isolating players via the web and collecting their responses, [...]

This game is all about scale. Think “The Sims” from the molecular level to the galactic with everything in between. At least watch long enough to see your animal doin’ it (soft jazz with sax helps set the mood). As a programmer, this thing makes my greatest accomplishments feel like Pong.