Category: Legacy

Posted on by lhl

Year end contributions:

Sappy new year’s resolutions:

  • be more productive, less lazy
  • work on stuff that matters
  • push myself more
  • be less risk averse

Less sappy resolutions:

  • call old friends
  • say no to refined sugar
  • work on organizing site, apt, life
  • finish projects
Posted on by lhl

If there was ever a language that needed object introspection, it’d be AppleScript. Also, screw what the ad copy says, this thing is confusing as fuck. Part of it is that it’s just so haphazardly documented. It took me 20 minutes of searching to finally find that GUI Scripting can only be done via the System Events object. The other part is that it’s bass-ackward… and the examples suck and don’t have any comments. (Come on, I want to know simple things, like file loading and file properties)

Hmm, a recipe-book wiki would be quite cool. Can I invoke the lazyweb?

[quoted in MacSurfer, woo]

Posted on by lhl

Avoiding paying work by doing some… web design (wow, last time I did that was… …a long time ago). Also, mulling over SQL representation of potentially cyclical graphs: using a cluster table to restrict tree building and then baking all the nodes (beats writing a servlet and caching all the nodes I think)

Related: check out Marc Canter’s current blog design – the Laszlo widgets I couldn’t care less about (sorry), but the WebOutliner (especially the inline quoting) and K-Collector integration is hotness.

Posted on by lhl

mathowie gives a shoutout to philg. photo.net was one of the first web sites I went to. I actually remember reading Travels with Samantha and going through the photo resources before happening on WTR. Like Matt, Philip’s writings really shaped a lot of my thinking on web community and development. For a while, I would use familiarity with Philip’s work as a way to judge a developer’s savviness/background. As time went on, I got more and more blank stares… Nowadays I doubt more than a few percent of developers would recognize the name. But a lot of the pre-dotcom webfolk would, I suspect.

Unlike Matt, I did get a chance to thank Philip personally one of the times he came out to Caltech (’98 or ’99?). I had answered a question during the presentation, and when I mentioned I had done the problem sets afterward, I got an off-the-cuff job offer, which was quite amusing. While at the time working at ArsDigita seemed like it would have a dream job, I never followed up. Looking back, maybe was a good thing (see also). He seemed like a nice enough person, and I’m glad that’s how I remember him as. Anyway, thanks Philip, for all you’ve done for the web.

Oh, and I’m so glad I no longer write TCL.