2005 August | Lazycoder

31Aug/050

Donating to the Katrina relief

Yahoo has set up an online store where you can donate to the Red Cross.

They also have a link on their front page to the Network For Good, which lists several other places where you can donate to the hurricane katrina effort

Amazon isn’t planning to participate in the fund raising since the Red Cross was able to get it’s message
out for several days before the hurricane. There isn’t the immediate unforseen need that the tsunami created.

Filed under: General No Comments

31Aug/050

How to tell you are due for an upgrade

When you do a search for your motherboard, wanting to find out what kind of processor it will support, and the top hit is a “motherboard roundup for 2000“

Time sure does fly when you’re paging memory.

Filed under: General, Technology No Comments

31Aug/050

Focus steal mothers

Retarded Application Design

Sahil points out an annoyance in iTunes. Specifically when the focus is put on a button that causes him to stop playing the radio. While I agree that where the application chooses to put focus is a problem, I have a bigger problem with focus stealing in general. Most OS’s, I’m not sure about the billion+ Linux distros, do that focus stealing crap. Next thing I know, I’m typing “oString();” in an IM window to my mother. I **HATE** that crap. I mean look, I even boldfaced the text AND added and extra asterisk on either side of the word ‘hate’. That’s how much I hate it.

Attention which ever dumbass at Apple, Microsoft, BeOS, and the creator of any other OS that does this crap. I’ve got a 12 gallon barrel of whoopass in the backyard warming up in the afternoon sun. If I ever run into you I’m gonna pour that can of whoopass all over your sorry ass. Focus should stay WHEREVER I AM FOCUSED! Alert me with a little audio or visual cue that something else would like my attention. If I was talking with someone at a party having a plesant conversation and someone else pushed that person out of the way and started asking me questions I’d give them a kick in the junk. I’d like to be able to do that to the OS.

Filed under: General, Technology No Comments

29Aug/050

Of course Google Is an Advertising Company

Daring Fireball: Google Is an Advertising Company: “”

Some guy at Daring Fireball is saying the same thing I said a while ago. Google doesn’t care about being a platform or building a new “Web OS”. They care about getting their ads into your vision.

You should check it out, it’s a good read.

update: The name of “some guy” is John Gruber. I suppose if I’m going to link to him, I should include his name.

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28Aug/050

More on Lazy coders

I see that Jeff Atwood posted about the laziness of good programmers. Phil H. followed up with a post of his own.

I just finished writing a post about how I chose my domain name, Lazycoder.com.

I’m still looking for a nice, clean WordPress theme that looks the same in all browsers. I could just edit the HTML for this theme until it’s fixed, but that’s a big pain. Maybe I’ll write a better theme editor for WordPress?

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28Aug/051

How I picked my domain name

[Pragmatic Programming] Why Good Programmers are Lazy and Dumb: “According to this entry in the blog Google Blogoscoped, good programmers are lazy and dumb. This mirrors Larry Wall’s famous statement about the three great virtues of a programmer being laziness, impatience and hubris.”

(Via The Farm: The Tucows Developers’ Hangout.)

I don’t remember when I first registered this domain name, I was living in New Mexico so it must have been at least 3 years ago. Anyway, that’s what I think about programmers. The best ones are lazy, in fact most programmers are lazy. If it weren’t for their laziness, we’d all be inserting punch-cards or flipping switches to use computers. We’d still be typing in commands at a keyboard instead of hunting around our “desktop” looking for an “icon”. That’s why we are so hyped up about code reuse, we’re too lazy to have to write the same code over and over again. The irony of that is it usually takes more effort to make your code reusable than it does to just copy-paste your code over and over again. Heck, even the “RSS revolution” is more evidence of the laziness. We’re too lazy to even visit the same website each day, we want the content delivered to US.

The best programmers are lazy because they look at some repetitive task and say “I bet I could automate this. That would give me more time to work on more interesting things.”