Day 10 – Program organization, Part 2 of 3. As an experienced information architect, I’m familiar with the challenges of declaring an organizational structure. Whether its for books, furniture, clothing, or software, every structure has it’s biases – somethings are easier, others more difficult. With this in mind, the goal is always to net a …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
True Thai is Our New Thai Place.
Last night, Jen and I ate at True Thai down on the south side of Minneapolis. This was our second attempt at dining there. Attempt #1 was trying to seat a party of 6 on a Saturday night, without calling ahead = bad idea. I haven’t been real pleased with the Minneapolis’ Thai offerings. Sawatdee‘s …
Learning Ruby – Day 9
Day 9 – Program organization, Part 1 of 3. Back in my review of The Object-Oriented Thought Process, I talked about the difference between is a and has a in programming world. Dave was then kind enough to clarify. Today’s chapter was that. In practical, We’re-Writing-Code terms, rather than the abstract, This-is-How-To-Think-About-It way of the …
There is No Path
Traveler, there is no path paths are made by walking. – poet Antonio Machado Special thanks to Evelyn Rodriguez at Crossroads Dispatches for sharing this thought of the day.
WishRSS Now Offers Buy for List Owner
I’m extremely pleased to announce an update to WishRSS. You can now purchase items from your friend’s WishList and for them, just click the “Purchase for WishList Owner” link in the list’s webpage or in the RSS feed. Of course, if you’d rather purchase it for yourself, there’s the “Purchase for Yourself” link. Enjoy. WishRSS.
Learning Ruby – Day 8
Day 8, What are regular expressions? If you don’t know about regular expression matching, or regex, it’s basically a language to find the useful needles in haystacks of text and code. Think ‘find and replace’ turned to 11. I do just enough regular expression matching to forget how it works. I always end up googling …
First Crack 35. Honey Wine Tasting with Christopher Hadden
We’re tasting honey wine, or mead, with homebrewer-extraordinaire Christopher Hadden. We taste the Dry Mead from White Winter Winery and discuss mead’s history, brewing process, where you can pick some up. For more about mead checkout: About Mead The Complete Meadmaker : Home Production of Honey Wine “this *the* modern reference on the art and …
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Learning Ruby – Day 7
Day 7, playing catch-up. I’m continually impressed with how concise the Ruby language is. As I mentioned in Day 4, Ruby frowns upon loops. I’m getting the impression Ruby also frowns upon taking up 2 or more lines to describe an action. Slagell’s examples of doing something a traditional way take up multiple lines, his …
Kayak and PinPoint Changing the Face of Online Travel
A couple years back, I helped Orbitz.com redesign their shopping process. During that time, if you wanted to book travel the major players were Expedia and Travelocity, with Orbitz aiming to be the more usable, better-looking alternative. Today, those three players are equally mature and equally less than compelling. They don’t capture all airlines and …
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More Gets You to Better
As I mentioned in my interview at Podcast411.com, I had an art professor who believed everyone had 5,000 bad drawings in them. Five thousand drawings bad drawings before the good ones could come out. This perspective is re-iterated in Throw More Pots over at Crossroads Dispatches. In this same token, I’m a firm believer every …