Jesse's Blog - Latest Comments

Re: Mime-type is really important to set for HTML5 video in Rackspace Cloudfiles

ruchitgarg — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:13:29 -0000

I am using CyberDuck to change the mime-type for changing existing file mime type. I guess CyberDuck got a bug.

Re: Mime-type is really important to set for HTML5 video in Rackspace Cloudfiles

Jesse Emery — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:03:51 -0000

Assuming you're going through the API, are you accidentally initializing a new object and overwriting or anything? Setting video/ogg has worked for me all along...

Re: Mime-type is really important to set for HTML5 video in Rackspace Cloudfiles

ruchitgarg — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 02:13:41 -0000

when I updated content-type to video/mp4 on already uploaded video files things started working much better.

But when i changed content-type to video/ogg for a .ogv file, file size of the file became zero....

Know whats going on here?

Re: How to keep your software awesome

123 — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 15:05:49 -0000

sounds like what firefox have been moving towards

Re: Hammurabi was the first programmer

Stephen Rice — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:44:52 -0000

I agree with that. I think a lot of the problem with explaining programming is there really isn't a lot out there that is hugely like programming.

Re: Hammurabi was the first programmer

Jesse Emery — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:02:12 -0000

I suppose audience matters. If we need people to understand that a computer doesn't make "judgment" then yeah, the analogy falls apart. But if we're trying to get them to understand that the physical hardware is not the same as the software? Then it probably works fine.

Re: Is the sorry state of American education actually good for software innovation?

Jesse Emery — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:54:17 -0000

Ha. Good for you. Schools still don't wholly suck across the board, as you say. I actually have a Liberal Arts degree and am continually thankful for the writing, math, history, and literature I got in school. But notice, I didn't mention CS. I loved my CS classes, but I barely remember them at any kind of detail level. I'm just glad that I got just "enough" of computer science to get me started on my own and that it didn't really take away from a more general education.

Having said that, it bites me in the ass from time to time. Sometimes I'll run into something where I just know it's not a "new" problem but I can't figure out how to describe it well enough to google it. It's those moments that I'm thankful for my CS grad friends who can go "oh, that's the blah blah blah problem, use the blah blah blah algorithm."

Also, I was (trying to) argue that our schools could do a much, much better job of making all education useful and interesting at all levels, not just university level. For example, it actually takes some work to make history boring (wars, adultery, heroes, vilians...), but we've managed to do just that in the US.
I actually think that even some of the best college-level CS programs are still way too academically focused. The single biggest flaw I encounter in recent grads, even really smart, talented ones, is that they have no idea how to write code with others. And I mean everything from "understandability vs cleverness" to version control.

Re: Hammurabi was the first programmer

Stephen Rice — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:38:25 -0000

That's a good point. My view on it is that it's a potentially counter-productive teaching analogy but a great way to explain the concept of programming.

And of course, Lessig: "Code is Law".

Re: Hammurabi was the first programmer

Jesse Emery — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:25:07 -0000

That's fair. Still, it got me farther with my grandmother than anything I've tried previously ;-)

Re: Is the sorry state of American education actually good for software innovation?

Charles Strahan — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:23:05 -0000

For a moment there, I thought you were writing about *me* :).

I took a Comp Sci course my freshman year which, while not inherently challenging, gave me some free time to practice writing small video games and such. That was the most, if not the *only*, stimulating class I had in the 12 years of my "education".

Since I graduated 2007, I've made a respectable living writing software - sans degree. All this time, I thought I would never have any interest in attending a university, as most of my peers were attending just to slap a degree on on their resume. I didn't know a single person my age that seemed to benefit (skill-wise) from college; none of them could write clean, maintainable code - let alone fully understand the semantics of their primary programming language.

It was only recently that I realized that my belief that "school sucks" wasn't completely accurate - the schools that *I* knew (and attended) sucked. I was blown away when I realized that a good college Comp Sci course touches on the theory of computation, compiler construction, and more. I wonder what the world would be like if most public schools were as challenging and interesting as what MIT has to offer...

So, yes, I'd have to agree that my piss-poor American education lead to me taking up an interest in software; however, I think I would be a better software developer today if our schools would just cater to our strengths, allowing us to focus on our intellectual and/or artistic pursuits, instead of dispensing incohesive trivia and calling it an "education".

Re: Hammurabi was the first programmer

Stephen Rice — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 19:54:51 -0000

I think it's hard to convey to non-programmers just how very, very strict a judge the computer is and that's the danger of using it as a comparison. Laws are fluid concepts that people get to argue about and change by practice or fiat. Code tells you what you're going to do.

Re: How to keep your software awesome

whatafy — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 08:37:16 -0000

Some really good points here, thanks!

Re: How to keep your software awesome

Jesse Emery — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 12:26:13 -0000

1) Yeah, the "your name" page vs. the "Dashboard" (aka logged in Home) throws me a lot as well. As does the repo sorting algorithm. I may have overrated github because it works so well for me. But now that I think about it trying to get non-technical team members into it to get them using the Issues and Pages, has been a, um... challenge?

2) Totally agree. I remember my first foray into the various permissions modules for Drupal. Just typing that sentence and jogging that memory made my eye twitch.

Re: How to keep your software awesome

jes5199 — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 11:27:13 -0000

1) github mostly Just Works, but somehow I always end up looking at my personal page ( https://github.com/jes5199 ) , trying to find the "new repository" button. It's not there. Sometimes it takes me a really long time to figure out how to get to the page it's really on - http://github.com - the front page, which is to say, the otherwise useless page ... or the page that seems useless until I rediscover that it's the only place that lists my *private* repos, too, which I also always look on my personal page for.

2) Drupal is an example of learning the wrong lesson of modularity. If you have simple, comprehensible APIs, then modularity just falls out. If you try to add overridable hooks at new levels of abstraction that you just made up for the first time, you can actually create an system that's more complicated to extend than to just rewrite from scratch

Re: How to keep your software awesome

Jesse Emery — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:46:55 -0000

Yes, you are entirely correct. I toyed around with the 3.x/9.x/Me reboot a bit and just sort of ended up going with more recent history because a) I figured people would remember it better and b) it got kind of complicated to explain "two reboots."

Re: How to keep your software awesome

Aaron Davies — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:42:50 -0000

it's worth noting that the windows history already contains one self-reboot--windows 3.1 was green, windows 95 & 98 blue, and windows ME off the chart on the red side. this was fixed by jumping to a different product, NT, which was solidly in the blue zone at the time.

Re: How to keep your software awesome

Chris — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:06:22 -0000

Thanks, some really good points, and very thought provoking

Re: 7 Things Ive Learned at South by Southwest This Year

Jesse Emery — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 01:23:22 -0000

11. Everyone in the tech world hates Facebook, even Facebook employees.

Re: 7 Things Ive Learned at South by Southwest This Year

Emily Denadel Emery — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 20:39:00 -0000

8. In sunny Austin, you can get a weird half-face-burn in less than 20 minutes.

9. Cheating the system: Bring your badge from last year, Flash a random email at a harried list checker and they'll wave you in, and for girls: decolletage (but consider #8 if before sundown)

10. Sweet tea and vodka, very tasty. But cheap vodka, even if organic and locally-produced, is still rotgut.

Re: Hammurabi was the first programmer

Jesse Emery — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:51:51 -0000

Incidentally, my tiny code snippet is pretty easy to read. Hammurabi's code, not so much...

http://eawc.evansville.edu/ant...

Re: Mime-type is really important to set for HTML5 video in Rackspace Cloudfiles

Jesse Emery — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 14:13:04 -0000

Glad to help!

Re: Mime-type is really important to set for HTML5 video in Rackspace Cloudfiles

richoakley — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 10:02:09 -0000

Thanks so much for this! Been battling for hours trying to work out what the problem was.. Much appreciated!

Re: Beck’s double standards aren’t just imagery or historical

Jesse Emery — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 23:14:17 -0000

That part bugged me too, but wasn't the point of my post and honestly, I don't want to spend my time analyzing Glenn Beck's every word (and http://www.stopbeck.com does a great job anyway).

Having said that, I actually interpreted it differently than you. I interpreted the other side - "that all the Indians wanted violent uprising", "that all the Christians wanted violence" (against the Romans?) and that "blacks wanted violence to overturn segregation."

Re: Beck’s double standards aren’t just imagery or historical

Emily Denadel Emery — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 23:08:35 -0000

"...while everyone wanted violence, they stood against it."

I'm most struck by that. Everyone wanted violence? Or did each man die by the hands of a single/small number of extremists acting presumably alone or without the mandate of a populace or legitimate government's urging?

Re: The Ass-Backwardness of Our Technology, Copyright Laws and Privacy

Justinconn — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 01:40:46 -0000

The suing of customers is a business strategy based on the copyright owner's legal right to control the exploitation of his work. Every person the big companies discourage from free downloading, is a person who pays for the content. This has been crucial as they have figured out better ways to monetize their content.