Ryan Tomayko

What really happens when you navigate to a URL —

“The facebook server responds with a permanent redirect”

WTF - Haml —

I love this so much:

… one way or another it seems I need something called EMACS.. WTF..!!!!! I dare you to install it and see how many WTFsss you will say…. it’s like some text editor that is so smart that you dont use the mouse dont even use the cursor keys..if you want to go back one character you hit control then B!!! Brilliant!!! two random keys instead of one with an arrow!!!! WWWTTTFFFF!! ok I might not need this crap…. lost a day learning to use the Rubik cube of text editors.

It’s easy to pfft and blow off this kind of … criticism, but if you can look past the make believe grammar and punctuation you really do get a sense for how hard it is for newbies to wrap their heads around even very basic set of tools needed to build things on the web. Maybe what we do is just hard and complex and there’s nothing we can do to make it simpler. I’m just always surprised when I get to peek through someone else’s eyes and see just how fucked up everything must seem.

/dev/fort —

A master plan:

Imagine a place of no distractions, no IM, no Twitter — in fact, no internet. Within, a group of a dozen or more developers, designers, thinkers and doers. And a lot of a food.

Now imagine that place is a fort.

They’re serious:

ASCII Table - The Pronunciation Guide —

ASCII punctuation characters and their various pronunciations. e.g., the entry for Exclamation point (!) lists:

exclamation (mark), (ex)clam, excl, wow, hey, boing, bang, shout, yell, shriek, pling, factorial, ball-bat, smash, cuss, store, potion (NetHack), not (UNIX) ©, dammit (UNIX)

That last one has a footnote: “as in ‘quit, dammit!’ while exiting vi and hoping one hasn’t clobbered a file too badly.”

The C++ FQA —

“Frequently Questioned Answers,” that is. A big list of why C++ sucks, basically. Also, here’s some solid C++ bashing by notable programmers. All of this and I’m only half-way through Eli Bendersky’s recent essay on C++ hate.

“By installing Java, you will be able to experience the power of Java” —

Funniest thing I’ve seen on Joel on Software in quite some time.

11 Words That Sound Offensive, But Aren't —

I almost died.

Reverse HTTP —

Allows a server to turn the tables and make HTTP requests to the client. I’ve been trying to come up with some use for this for 45 minutes and I’m totally baffled but it’s kind of interesting anyways.

Dear Leg-Shaker —

I’m pretty sure this exact thought occurs to everyone that sits at a table connected to mine on a daily—maybe hourly—basis. I’m sorry!

The Subprime Primer —

The financial crisis explained using the crappiest cartoon stick figures ever. Also, the best overview I’ve seen yet.

Documents Reveal Django Pony, Caught In Tail Of Lies —

Aha!

The giant cow that's the size of a baby elephant —

… and other freakishly large animal pr0n. Awesome. (via sogrady)

IBM Web services guru predicts WSDL future —

From 2002: “On this latter specification, Sutor is emphatic: web services are defined by whether they are described in WSDL.”

Yoda Fail —

“… sued the restaurant where she worked saying she was promised a new Toyota for winning a beer sales contest in April. Berry, 26, believed that she had won a new car, but she was blindfolded, led to the parking lot and presented a toy Yoda …”

War Breaks Out Between Hackers and Scientology -- There Can Be Only One —

“… people of the Internet, the YTMNDers, trolls of the world, the GameFAQs members, the eBaumers; us old time Internet users, and the newest of noobs, the YouTubers and MySpacers, must band together for a fight that transcends our differences …” :)

Rap Lyrics Explained With Charts and Graphs —

Includes a nice chart of the Differentiation of Fat Joe’s Liquid Based Promiscuity :)

Flunked: 14 Signs of a Deficient Intellect —

“Groj Sale”

depressing —

“maybe try coding something in c”

Using a Mac…why oh why? —

“It all started with Windows Vista”

Python —

“Whitespace?”

PEP 3117 -- Postfix type declarations —

“After careful considering, much soul-searching, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, it has been decided to reject this PEP.”

The Two Types of Programmers —

From IMil in comments: “Shocking statement #(n+1): 80% of the 80% believe that they belong to [the] 20%.” A recursively shocking statement! i.e., (0..Infinity).inject (0.8) { |x,n| x * 0.8 }

How to tell if a web page sucks —

Beautifully executed.

Anti-Terrorism and the Death of the Chemistry Set —

“Modern fascist states don’t even bother to kill those people, and pretending they’re going to show up in some stormtrooper outfit and start a gun battle with you is insane.”

Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters —

“No one party has a monopoly on bullshit” … “it’s not just about talking bullshit, it’s also about living it…”

The New BackUp Commercial —

“… and mounts your shotgun flush at your bedside enabling access to your shotgun while in the laying position in your bed!”

Programming - You're Doing It Completely Wrong —

I know! Seriously.

An unordered list of thoughts I had during a conference call with a potential client today —

“Facebook isn’t the internet, dipshit.”

Paul Graham Facts —

“Paul Graham can divide by zero — and the answer is ‘Paul Graham’” … “Paul Graham invented Al Gore” … “Paul Graham is a default constructor. He takes no arguments.”

The Mythical Business Layer —

“It was as if its architects were given a perfectly good hammer and gleefully replied, ‘neat! With this hammer, we can build a tool that can pound in nails.’” — that is THE SINGLE FUNNIEST SENTENCE ever assembled in the history of english language!

HTTP Errors Poster —

Stefan Tilkov with a poster-size illustration of HTTP client errors (4xx series only).

Why we should hang out: a mathematical proof —

“Clearly, after inspecting r guys, the expected utility of inspecting one more an continuing optimally is 1/(r+1) * the sum of b = 1 to r + 1 of U*(b, r+1). Call this expression Z.”

Congressional Representation Or "Ass-Kissing Little Chickenshits"? —

MoveOn’s response to a congressional vote condemning their recent NYT / Patraeus ad. This is apparently going into the Times sometime over the weekend…

/sys/man/1/emacs —

The emacs(1) manpage from Bell Labs’s Plan 9.

Obie Fernandez : Ruby on Rails and More... —

“I’m not really much into evangelizing Ruby and Rails much nowadays. You know, since we won, I have to admit that it became boring and besides the point.” :)

Inappropriate "Talk Like a Pirate Day" remarks —

“Aaaaaaaar! Home a day early, ye are, husband. This varmint a poor stranger be who lost his clothes.” :)

Leaked Media Defender e-mails reveal secret government project —

“The e-mail was leaked to the public by a group that calls itself MediaDefender-Defenders.” … “Apparently, MediaDefender employee Jay Mairs forwarded all of his company e-mails to a Gmail account, which was eventually infiltrated.”