I’ve been discussing with a friend of mine various topics related to a more “classical” variant of hacking: Unix, Lisp, Emacs, etc…

One of the topics that we’ve stumbled upon more than once lately is Git. I’ve been holding fast in the centralized-VCS system world, not willing to let go of my trusty installations of SVN. The most important reason for this was actually that I just did not understand how a non-centralized VCS works. I chanced upon an article on Hacker News a couple of days back that talks about Understanding Git Conceptually.

Motivated by this article I brought up Git again at our next encounter and we soon came to agreement on the point that both of us believe that Git is in fact more than just a version control system. In fact, with it’s distributed, decentralized approach and branching/merging, it does look a lot like a component that lives beneath the hood of a database system. Discussing the topic further we’ve mentioned databases which are document-oriented, and not in the typical RDBMS offering.

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I’m not giving you my e-mail account/password, even if that’s what you want me to do. Fuck you for even daring to suggest that this will somehow diminish my user experience.

To everyone else: stop designing stuff that wants me to enter my credentials for some other service.

Technorati Tags: issuu

For the longest time, I’ve been in love with this amazing keyboard. What it does, is that it shifts the characters on the left/right halves of the keyboard when you press and hold the space bar. Since I’m a thrifty bastard I cannot justify to myself the need to spend about 150 dollars on something that my keyboard can do quite well on it’s own, so I set out to replicate the behaviour.

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Obviously somebody likes the tagline of my blog a lot.

It is said that immitation is the greatest form of flattery. Thanks Corrine!

It all started when a client of mine asked me why the hell their CMS admin interface was taking so long to load.

Okay, I admit. I’ve been a little bit lax about usability testing on slower connections, but this is ridiculous. When you inspect the complete distribution of Dojo (not all of which is loaded, that is true), you see that it’s just over 50 megs in size. 50 megs!

A rather reasonable administration page (a Table, a Tree and the data sources for them) result in the load of 175 request with the total of 357kb. On a local interface, with a nicely tuned Apache server, this results in a load time of 10 seconds. I can’t even begin to think what the load times look like on a slow link.

Taking a look at my application, I realized that most of the functionality that I use from Dojo doesn’t really add anything innovative or amazing, just slows down the loading.

So I’ve decided provisionally to ditch Dojo in favour of jQuery. I’ll be investigating what I can and cannot do with jQuery and write up my experience during the porting.

Technorati Tags: dojo, dojo toolkit, ajax, jquery, porting