the ryan king

Like others, I’ve always had trouble getting up when my alarm goes off in the morning. Unlike Tom, I’m more like Drunken Batman, requiring multiple alarms and multiple snooze-button iterations to get my ass out of bed.

So, for me, news like this (which lots of people are taking about) seems promising. I’m hoping there really are psychological tricks to make this happen for me, because it would be very nice.

Sir* Tim Berners Lee has a blog.

I, for one, welcome our new old web overlord. :-D

* Can SHOULD Americans call him Sir?

For all you who know me as that guy who sent Kitta a t-shirt and especially if you’re one of those people who have asked me where you can get some schwag of your own, you probably want to take a look at the new Technorati store that was announced the other day.

….at least, that is, every IDE I’ve ever tried.

I’m having to live in Java land for the time being, as required by my coursework. This hasn’t been extremely bad so far, as I’ve had simple enough projects that I could easily just use vim or TextMate and a few shell scripts to manage everything.

However, I’m now working on a project with significantly larger scope. Therefore, I thought it useful to try out one of the popular Java IDEs. First, I tried NetBeans 5.0 (beta) because Tim Bray seems to like it. I couldn’t really get it to work and it was quite ugly, to boot.

Next, I tried Eclipse, because, you know, its what people use. No go, spent 30 minutes figuring out how to run my code.

I like the idea of a good IDE, but unforunately, Eclipse gets so many simple things wrong that I can’t use it. Can’t. I’d like to, but I can’t get any work done with it. So much for helping my productivity.

Here are my objections regarding Eclipse, I’d love to be proven wrong on these:

• The keybindings are so wrong on Mac OS X. There are years, nay decadesm of well-established precedent on the Mac. You break those, you break everything. When you make Option-left-arrow do anything but skip 1 word to the left, you make the application worthless to me.
• Ok, so the keybinding suck, but you can’t change them, right? Um, I guess so. Though I think I found the interface for changing them, I haven’t been able to actually change any of them, so I’m stuck with the idiotic behavior.
• I couldn’t figure out how to actually run my code. I went to the Run menu, tried all the reasonable options, but was unable to run my code. I went to the command line and it took me 2 seconds to run my code.

I haven’t had a chance to try IntelliJ and xCode doesn’t seem to really give me anything, so I’m going to ignore it. Instead I’m gonna use TextMate and write shell scripts.

I’ve been meaning to comment on Tantek’s awesome Pandora’s Box (Model) of CSS Hacks And Other Good Intentions and I’ve got tons of schoolwork to do, so now seems as good a time as any.

I’m probably indirectly responsible for his post being written. You see, awhile back, the CSS Working Group was all in town for one of their periodic F2F meetings. The night before their meetings, I and another local out to dinner with the WG.

I ended up sitting between Tantek and Marcus, of Microsoft, who wrote a somewhat controversial article, Call to action: The demise of CSS hacks and broken pages, in which he proposes that web developers use conditional compilation, rather than CSS hacks (which are disappearing in IE 7).

I made the mistake of agreeing with Marcus on this issue. :D

Tantek has some very good points and obviously, as always, but a great deal of though into the design of the first CSS hacks. Until that night at dinner, I never quite realized all the design decisions he had made. Once he got done, I said “have you blogged this?” and he said “no.” The rest, as they say, is history.