8 items tagged “charles-miller”
2009
Ask browser users, and they'll tell you the overwhelming reason why they can't upgrade to a more modern, standards-compliant browser is because their work won't let them. Ask IT departments why this is the case and they'll point to the six- to seven-figure costs of upgrading turn-of-the-century Intranets written to work in, and only in, Internet Explorer 6. Google have provided a way for websites to opt out of IE6 (and even IE7) support without requiring enterprise-wide, Intranet-breaking browser upgrades.
And so it goes, around again. Charles Miller on Java, pointing out that if you don’t have closures and first-class functions you end up having to add band-aid solutions and special case syntactic sugar. Python’s lack of multi-line lambdas leads to a similar (though less pronounced) effect.
2008
Cluetrainwreck. Comcast’s official Twitter account is pretty creepy... “I hope we can change your perception of Comcast!”.
Heavier than Air. Charles Miller points out that every time Apple breaks the mold with a new product (the iPod, the iPod Mini, the iMac and now the MacBook Air) they lose in feature matrix comparisons but win in the marketplace.
2007
Maven: Broken By Design. Charles Miller: “If you check out a particular version of your code and build it with particular versions of your tools, you should get a product that is binary-identical each time.”
Understanding Engineers: Feasibility. Charles Miller provides smart definitions of what programmers mean when they say “impossible”, “trivial”, “unfeasible”, “non-trivial”, “hard” and “very hard”.
... if you're in an email conversation with one other person and you're both using Gmail, don't bother quoting at all.
2003
Supporting Conditional GET in PHP
This site’s RSS feeds now support Conditional GET. Since the feeds are dynamically generated on every request, adding support took a bit of hacking around with PHP. Here’s the function I came up with (based on the excellent description provided by Charles Miller in the article linked above):
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