OK, let’s do one of those patented link posts to clean out some of these open tabs…
Let’s start with Mario.
As far as programming goes, I’m a kernel guy–an engine guy. I don’t do UI, and trust me, you’re happy I don’t. I make it work under the covers. As such, I often deride and disparage the hard (and often painstaking) work of the user interface specialists.
In the web application world, this means I often cast some stones at the “we’ll fix it with JavaScript” crowd.
Well, maybe I should just relax that stance–I mean if someone can make a working version of Super Mario that runs inside a web browser in just 14K of JavaScript, then I guess it can probably do all the things we need business applications to do.
Now, let’s look at a couple of nice tools for simplifying some of the more annoying (and common) technical tasks.
First is the old .htaccess file. If you run a web site, the odds are good that you’ve tangled with this a bit yourself. Maybe you haven’t had to because your software does it for you (WordPress is particularly good about jiggering the aliasing that .htaccess support), but if you’ve ever wanted to password protect parts of a site, customize error pages, change default page names, setup the old “no hotlinking to my images” hack, or many other things, then you know about the .htaccess file. The syntax for this file has all the intuitiveness of a Unix command line interface–that is to say, there’s nothing intuitive about it at all.
Which makes it surprising that no one has come up with a simple front-end for editing the files.
Until now. You’ve got to love the “free tools on the web” world. This interactive editor won’t do everything you might want to do with an .htaccess file, but it certainly will simplify many of the most common tasks.
I’ve actually used it to do a bunch of things that I’ve always meant to get around to (like changing the error pages) but that were never enough of a priority for me to look up how to do them. That’s the second order disruptive effect of this kind of thing–not that it makes some operations easier for people who needed to do it but didn’t know how, but that by making them easier it lowers the threshold for adoption even by people who could have done things anyway.
Another similar online tool exists for experimenting with and constructing regular expressions.
I’m not going to talk at length about regular expressions, but suffice it to say that if you don’t know what they are and don’t use them on a regular (heh) basis, then you are doing a lot of work you don’t have to be doing. Understanding regular expression groups for search and replace will save you a ton of time if you ever do any serious text editing.
I am coming to love Computer Science Unplugged. That site would be a gold mine even without the star bit, but when you take the Activities section into account then it’s more than a gold mine.
I should almost make everyone read the Information Theory section. Yes. Everyone.
I’ve been using AdBlock and FlashBlock for several years now (although, I have lately been using AdBlock Plus, rather than the old school one), which results in a highly mediated interaction with the Internet–I literally don’t know what the Internet looks like to you if you don’t make use of these things. When I have to use Internet Explorer (which obviously doesn’t have these plugins) I am often quite shocked at how some of the sites I use regularly “really” look.
Well, apparently enough people are doing this now that there’s some advertiser backlash, and consumer backlash against the advertiser backlash.
Here’s the best one I’ve seen. And read the comments for a nice review of the various arguments.
I love the idea of mountable remote filesystems–it’s cool enough that a bunch of machines running on a LAN can all pretend that their various drives are part of a common file system (best seen in the ages old unix NFS system, or more crudely in Windows file shares), but when we’re mounting things over the Internet, and things that weren’t explicitly meant to be file systems, then things are really cool.
A classic example would be GMailFS, a file system for Linux that lets you use your GMail storage as a remote “network share”. (There is a Windows equivalent in the GMail Drive Shell Extension, but Unix systems are much better designed to deal with virtual filesystems.)
Another recent example is FlickrFS, which allows Linux users to mount their Flickr account as a filesystem–all the photos in the account appears as files in a “drive” in the operating system. Snazzy. I’ve got a Ubuntu box here–I’m totally going to set that up, just to mess around with it.
Another example, perhaps even cooler, is the WikipediaFS, which allows you to mount Wikipedia (or any wiki running the same software) as a filesystem–seeing each article as a file that can be edited. Damn. I wonder if that could be hacked up a bit to create a WordPressFS that would make each blog entry (and uploaded files) appear as a filesystem…
