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Broofa’s Readability Analyzer
Okay, this one goes out to all you hard-core geeks out there! I’d like to introduce Broofa’s Readability Analyzer. For the Impatient What is it? A tool for determining web page readability. What’s it do? At the bottom of every web page, you’ll see how “readable” the page is, based on a combination of computed…
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The Web 2.0, Ajax, and SkiBonk
There has been a lot of talk lately about the Web 2.0 and Ajax. And possibly even more talk around why the heck there’s so much talk. They have definitely achieved over-hyped buzzword status, but underneath the hype there is some fundamental value. In response to a query on one of the mailing lists I’m…
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The Social Bits
I’ve recently been pondering what it means to be a software developer, and the ways in which it is changing. I have been programming professionally for almost 20 years now, and I come from a generation of programmers that grew up with computers that were more like toasters than network appliances. Programming was, by nature…
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Wisdom in Algorithms, Part II – The Documentation of Life
[This is part 2 of an ongoing series of discussions on aspects of computer programming that transcend the software industry. Part one can be found here.] In many ways, software projects are like ancient civilizations. They live, breathe, thrive for a brief period of time and then their members are thrown to the four winds,…
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You’ve Got … $!#*@!
About 5 years ago, I stumbled upon the perfect way to deal with email: I simply let my inbox fill up, then once every three months I take all my messages, sent and received, and drop them into an archive folder corresponding to whatever the current year is. It’s wonderful. No managing folders, no worrying…