Now, this is somewhat sick ... as soon as you
provide a nice feature for your users, like a
wiki, you run into asinine people who will
abuse it for their own purposes (follow the

Nigritude Ultramarine and the Wiki Sandbox Effect

This is why shopping centers have "no skateboarding"
signs and the BP on North Avenue closed off part
of its parking lot where the motorcycle clubs used
to pull in for their pit stops ... not because any one
person doing it is bad, but when enough people
take advantage, things get screwed up.

At least this guy realized what he was doing was wrong:
Wiki Sandbox Morals

Labels: Webworks

The Zealouts are coming!

Grain Of The Language

Cool merging of the word zealot and lout!

Labels: Development

I was working on an API and had trouble picking a name for
a particular operation (which we'll call, say, "getCurrentText"
for sake of argument). TheFullyExplicitName was a little long
and unwieldy and I hve vry strng f3l'ns agst Un*x stle abbrs,
so I wanted to derive a simple text name that fits with the
rest of the API (read, readLine, isMoreNeeded).

So I ferret around on the web and find a few interesting
resources:

Java Collections API Design FAQ

API Design with Java

but no good resource for overall API names.

It seems to me there should be a standard lexicon of API
names. Just as there are standards for names in given languages
(e.g., getX/setX in Java, get/set properties in C#, -p predicates
in Lisp, isX for predicates in Java-like languages, etc.) there should
be standard names we can use for APIs with standard definitions

read/write or read/print

open/close

clear

iterator/hasNext/next

and so on. I guess there need to be two parts to this library:
the semantic list of terms that are common to many APIs, and
standard names that have maximum usage across the API's
semantic contents.

Anyway, just rambling.

Labels: Development

Apparently it does.

Labels: Webworks

Hm... trying out the Google toolbar, because annoyance level on popups just hit max.

Google Toolbar Installed

And it has a Blogger feature. Intriguing. Wonder if this works.

Labels: Webworks