The New York Times’ fancy new prototype site. View high resolution

The New York Times’ fancy new prototype site.

Week of the Year Alfred Extension

It probably does not come as a shock that at the Post, all of our code is stored in git. Everyone seems to have a particular philosophy about how to manage where features are developed, where production code is kept, how often the two are merged, etc etc.

One thing we do is keep our production code in branches named with the following format: {Year}.{Week of Year}. So, for example, this week’s branch is 2013.7.

I had a lot of problems getting behind this strategy for one simple reason: who can remember what the current week of the year is? But the system was not going away.

After almost 7 months of way too many Google searches for “current week of the year”, I finally got smart, and wrote an Alfred extension that would display the current week of the year in the Notification center.

Turns out, it was aggressively easy. The entire code involved in the whole process is this:

ruby -e 'puts Time.now.strftime("%V")'

Now, through the magic of Dropbox, I’m going to share it with the internet. You can download the extension here.

Disable iTerm 2’s animation display

Thanks to HackerNews user shabble, here’s a trick to be able to delay iTerm 2’s annoying animation display:

defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 HotkeyTermAnimationDuration -float 0.00001

It’s done wonders for making it feel more responsive. Now, if only I could disable the animation delay for switching between spaces on the Mac …

"The Homely Mutt" →

Steve Losh has a really extensive, well written, and easy to understand post on working through the install of mutt, offlineimap, notmuch, and just about everything you would want to know about the subject.

Now that Sparrow is effectively dead many of its users will be looking for a new email client. If you’re not afraid of the terminal you may want to give Mutt a try.

While he’s inspired me to combine all my email to a single address, and simply not care which account responds to the message, after using mutt cold turkey for a day, I simply can’t do it. On days like tonight, with the Presidential Debate in full swing, pressing “o” to refresh my mail every 2 minutes simply doesn’t work. For my needs, right now, Sparrow is just fine. Let’s hope it stays that way.

“
I’ve never been woken up at night by someone saying “Oh, this code’s ugly.” I’ve never gotten paged because my Clojure is inelegant.
Ted Nyman, formerly Lead Engineer at Simple, now at GitHub

Joe Paterno, at the end, showed more interest in his legacy than Sandusky’s victims - The Washington Post →

(via Instapaper)

“
The only explanation I can find for this “striking lack of empathy” is self-absorption. In asking how a paragon of virtue could have behaved like such a thoroughly bad guy, the only available answer is that Paterno fell prey to the single most corrosive sin in sports: the belief that winning on the field makes you better and more important than other people.
Joe Paterno, at the end, showed more interest in his legacy than Sandusky’s victims - The Washington Post

Why I'm Doing It All Wrong - dan shipper →

(via Instapaper)

Maxim Interrogates the Makers and Stars of The Wire | Maxim →

(via Instapaper)

KEEGAN: The Opposite of Loneliness | Cross Campus | Yale Daily News →

(via Instapaper)

stdout.be | Fungible →

(via Instapaper)

onthemedia:

Pulitzer prize winning reporter Charlie LeDuff left the New York Times to cover his hometown, Detroit (our interview about that is here). Now, he’s reporting for the local Fox affiliate, where he produced maybe our favorite local newscast story ever.

Sexting, shameless judge + a reporter doing stand-ups in Ray-Bans + a distorted voice modulator interview = our favorite non-MCA related thing on the internet today.

(Reblogged from onthemedia)

"Android Is Now Either Losing Or Only 'Winning' Because Apple Is Letting It" →

MG Siegler:

In September 2010, I wrote a post that ignited an absolute shitstorm around these parts. “Shitstorm” in this case meaning a post with a thousand comments, the majority of which were spewed up by rabid Android fanatics. The title of that post:

Is Android Surging Only Because Apple Is Letting It?

At the time, we were in the midst of a massive Android surge to the top of the smartphone ecosystem food chain. This was happening all around the world, but the focus of this particular post was the U.S. market. Based on some comments made by developer David Beach at the time, I wondered if, as the title suggested, Android was only doing so well in the U.S. because the iPhone was still only available on one carrier, AT&T?

It’s time to revisit that thought because there’s now absolutely no question that this was the case. There’s now data to back it up. What’s more, despite what some surveys suggest, this trend may have fully reversed itself.

As a Verizon customer for the past 10 or so years, I can attest to this being true. I came really, really, really close to just buying an Andriod phone when my contract was up in October of 2010, even with the rumors of an “imminent” launch of the iPhone. I held out for a variety of reasons, and couldn’t be happier (despite the 26 months with a shitty Blackberry Tour). I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if I was one of the few to really hold out that long though.

My favorite track off B.o.B’s new album. Overall, I don’t think it is as good as the first album, but this song is pretty freaking sick.

This is sad →

Jennifer Rubin, WaPo:

Richard Grenell, the openly gay spokesman recently hired to sharpen the foreign policy message of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, has resigned in the wake of a full-court press by anti-gay conservatives.

In the National Review, Mathew Frank wrote late last week: “Suppose Barack Obama comes out — as Grenell wishes he would — in favor of same-sex marriage in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. How fast and how publicly will Richard Grenell decamp from Romney to Obama?”

The argument that Grenell could essentially not be openly gay and serve on a GOP presidential campaign was belied by the fact that Grenell has been a loyal Republican for many years, working for esteemed foreign policy figures including former Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton.

The ongoing pressure from social conservatives over his appointment and the reluctance of the Romney campaign to send Grenell out as a spokesman while controversy swirled left Grenell essentially with no job. The Romney camp has not responded to my request for comment.

Even though I would probably disagree with Grenell on a lot of issues, he should be able to work for the presidential candidate or president.