Painfully Obvious.

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Steven Frank, co‐author of Transmit: Don’t use FTP. Finally someone says it! FTP is a crazy, insecure non‐protocol, and the fact that it’s still used has more to do with ubiquity than any sort of merit. SFTP piggybacks on all the security of SSH and is much easier to work with. WordPress has a great feature that automatically upgrades your installed plugins — but only on FTP, not SFTP.

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Immature testing organizations tend to have about five clean tests for every dirty test. Mature testing organizations tend to have five dirty tests for every clean test. This ratio is not reversed by reducing the clean tests; it’s done by creating 25 times as many dirty tests.

Steve McConnell
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Brand New looks at the Hornets’ logo tweak. Scroll down to the comments section to see their secondary logo — it’s exceedingly clever, co‐opts some New Orleans iconography (the primary logo dates back to the Charlotte era), and kicks the primary logo’s ass. The Saints’ fleur de lis logo represents an era when a team’s logo could be unapologetically abstract. (The bigger news is the slight color change; I’m looking forward to seeing the new uniforms.)

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Practical Prototype & script.aculo.us: the book

• Posted in Web

Against all odds, I have written a book designed to familiarize the reader with Prototype and script.aculo.us. How am I supposed to convey how hard this was? I’d say it was like giving childbirth, but the process itself took much longer than it takes to grow a baby. Why did…

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If I were the benevolent dictator, I would make it capital offense for members of the punditocracy to opine ignorantly about the tastes and habits of “regular people,” who apparently have comfort zones no larger than their footprints, and who are unwilling to vote for anyone who doesn’t live their lives exactly like they (are imagined to) do.

Atrios
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Because we all know where black teenage males in the hood get their inspiration from — famous middle‐aged people. I’ll never forget when I was a kid and everyone was in those Cosby sweaters… man, that was a hot‐ass summer.

Jesse Taylor
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When writers purport to educate readers about complex matters, and they are arguably wrong, I think The Times cannot label it opinion and let it go at that.

Clark Hoyt, New York Times Ombudsman
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People who write about very specific things, I’ve found, often have the most interesting things to say. Steven Levithan writes Flagrant Badassery, which covers JavaScript and regular expressions. Steven’s XRegExp library does some killer stuff that the native JS RegExp does not; at only 2.4KB, it’s a must‐have for grepping and/or parsing on the client side.

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Gabe essentially began anti‐anxiety medication and planned a trip for Paris in the same week, possibly even in the same moment, and as an observer — it is literally my job to observe — this was an intriguing process. He wasn’t yet ensorcelled by the chemical, and yet with full awareness of his own agony he went through the previously unthinkable process of putting all this together. It must have been something like jumping from a plane with a strange backpack and a pamphlet entitled “Your Parachute.”

Penny Arcade