Author Archives: Matteo Caprari

Learning Closure: managing dependencies and compiling

Google’s closure library offers semantics and tools to manage dependencies between modules. This is specially useful when building single-page javascript applications. To find out how smoothly this works, I’ll build a simple javascript application that given a string, displays its … Continue reading

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Book: Programming Collective Intelligence

Programming books are seldom page turners, even for geeks like us. And programming books often fail to go beyond the technology. Programming books are rarely as good as this one. Allow me to digress for a moment. Online there is … Continue reading

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Learning Closure. Ajax with goog.net.*

Google released closure library, a javascript library good to make rich internet applications. As this is going to be an important library in software developement, I decided to try it. ‘Ajax’ networking is a good starting point, so I looked … Continue reading

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book: forms that work

Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability There is no html in this book, it’s not about programming forms. And that’s why I liked it. This short book clarifies what good form design is about, in plain english. Plenty … Continue reading

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book: don’t make me think

Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability Delightful one-night read. Some good common sense advice on web design and two brilliant chapters on usability testing on a budget. common sense is underrated

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netflix prize contest, a new one

With netflix announcing a new contest, it’s time to look back at how the Netflix Prize ended: BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos team (AT&T Research engineers) won over the ensemble (a creek of lower-ranked contestants), just minutes before the deadline. Both teams … Continue reading

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Above the Clouds: The View from Berkeley

RAD Lab released Above the Clouds: The View from Berkeley (pdf) an high-level overview of the cloud. It’s great read for anyone interested in the subject, no need to be involved in software development. It’s the best text on the … Continue reading

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Falickaway: a flickr viewer

Available now: flickaway (demo) I love flickr. I also love my pictures, and sometimes flickr feels too… generic? impersonal?Anyway. I decided to spend some time coding this flickr viewer so to have a website with my style and the same … Continue reading

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[C Testing] MinUnit – less is more

- Can a whole framework be 3 lines long? - The C project I’m working on is quite small in LOC and files. It won’t grow much as it’s deployed on a chip with 4k program space and 256 bytes of ram. … Continue reading

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CYZ_RGB alpha 2 – feature complete

The second release of CYZ_RGB, an alternative firmware for BlinkM, is now ready for download. The latest release implements all the features of the original firmware. The program has been slightly tested at a functional level (sitting there and watching … Continue reading

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