Nicholas Cloud's Blog, page 3

Book Review - How to Watch TV News by Neil Postman

My grandparents were religious about watching the evening news. On the occasions that we visited them I recall the family gathering in the living room after dinner to watch the local half-hour news show, followed by the weather. All activity in the house ceased for those precious minutes, and all eyes were glued to the cathode ray tube���s mesmerizing colors.

Now, as an adult, I take for granted the never-ending stream of news available to me 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the...

Book Review - On the Meaning of Life by Will Durant

Would you know what to say to a total stranger who asked you to convince him not to commit suicide?

In 1930, that is the very situation that prompted historian Will Durant to ponder and write about the most profound question of all: what is the meaning of life? After ad libbing his own answer to a desperate soul whom he never saw again, he penned a letter to the foremost minds of his time, inquiring: ������what are the sources of your inspiration and your energy, what is the goal or motive-for...

Creating Reusable Code

Create reusable software is challenging, especially when that software may be reused in situations or scenarios for which it may not necessarily have been designed. We���ve all had that meeting where a boss or manager asked the question: ���What you���ve designed is great, but can we also use it here?���

In the last month I���ve had this exact experience, from which I���ve learned a number of valuable lessons about crafting reusable software.

eTexts and annotations

When I first started working f...

My Favorite Book of 2018

I was asked to write about the best book I���ve read in 2018 in 200 words or less. Here we go.

My current obsession is authors Will and Ariel Durant, two of this centuries most prolific historians and pure joys to read. This year I read The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, a work which reminds me that the past is not so unlike the present, and that the problems of humanity now are the same problems humanity has always faced. Philosophy tells the story of fifteen Western philosophers, from P...

Politicians don't understand the Internet (or anything else)

The internet is justifiably ablaze with criticism of Rudy Giuliani���s recent Tweet in which he blames Twitter for linking his own fat-fingered mistype to an anti-Trump website. I feel bad for defending Twitter because the company is no friend of actual free speech, but my loathing for semi-private companies is only eclipsed by my loathing of politicians, so here it goes.

Twitter auto-links anything that appears to be a a URL, roughly defined as text that���s not a dot or a space, followed by...

Microsoft is building a Chromium web browser to replace Edge on Windows 10

From Windows Central:

Microsoft���s Edge web browser has seen little success since its debut on Windows 10 in 2015���

I���m told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, which uses a similar rendering engine first popularized by Google���s Chrome browser known as Blink. Codenamed ���Anaheim,��� this new browser for Windows 10 will replace Edge as the default browser on the platform, according to my sources, who wish to...

Using the find command

The find command is used to recursively locate files in a directory hierarchy. Since programmers and system administrators spend a great deal of time working with files, familiarity with this command can make each more efficient at the terminal.

The command is composed of four parts:

the command nameoptions that control how the command searches (optional)the path(s) to search (required)expressions (composed of ���primaries) and ���operators��� that filter files by name (optional)

A primary is a...

String.prototype.strike()

Today I learned that, while technically deprecated, String.prototype.strike() is still a thing.

(And apparently so are blink(), bold(), and italics().)

String.prototype.strike()

Today I learned that, while technically deprecated, String.prototype.strike() is still a thing. (And apparently so are blink(), bold(), and italics()).)

ES2015 Generators

I have written a guest blog post, “ES2015 Generators“, on the eNotes developer blog:

Recently I had the opportunity to re-write the content tree control that we use to manage content nodes in www.enotes.com. We’ve all worked with the DOM, which represents HTML nodes in a tree structure but has some challenging deficiencies and a relatively grumpy API, the tortures of which prompted me to take a stab at a smoother tree-like design. During this process I experimented with several approaches to...