Roger Ebert on His Profile in Esquire:

Ebert:

I was a little surprised at the detail the article went into about the nature and extent of my wounds and the realities of my appearance, but what the hell. It was true. I didn’t need polite fictions.

Chris Jones’s profile captured what I’ve been thinking for the last year or so: that Ebert has become a far better writer now than he was before. And that’s saying something, because he’s always been a terrific writer.

I have to agree with John Gruber here. I read Roger Ebert’s blog post yesterday and went out and bought Esquire for the first time ever just to read the story on him. It was touching, enlightening, and it gives me an even deeper respect for Mr. Ebert. I’ve really been enjoying his writing for the last couple of years. I look forward to reading more from him and I will be greatly saddened the day he slips from this mortal coil.

Today, Clang completed its first complete self-host! We built all of LLVM and Clang with Clang (over 550k lines of C++ code). The resulting binaries passed all of Clang and LLVM’s regression test suites, and the Clang-built Clang could then build all of LLVM and Clang again. The third-stage Clang was also fully-functional, completing the bootstrap.

Congratulations to all of the Clang developers on this amazing achievement!

Huzzah! I’m so buying LLVM/Clang devs a drink if I ever meet them.

shutup.css is a custom user stylesheet you can install in your web browser which will automatically hide the comments section of many popular web sites. My gift of a quieter, saner web to you.

Brilliant.

iPad: from the company and the man that brought you: The Apple ][ Macintosh iMac OS X iPod iPhone

/via Soft Arts/Daniel Pasco

Eugene Lin wanted to be rich. Steve Jobs promised it. App after app, the Apple gods got angry with him. Until finally, with nothing but an accelerometer, two dozen naked women, and the nation of Japan, Eugene had a story to tell.

Tomorrow, 20 January 2010, a lot of indie Mac and iPhone developers are getting together to sell their software. What makes the 20th so special? The sales for the entire day are being donated to Haitian relief charities. That’s over 135 companies selling their products and then giving the money to those in need. If you’re looking for some Mac or iPhone software check out Indie+Relief.

More can be learned at Carpeauqa where Justin Williams details more about it.

Vincent Driessen’s model is described with Git in mind, but can easily be converted to Mercurial or other similar version control systems.

Nice. I like the graphical representations and the detailed explanations.

/via Justin Williams

5. You are not the best at programming. Live with it. – I always thought that I knew so much about programming, but there is always someone out there better than you. Always. Learn from them.
6. Learn to learn more – With number five explained, I’ve always had a magazine or book in my hand about computers or programming (ask my friends, they’ll confirm). True, there is a lot of technology out there and keeping up with it is a fulltime job, but if you have a smart way of receiving your news, you’ll learn about new technology every single day.

A good list of things, with these two jumping out at me. When you reach a point at a company where you aren’t learning that’s a sign it’s probably time to move on. Personally I don’t enjoy sitting around resting on my laurels, even though it doesn’t always look like that.

/via Jason Kottke

Alex Payne, in Don’t Be A Hero:

If someone is working at four in the morning, something is deeply wrong. Figure out what’s broken and delegate the work out evenly across your team such that it doesn’t happen again. Don’t pat your hero on the back for “pulling another late-nighter”.

This is one reason why, when looking for a job a few years ago, I didn’t consider working for any company whose job description implied (or stated) that I’d be expected to work extremely long hours regularly and not have a family life. Such companies are either run by “heroes” or expect to hire one. (Usually for the same salary as a nine-to-fiver and with a trivial equity stake.)

I resent the commonly held belief that this is an unavoidable part of “startup culture”. (It’s completely avoidable.) Such beliefs encourage workaholism, especially among young people, and cause poor-quality products, employee burnout, and high turnover.

I don’t want to be a part of any company that’s so poorly managed, or simply so cheap, that employees are expected to forego a healthy lifestyle. No job is worth that.

So true. My current job has the current record over my 13 years for hours worked in a week and days worked in a row. I’ll never do that kind of stretch again. Ever. Burnout is not just bad for you, it’s bad for your family and friends too.

/via Marco Arment

(Via Big Fat Whale by Brian McFadden)