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31 Jul 2007
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17 May 2007How to create a consistent button style across browsers.
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7 May 2007"Training wheels without the bike". Listen, I'm really sorry, Brian, but PHP is junk. Junk!
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16 Apr 2007
A great new code improvement landed on the Firefox 3 codebase last Friday: Enhanced Page View. It adds a lot of information and makes it so much easier to find. But the notable thing about it is that -- like APNG support -- it was a Summer of Code project. For the second summer, Google paid college students for the summer to work on code for open source projects. In 2005, none of the Mozilla projects got very far, but the story was decidedly different this year. Gervase Markham's lookback indicated that 5 of the 12 projects were checked in (or nearly so). And a couple of the others made significant progress.
Google's doing a lot of good things here: indirectly supporting open source projects, helping college students do something for the summer that's related to their degree, and (probably most importantly) introducing the students to the experience of working in the open source community. Not just Mozilla, but plenty of other projects, big and small, got help: Gaim, Drupal, Wordpress, and dozens of other groups all owe Summer of Code for new features and bug fixes.
I only wish Summer of Code had been around when I was in college.
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13 Apr 2007I thought of this the moment they introduced SiteKey, but never had the ambition to do it. As Bruce Schneier would say, SiteKey is security theater.
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19 Mar 2007Coding Horror is quickly becoming one of my favorite "running a website" blogs.
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3 Mar 2007An old, but interesting, look into what happens when the manager of the software team gets to design your office space. It ends up being awesome.
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12 Aug 2006
Some behind-the-scenes stuff: I've finally upgraded this blog from WordPress 1.5 to 2.0.4. While I was at it, I decided to install the coComment plugin, so that you can follow your comments with coComment. They have a new Firefox extension that makes it even easier than before. Almost trivial, in fact.
Update, 13 Aug - I've created a small plugin to add the slash:comments element to my RSS feed. That should fix the discussion counts on my home page, and it's a cleaner solution than hacking the WP code directly.
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5 Aug 2006
Here's a random Saturday link-dump:
- Don't believe BusinessWeek's bubble-math - Web 2.0 plus shoddy journalism equals a firm foundation for another bubble. BusinessWeek takes a made up number, multiplies it by a rumored percentage, contradicts itself several times, and most readers are probably just thinking "Wow, what a smart kid!" Related: A hilarious parody.
- Saved locations on Google Maps - This is a great thing. I've been waiting for some sort of smart auto-complete on Google Maps since day one. The interface is a little crusty (I wish I could click on a bubble anywhere and say "save this location" instead of having to have all locations saved), but I'm certain this is just release number one.
- No Space World and Mario Galaxy could be available at launch. Or rather, no one has yet verified that Mario Galaxy won't be available at launch. Related: The early October release rumors still seem to have some air in them.
- Two Cool Bash Tricks - Holy cow. Both are total life savers, but the second more than the first. Redirecting output to two files before you can diff them is a big pain in the neck. (via)
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24 Jul 2006
How would you design a database of the names of Starfleet employees? At the very least, you'd have to handle standard European Human-style names (given name, family name); Bajoran-style names (family name, given name); and Klingon-style names (given name, son/daughter-of father's name. And you'd probably need to have House name in there, too). I'm certain there are others that I'm leaving out and that we're unaware of. How would you do this?
Corollary: How would you alphabetize a list of Starfleet employees names? Would Ro Laren come before or after Jean-Luc Picard?