July 2011
1 post
3 tags
“During the 20th century, the greatest danger to European stability was Germany’s...”
– John Lanchester, writing on the Eurozone crisis for the London Review of Books.
June 2011
1 post
2 tags
“My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing… Those...”
– wrook, in an insightful /. comment. HT… erm, someone in my twitter feed. Sorry.
May 2011
4 posts
2 tags
“Do civilizations fall because the soil fails to produce—or does a soil fail only...”
– Charles Kellogg, “Soils and Men”, 1938.
3 tags
The Chance for Peace →
A seminal speech by Eisenhower, from 1953. We need more of this kind of sentiment today, to remind us that we a social beings who can control our own destiny.
4 tags
Flux Slider →
Awesome hardware accelerated slider transform kit.
1 tag
“…you don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do...”
– XKCD, breakin’ it down.
April 2011
1 post
4 tags
Using prime numbers and multiple backgrounds to... →
A brilliant article on generated pseudorandomly tiled backgrounds with simple CSS3 and a few carefully chosen images.
March 2011
8 posts
4 tags
Rack-PageSpeed →
Rack is probably the coolest web-development thing to come out of the Ruby community in the 5-ish years I’ve been paying attention. I’m continually impressed with projects like this :).
3 tags
2 tags
Folk Models of Computer Security →
Interesting qualitative research from Rick Wash on the mental models average people have of computer security stuff. Definitely worth a read if you’re in the field or interested in it. HT Bruce Schneier.
3 tags
4 tags
A small collection of CSS tricks with shadows.
First, from Harry Roberts, a clean way to do that loverly ribbon thing that has been so popular the last few years. Uses images, but the markup is muy simple. Also links to a pure-html+css way of accomplishing same but involves a lot of HTML5 wrappage.
Second, from Nicholas Gallagher, we have an overview of creating different, subtle effects with drop shadows, from curled corners to single...
2 tags
My SublimeText2 prefs files, as a gist →
Mostly so I don’t forget. But if you’re using the dev builds of SublimeText2—and why shouldn’t you be?—you might derive value from them, too. Or point out things to me, more like.
2 tags
“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology is not enough.”
– Steve Jobs, unexpectedly hosting his company’s introduction of the iPad2. What was most interesting to me, beyond this statement, was his repeated deployment of the phrase “Post-PC”. I’m excited to make that move.
3 tags
MacOSX tips: .bash_profile vs. .profile
So, I had previously combined all of my various shell hackery and pimpage into a collection of files loaded by my ~/.profile script. I recently discovered bash-it, a totally groovy theme-based shell “framework”, and in installing it on my personal machine I had to also discover the difference between ~/.profile and ~/.bash_profile—bash-it is wired to use .bash_profile by...
February 2011
16 posts
3 tags
jQuery Waypoints Plugin →
Easy, clean plugin that allows you to trigger events based on the user’s scrolling activity on your page. Very nice.
5 tags
WHATWG's Developer's Guide to HTML5 →
I am a huge fan of the increased usability of the documents curated by our various standards groups. Nice work, Ben Schwartz!
2 tags
3 tags
5 tags
TileMill, an open-source map tile design toolkit →
This is pretty impressive work, and will open the doors to all kinds of folks to play with creating interactive online maps. Very nice. It’s a bit of a chore to install right now, but it’s still “in progress”. (Oh, and it is built on nodejs. Nice.)
Our country's most important systems have the... →
Probably well known to those on the inside, it’s worth pointing out again and again :).
rcanine:
Chris Palmer writing for the EFF:
In my own private-sector security industry work, I observed a pattern: the higher the stakes, the worse the security. “Worse” usually means “more easily resolved with known techniques”. I evaluated a wide range of applications and platforms, and almost...
4 tags
“[the NFL labor dispute is] simple really: The owners overspent on unnecessary...”
– The Mises Institute blog, providing a nice summary of things. (HT Smartfootball .)
3 tags
Bash-It, a Bash Customization Project →
aliases and themes, etc. Seems interesting so far.
3 tags
A cogent discussion of #! and why jQuery Mobile is... →
I forget where I ran across this. It was open in a minimized window all on its own as if I had told Echofon to open a link from a tweet, but I cant figure out where. At any rate, nice discussion.
4 tags
Isotope: An exquisite jQuery plugin for magical... →
By the phenomenally talented David DeSandro.
3 tags
Whither Artisanal Medicine? →
Khoi Vinh wonders how long it will be before we see “organic, Napoleon cherry-flavored NyQuil.” Now I kind of do, too…
4 tags
The Urbanophile on "That Chrysler Ad" →
I suppose it was inevitable that this would generate blowback, but even I was surprised to see such strange bedfellows as Mother Jones and Mark Steyn united in their distaste of the commercial. It’s notable that most of the criticism seems not to be from Detroit or the Rust Belt itself, which liked the ad and doesn’t feel patronized by it. The critics seem to be mostly those who are incensed...
4 tags
“Nothing today is more important than agriculture…”
– Allan Savory, pioneer of Holistic Management.
An Alternative View of Casino Royale
ubergrid:
In CASINO ROYALE, James Bond is the Bond girl. Look at the way they even show him emerging from the ocean like Ursula Andress. Sexual torture, too, if less creepy-glam than being stripped and painted gold. Vesper Lynd is Bond: never not in control, never without a plan, seducing to further her goals. She has to die so Bond can become her.
6 tags
Snow Leopard, 64-bit MySQL, and Ruby / Rails
I recently (finally) upgraded my work machine to OSX 10.6, which necessitated a move to the 64-bit version of MySQL—a story unto itself—which in turn necessitated reinstalling my ruby-mysql gem for the new architecture. This should have been a simple process, even though the mysql gem has C extensions and you have to perform a magic incantation to get it to link the correct shared...
From Macroeconomic Resilience: The Buddha on Free... →
macroresilience:
“Do not accept anything on mere hearsay (ie, thinking that thus have we heard it for a long time).
Do not accept anything by mere tradition (ie, thinking that it has been handed down thus through many generations).
Do not accept anything on account of rumours (ie, by believing what others say…
January 2011
11 posts
4 tags
The Best Possible News for Egypt
“The presence of the army in the streets is for your sake and to ensure your safety and wellbeing. The armed forces will not resort to use of force against our great people,” the army statement said.
“Your armed forces, who are aware of the legitimacy of your demands and are keen to assume their responsibility in protecting the nation and the citizens, affirms that freedom of...
1 tag
Silencio
Recently I’ve found myself wearing my decent noise-canceling headphones for long periods of time… without having any music playing. I find it quite pleasant to listen to this muted, baffled version of the outside world; it’s almost meditative.
There’s so much noise in the world. Take some time to tune it out and see if you find what I found: that silence is (sometimes)...
3 tags
5 tags
The Challenge of Television
I should preface this by saying at the outset that I am in no way connected to the TV industry: everything I know about it is from their public face. Maybe there are plans afoot to confront this challenge head on and I just don’t know about it yet.
So the other day I was having a discussion with a few friends—over on facebook—about Caprica, the now-cancelled sort-of prequel to...
3 tags
3 tags
“I’ve had enough of losing and all I will gain by Hoke failing is another few...”
– Steve Deace, with the bottom line on the monumental failure that was Dave Brandon’s coaching search. Go Blue and Good Luck.
3 tags
Weave Silk: Generative Artwork in HTML Canvas →
This sort of thing is irrepressibly cool. I love it.
4 tags
Wanna focus in on a couple of specs?
For reasons relating to rvm and TextMate’s continual inability to cope with it (seriously, where is TM2? ;) ), I’ve been running specs from the command line pretty much exclusively these days. Telling rspec to just run one suite at a time isn’t a particular problem, but what if you want to focus on a tighter set: one description block, or tighter still, one spec at a time? Or how...
4 tags
My Unsolicited Opinion on iPad Publishing
So, there’s been some time now to reflect on the initial efforts by Old Media (magazines, newspapers, etc.) to harness the hotness that is the iPad (and the inevitable wave—eventually—of decent Android knockoffs). In fact, henceforth when I use the word “iPad”, feel free to mentally interpolate “…and all the decent Android tablets, whenever they...
3 tags
“In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the...”
– William Safire, writing a thankfully unnecessary obituary for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, should Apollo 11 have failed to return in 1969.
4 tags
2010 in Entertainment
One of my goals in 2010 was to cultivate a deeper engagement with the entertainment that I consumed; I managed to meet my goal of reviewing at length here any videogame I finished (and one that I didn’t). I even managed a couple of comments on some music and books that I enjoyed.
On the downside, I abandoned my reading journal in the spring, and only kept loose track of television and...
December 2010
11 posts
3 tags
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
At this point I am hoping for a minor miracle to occur in Assassin’s Creed 3. As I began to have my fill of the vast and sumptuous recreation of Rome, 1503—reimagined here as a virtual playground for a free-running open-world do-gooder—and turned my attentions to the resolution of Ezio’s now overly drawn-out saga, I was thinking what a surprise masterpiece Brotherhood...
3 tags
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow
I was never a fan of the much-beloved Castlevania games. They always seemed like unceremoniously and unforgivingly hard action-platformers. I’m a fan of challenging games, but not when all the challenge is in trial and error, and what little I played of the 2-d side-scrollers of Castlevania lore always seemed to go above my head. There was always a castle, some overwrought dialogue, and a...
4 tags
Netflix's Chaos Monkey: How to ensure robust... →
What a brilliant idea. I’m now going to advocate for something similar on any major system I work on.
4 tags
“Every day in highly respected newspapers I read well-crafted stories…...”
– David Cay Johnston, writing for the Nieman Foundation in a fairly hard critique of modern news “reporting”.
3 tags
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes to Email Privacy! →
Woo, go EFF, etc. etc. Here’s hoping it sticks.
4 tags
“But there’s also a character issue: what we really don’t need right now is a...”
– PK. Infinite sadness, Obama.
3 tags
Asymco →
Horace Dediu offers up “Curated Market Intelligence” over at Asymco, and it is precisely the sort of market analysis that I’d like to think I would be producing had I decided to, you know, use my degree instead of becoming a developer-designer. It’s high-signal, low-noise, and served up in pretty easy to digest chunks, like this little bit on supply-constraned markets and...
6 tags
Nice Overview of some Information Design Issues... →
Specifically, it covers why Google Maps has a superior feel and ease of use. Hint: it’s all in the labels. Good work! (HT @flyosity, I think!)