modernity tumbling by

"During the 20th century, the greatest danger to European stability was Germany’s sense of its..."

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 08:45:57 -0400

“During the 20th century, the greatest danger to European stability was Germany’s sense of its special destiny. During the 21st century, the greatest danger to European stability is Germany’s reluctance to accept its special destiny.”

- John Lanchester, writing on the Eurozone crisis for the London Review of Books.

"My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing… Those programmers with a..."

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 11:24:20 -0400

“My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing… Those programmers with a “spark” are programmers who have an innate talent for the language. Or they are people who have read and read and read code. Or both. We teach programming wrong. We teach it the way Japanese teachers have been teaching English. We teach about programming and expect that students will spontaneously learn to write from this collection of facts.”

- wrook, in an insightful /. comment. HT… erm, someone in my twitter feed. Sorry.

"Do civilizations fall because the soil fails to produce—or does a soil fail only when the people..."

Tue, 17 May 2011 08:26:44 -0400

“Do civilizations fall because the soil fails to produce—or does a soil fail only when the people living on it no longer know how to manage their civilization?”

- Charles Kellogg, “Soils and Men”, 1938.

The Chance for Peace

Wed, 11 May 2011 12:35:08 -0400

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.

Flux Slider

Wed, 11 May 2011 12:33:16 -0400

Flux Slider:

Awesome hardware accelerated slider transform kit.

"…you don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then..."

Mon, 09 May 2011 09:08:05 -0400

“…you don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.”

- XKCD, breakin’ it down.

Using prime numbers and multiple backgrounds to good effect

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:53:47 -0400

Using prime numbers and multiple backgrounds to good effect:

A brilliant article on generated pseudorandomly tiled backgrounds with simple CSS3 and a few carefully chosen images.

Rack-PageSpeed

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 19:53:50 -0400

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 :).

We live on a pretty remarkable ball of rock and water, folks. I...

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 08:31:51 -0400

We live on a pretty remarkable ball of rock and water, folks. I hope to see these in person someday.

Folk Models of Computer Security

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:23:18 -0400

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.

dgoings: Local Ann Arbor band My Dear Disco has changed their...

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:09:00 -0400

dgoings:

Local Ann Arbor band My Dear Disco has changed their name to Ella Riot (read more about it here), and this is their first new song/video under that name. It’s a great song, a crazy video (shades of OKGo), and has some fun shots of downtown A2.

These folks are my neighbors, kitty-corner across the street. I wish I knew them better than I do, since they’re pretty damn good.

A small collection of CSS tricks with shadows.

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 10:13:20 -0500

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 horizontal folds.

Last, from Dustin Cartwright, we have a little toy keyboard. It’s not useful, but it sure is cool.

Thanks, fellas!

My SublimeText2 prefs files, as a gist

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 11:21:10 -0500

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.

"It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology is not enough."

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 01:49:28 -0500

“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.

MacOSX tips: .bash_profile vs. .profile

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 01:27:13 -0500

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 default.

Apparently, your shell will use whichever of ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile it encounters first… and given that it looks at things in alphabetical order, it will prefer the .bash_profile. It doesn’t load both. So if you’re like me, and added a bunch of stuff to your .profile file, you’ll have to source the .profile in your .bash_profile if and when you create one.

Just a quick tip… and another shout-out to bash-it. My prompt is now all kinds of pimp’d: shows me the source-control status of the current folder and my current rvm ruby and gemset. Nice!

jQuery Waypoints Plugin

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 14:35:15 -0500

jQuery Waypoints Plugin:

Easy, clean plugin that allows you to trigger events based on the user’s scrolling activity on your page. Very nice.

WHATWG's Developer's Guide to HTML5

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 10:34:12 -0500

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!

Dead Island Trailer. Wow, it’s… everything...

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 17:29:46 -0500

Dead Island Trailer. Wow, it’s… everything @daringfireball said it was going to be: haunting, brutal, moving. All in a game trailer.

This is a window that popped up when attempting to purchase an...

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:11:37 -0500

This is a window that popped up when attempting to purchase an eBook directly from Penguin. Holy hell, if you need that wall of text as a disclaimer you’re doing digital media wrong. Just let me buy something that will work with my gear, people.

TileMill, an open-source map tile design toolkit

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:19:00 -0500

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.)