April 2004
April 10, 2004
How to bribe the Maitre D (via) It’s easier than you think.
More Eric Meyer on CSS (via) The pinkest book in the world, ever.
Gmail accessibility. Mark Pilgrim: “The only way Gmail could be less accessible is if the entire site were built in Flash.”
April 11, 2004
Customer service droid cartoon on Penny Arcade. It may be about AT&T, but it could easily apply to Sprint as well.
Groovy: Closures. I’d nearly written Groovy off as a pointless Jython clone, but it actually has some interesting features.
Normalizing Syndicated Feed Content. “...you are guaranteed to get it wrong an unknown percentage of the time.”
April 13, 2004
XHTML Quicktime Object. A standards Compliant method for adding Quicktime movies to pages.
Duck and Cover (via) The original video, brought to you by the Internet Archive.
A myriad of markup systems
It’s hard to avoid the legions of custom markup systems out there these days. Every Wiki has it’s own syntactical quirks, while packages like Markdown, Textile, BBCode (in dozens of variants), reStructuredText offer easy ways of hooking markup conversion in to existing applications. When it comes to being totally over-implemented and infuratingly inconsistent, markup systems are rapidly catching up with template packages. Never one to miss out on an opportunity to reinvent the wheel, I’ve worked on several of each ;)
[... 614 words]It’s red, not pink. Eric’s latest book looks very different in the flesh.
April 15, 2004
A National ID Card Wouldn’t Make Us Safer. Someone needs to show this to the UK government.
Behind the Scenes at News Aggregator Topix.Net. An interesting operation.
Survival guide to i18n. Ridiculously useful.
Exact string matching algorithms (via) With illustrative animations in Java.
Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures (via) More algorithms than you can shke a very big stick at.
Cooperative Linux. Run Linux on Windows, natively.
How CoLinux works. The geeky details.
Frames without frames (via) Replicating Frame style navigation with CSS.
PHP Comes of Age (via) Oracle sponsored article on PHP “culture clash”.
The learning curve of web standards. Transitioning to standards based web design.
April 16, 2004
Writing serious Perl: The absolute minimum you need to know (via) How to write Perl like Python ;)
Yahoo! Search Results for what is my destiny (via) Great tribute to the Onion (click “What’s this” for the original story).
New Negative Campaign Ads Blast Voters Directly. Beautiful.
Keep It Simple: Separating behavior and structure. PPK says nice things about me! ego++
McGraw Hill sold me out
Like everyone else on the internet, I get a fair amount of spam. I tend to keep my main work as clean as possible, while skipping over the spam in my lower-traffic personal account and cleaning it up every week or so.
[... 587 words]Top 10 ways to crash PHP (via) Fascinating insight in to some little known PHP bugs.
April 18, 2004
The Spy (Ftrain.com). “Because what I do to make a living, developing web sites, is to most people so stunningly, awe-inspiringly boring, that I shield them from my days.”
Optimization: Your worst enemy. Great essay on premature optimization.
Bookmarklet request
Anyone know if it would be possible to create a bookmarklet that emulates an EyeDropper style application: as you move it around the page it shows you the hex colour code for the pixel directly under the mouse pointer? I’m pretty sure it can’t be done but I’d love to be proved wrong.