Archived Posts from 2009

November

1. MacSpeech Dictate: First Impressions
   November 19, 2009

   I suspect that the first thing any developer does when they get their hands on MacSpeech Dictate is to begin writing a review of MacSpeech Dictate in MacSpeech Dictate. I am no exception.

2. My Jekyll Fork
   November 12, 2009

   Jekyll is a well-architected throwback to a time before Wordpress, when men were men, and HTML was static. I like the ideas it espouses, and have made a few improvements to it’s core. Here, I’ll point out some highlights of my fork in the hopes that they see usage beyond this site.

October

1. Fallow fields, revisited
   October 04, 2009

   I'm currently in the process of gutting my website, and rebuilding it piece by piece. I suspect I'm doing this to distract myself from the fact that I don’t seem to have anything interesting floating around my head to write about. Rather that catalog the failings of the system I'm replacing (for they are legion), in this article I'd like to touch on the carefully considered bits I'm keeping around.

September

1. Productivity Or My Lack Thereof
   September 23, 2009

   It’s becoming clear that I'm miserable at distinguishing between productivity and productivity porn.

May

1. Mnot's Redbot
   May 23, 2009

   Mark Nottingham has put together a really useful tool that aids in the analysis of the behavior of HTTP resources. I've started putting together a command line version based on the web version he’s released on GitHub.

2. Playing with Placemaker
   May 21, 2009
3. Running `python-spidermonkey` on JeOS
   May 16, 2009

   Paul Davis' python-spidermonkey project looks brilliant.

4. Well. That was easy.
   May 16, 2009

   Getting JSLint running inside Spidermonkey was much simpler than I expected it to be.

5. DSL Woes
   May 10, 2009

   My DSL connection is really quite fast; I'm apparently only ~800m away from the nearest DSLAM, and so I should in theory be capable of maxing out the connection. This holds up pretty well in speed tests: I get great downstream, and passable upstream scores when connecting to pretty much anything in Europe. All told, I should be thrilled with my service, but I'm not, because it only seems to actually work about 80% of the time.

6. The Value of Measurement
   May 10, 2009

   While I agree fully with many of the conclusions Lukas Mathis draws in an excellent essay on the recent Google/Douglas Bowman split, a few bits deserve further study. In general, engineers understand and can relate well to automated A/B testing, and designers understand and can relate well to more personal usability testing. The two are, however, not the same, don’t provide the same data, and ought not be conflated.

7. Compiling Varnish on a minimal JeOS System
   May 09, 2009

   Varnish is an excellent-looking ‘HTTP accelerator’, designed specifically as a high-performance caching reverse-proxy to sit in front of your hard-working application servers, and relieve them of load. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass to install from source on JeOS, though.

8. I think I've bricked my iPhone
   May 09, 2009

   I tried to install the latest iPhone 3.0 beta firmware on my decidedly-not-3G iPhone last night, and failed miserably.

9. Asynchronous Execution, JavaScript, and You
   May 05, 2009

   I spent more time than I care to admit this afternoon tracking down a bug in some relatively straightforward jQuery code. As it turned out, I was overlooking my error because I was thinking about my code in absolutely the wrong way.

10. Installing the W3C HTML Validator on JeOS
    May 03, 2009

    So. W3C has quite decent installation instructions for the HTML validator, but it makes a few assumptions about a typical linux environment that don’t actually hold true if you’re running a stripped down JeOS distro in a virtual machine.

11. Static IPs in VMWare Fusion Guests
    May 02, 2009

    Setting VMWare Fusion up to assign the same IP to a particular guest OS every time is a trivial process, and makes configuring your development environment a simpler process.

12. Vimeo's Noncommercial Nature
    May 02, 2009

    Vimeo’s asked Marco Armet to take down his Instapaper Pro demo video. His response is frustrated and understandable. I don’t, however, think it’s completely justified.

13. (Mildly) improving Google Analytics' JS Embed
    May 01, 2009

    Google Analytics' embed JavaScript isn’t at all pretty. A few changes can make it a bit cleaner to implement.

14. Virtualization Tips
    May 01, 2009

    In the last three weeks, I've set up something like 6 virtual machines to play with a variety of bits and pieces of things that I come across. Here are a few lessons learned.

March

1. Instapaper is Amazing
   March 22, 2009

   I think I've read more articles with Instapaper in the last two days than I have in the last two weeks with NNW alone. It’s an absolutely brilliant tool, and I'm excited about how much simpler it’s made my internet-related reading life.

February

1. Opera Web Standards Curriculum: The JavaScript Bits
   February 08, 2009

   Last year, I jumped on the opportunity to sit down and write some articles for Opera’s Web Standards Curriculum. I bit off a bit more than I could chew, and Chris Mills exhibited the patience of a saint as I finished the first quickly, the second slowly, the third very slowly, and then completely failed to deal with the rest. Regardless, those were released along with the rest of the JavaScript bits to complete the curriculum.

January

1. Centralized Bug Tracking
   January 10, 2009

   I liked many things about working at Yahoo. I'm coming to realize that what I (in hindsight) like most is probably the piece of software I thought about the least positively, namely Yahoo’s mostly centralized and completely open bug tracking system: Bugzilla. We abused it more than a bit, attempting to layer task and project management on top of a system that wasn’t really designed to support it, but all told, Bugzilla made my work life better.