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.
Mike West works and plays on the internet. Currently working as a software engineer on Google's Chrome team in Munich, he tries to make the web platform marginally less insecure than it generally is. Drop him an email at mike@mikewest.org follow him on Twitter or circle him on Google+
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.
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.
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.
It’s becoming clear that I’m miserable at distinguishing between productivity and productivity porn.
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.
Yahoo’s latest API is really quite cool: Placemaker takes your unstructured data (e.g. any HTML page, RSS feed, etc), and extracts a nice list of locations that your data refers to.
Getting JSLint running inside Spidermonkey was much simpler than I expected it to be.
Paul Davis’ python-spidermonkey project looks brilliant.
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.
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.
I tried to install the latest iPhone 3.0 beta firmware on my decidedly-not-3G iPhone last night, and failed miserably.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google Analytics’ embed JavaScript isn’t at all pretty. A few changes can make it a bit cleaner to implement.
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.
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.
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.