Douglas Crockford's The Department of Style

A Terrorist Fist Jab

I like the New Yorker's Obama cover. I chuckled. I got the joke. I'm not angry, nor am I offended. It could have been drawn better. Maybe they were in a hurry.

Posted: Jul. 16, 2008 11:25 PM

Character Sets

In the early days of programming languages, before there were standardized character sets, each programming language would define its own character set. Some languages had arrows instead of = for assignment, which really makes much more sens

Posted: Jul. 11, 2008 12:19 PM

Las Vegas, Las Vegas

I was in Las Vegas recently. Bruce Vilanch was on permanent display at the east skybridge entrance of New York New York. Spooky.

Posted: Jul. 9, 2008 01:56 PM

Sleep Apnea

Lucy had a sleep test a couple of weeks ago and they found that she has what they call moderate sleep apnea. She is supposed to go back Monday night to find out if, and at what level, a CPAP machine might help. She is concerned about h

Posted: Jul. 5, 2008 06:35 PM

Telephone

I have a telephone instrument on my desk. I rarely use it. Most of the calls I get are recruiters, evil telemarketers, and wrong numbers. I mostly communicate with people using email, im, and the old reliable f2f. The office phone is as usef

Posted: Jul. 2, 2008 11:31 AM

Fireflops

The Ajaxians picked up Peter Michaud's story about another problematic Firefox feature. This one involves a second parameter to the sinister eval function that breaks closure encapsulation. Peter's story is timely, but it ain't news. This blunder has

Posted: Jun. 30, 2008 12:47 PM

Velocity 2008

This week I attended O'Reilly's Velocity conference. This was the maiden event for this conference, and excepting some trouble with space management, it came off really well. The talks were kept short and they kept to the schedule so there w

Posted: Jun. 25, 2008 12:03 PM

That's Morse Code! They're Still Alive!

Unicode is (or should be) the single encoding for the transmission of all of the world's text. But Hollywood teaches us that when all else fails, our very survival may depend on our knowledge of Morse Code. Samuel Morse was a portrait painte

Posted: Jun. 19, 2008 08:09 PM

minify

The first person I ever heard use the word minify was Alvy Ray Smith who was at the Lucasfilm Computer Division in 1982. Alvy used it to mean to reduce the size of an image by scaling down or zooming out. In 2000, at Electric Communities (aka C

Posted: Jun. 16, 2008 02:25 PM

Firefox

Our best immediate hope for safe widgetting with state-of-the-art web browsers is safe JavaScript subsetting. A safe subset of JavaScript restricts or eliminates features of the language and runtime environment that grant excess authority to

Posted: Jun. 11, 2008 04:48 PM