//todo: think of better title

CSS selectors level 4 draft

2012-01-27T08:44:00.000-08:00

Lisp in ruby

2012-01-25T11:24:00.000-08:00

Lisp in ruby. Short and sweet.

What the bagel man saw

2012-01-13T10:10:00.000-08:00

Interesting story, but the conclusion might suffer from survival bias - is the number of dropped customers statistically significant?

Random notes on WebGL

2012-01-10T13:29:00.000-08:00

Notes on WebGL.

SML vs OCaml

2012-01-10T06:56:00.001-08:00

I was learning SML over the holidays. Neat language.

Here's a syntax comparison between it and OCaml.

Fixing IE PNG opacity

2011-12-06T07:39:00.000-08:00

So you've got a sweet jQuery-based animation working in Firefox and Chrome and all that, and you check in IE, and, in horror, you find that the opacity animations on PNG background images are showing this ugly black halo. What to do?

Easiest fix:

//say this is your initial style
.thing {
background:url(images/translucent.png) no-repeat;
filter:alpha(opacity=50);
opacity:0.5;
}

//add this to the stylesheet
.thing {
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(
src=/path/to/images/translucent.png) alpha(opacity=50);
background:none\9;
}

(I wrapped the one line to fit in the blog, but the filter declaration should be all in one line)

Just make sure you use an absolute image path on the filter, not a relative one. Tweak the opacity to your liking.

When animating, jQuery is smart enough to not clobber the AlphaImageLoader filter when it changes the opacity one.

Programming blogs

2011-10-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

Heh.

On Dart

2011-10-11T09:56:00.000-07:00

So people are going bananas over this new language that Google says will supposedly replace Javascript.

What I'm wondering is: what can I do with this new language that I cannot do with Javascript? Can I compete with native mobile apps? Can I compete with the Flash 11 API? Flash 10? 9? 8? Or does it only provide me with yet-another-slightly-different-syntax-to-do-what-I-can-already-do?

On Node.js

2011-10-04T09:52:00.000-07:00

Some trolling on Node.js. I remember having a convo with Dave S. about exactly this a few weeks ago.

I don't know about slow Fibonacci functions, but I could totally see a misguided soul writing yet-another-MVC-framework that used require (a blocking function in Node.js) in the wrong place.

Art of ASM

2011-08-11T13:03:00.000-07:00

80x86 Assembler Course

Evolutionary Program Repair

2011-07-25T09:21:00.000-07:00

Automatically fixing C code with genetic programs. That's definitely some interesting AI work.

Some notes on CSS drop shadows

2011-07-18T08:24:00.000-07:00

So I wanted to do some CSS shadow for a project I was working on and it turns out that IE has filters to emulate the CSS3 box-shadow property:

.shadow {
 -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 4px #888;
 -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 4px #888;
 box-shadow: 3px 3px 4px #888;
 -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Strength=4, Direction=135, Color='#888888')";
 filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Strength=4, Direction=135, Color='#888888');
}

This works fine and dandy for the simple cases, but there are a couple of caveats that should be written down since I haven't seen these mentioned anywhere:

The IE shadow gets the box model wrong: it adds the size of the shadow to the width/height of the element to which it's applied. Beware when floating and applying to elastic layouts.
The IE shadow does not necessarily appear around the element. If you have a div w/ a background-image that is smaller than the div itself, the shadow will be applied to the edge of the background image, not around the outline of the element

Why gas is expensive

2011-03-11T23:00:00.000-08:00

Huh, that was an interesting read.

Monads in javascript

2011-03-09T06:10:00.000-08:00

Quite easy to understand.

Placekitten

2011-02-28T09:44:00.000-08:00

Useful. Kitten image placeholders.

Chocolate and child slavery

2011-01-27T18:57:00.000-08:00

This is probably the worst piece of trivia I've ever heard about foodstuff.

Clever business models of 2010

2011-01-07T06:51:00.000-08:00

Of course, execution is still king.

Analytics tools

2011-01-06T10:36:00.003-08:00

A list of popular ones

Zero rupee bill

2011-01-04T06:17:00.000-08:00

This is pretty cool.

Scatter - ajax without coding

2010-11-30T10:27:00.000-08:00

Nice library. I did something similar for a client once. The idea is to have links auto-ajax and replace elements on the page when elements in the response have id's that match elements in the current page.

Apache Portable Runtime

2010-11-22T07:06:00.001-08:00

Looks useful

Security Training Videos

2010-11-19T06:07:00.000-08:00

A ton of videos on assembly and exploits

The watchtower of destruction

2010-10-07T10:16:00.001-07:00

Interesting story about firefighters in Alaska back in the days when people had to pay the firefighters directly to get covered.

Sloppy

2010-10-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

Funny. It produces a score based on how sloppy the code looks like.

On junk food and addiction

2010-09-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

Basically, you should eat healthy.

UglifyJs

2010-08-18T07:18:00.000-07:00

It seems to produce more stable code with less effort

Node in Windows

2010-07-31T12:50:00.001-07:00

Using VirtualBox. I had to change the networking options to use NAT.

Web designer wish list

2010-07-26T12:58:00.000-07:00

I like to read about the pains that current tools give people.

Haskell Platform

2010-07-23T08:50:00.000-07:00

Pretty much everything you need to get started with Haskell.

Superstitions work

2010-07-19T10:04:00.001-07:00

A research that suggests that lucky charms and other superstitions affect positively the chances of completing tasks.

Boost creativity

2010-07-17T05:43:00.000-07:00

A bunch of nifty psychology tricks with links to studies.

Microsoft on the ball lately

2010-07-06T06:15:00.000-07:00

Is it just me or is Microsoft really starting to put some muscle behind their consumer facing products?

They completely rebranded their search engine last year and now they're pushing out ads for Trueswitch for Hotmail, which lets users import contacts and emails from old emails to a new one (if, say, you get married and change your name, for example).

IE9 is also shaping up to be a serious contender in the browser wars.

Which is not to say they're not focusing on other things anymore. F# has been getting praises left and right too. They're even getting involved in open source now.

Kudos to Microsoft.

Talking to God

2010-07-05T14:16:00.000-07:00

Heavily darwinian but interesting nonetheless.

Use the Source

2010-07-02T07:44:00.001-07:00

It's basically hacker news, but focused on code. It might just become my new favorite site.

UX myths

2010-06-24T12:52:00.000-07:00

With studies.

How planes fly

2010-06-22T10:48:00.001-07:00

They taught me wrong when I was a kid!

The Exponential Function

2010-05-28T06:32:00.000-07:00

A great explanation of the exponential function. As Einstein famously said: "The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest".

scheme in haskell

2010-05-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

A hands-on tutorial

Music notation with canvas

2010-05-12T08:23:00.000-07:00

Really cool.

Design theory articles

2010-05-11T06:59:00.000-07:00

This is actually interesting.

Wait-free hashtables

2010-05-10T08:03:00.001-07:00

Note to self: play with this later.

Google new design: A/B testing fail?

2010-05-07T06:17:00.000-07:00

You must have noticed that the Google result pages now have that left bar thingie, and if you hang around techie sites, you probably heard a number of people voice negative opinions about it. "It's redundant, it's cluttered, it's inconsistent, it's a rip-off from Bing" are some of the arguments I've seen more than once so far.

Apparently, this new SERP is the result of some A/B testing Google did, which supposedly is optimized to boost whatever metrics they are interested in boosting.

There's a problem with this idea though, imho:

How do they know they are boosting the right metrics?. For the top link on the page, one could say: the more clicks per second, the better. But what about the "more" link on the left bar? Given that a click on that is one less click on the top link, what do you optimize for? Is the local optimization contributing or detracting to the overall goal of the page?

Is it in Google's interest to make its UI look the same as Bing's?

Is it cool that users have to re-learn that now there's a block of stuff on the left and the actual search result titles are shorter (and sometimes, plain cut-off)?

Is it cool that this encourages power users to whip up home made UI-customization scripts?

How does this habit-changing move speak to the Google-loving tribe (the mouth-to-mouth advertisers)?

I wouldn't say this change was a dumb-move-that-will-kill-Google(tm) or anything drastic and stupid like that, but I'd note that in the Internet, things don't die, they just fade away slowly as an overwhelming amount of better stuff comes along. If anything, I think this change was a tiny step towards that direction.

My 2 cents.

Seven blunders of the world

2010-05-06T10:47:00.000-07:00

Food for thought.

Buy vs Rent calculator

2010-04-22T07:12:00.001-07:00

Nifty calculator.

Turns out I'd only ever be better off buying if the property costs less than $120k. And even then, not by much.

Alternatives to Red Black Trees

2010-04-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

Treaps, AA-trees, ravl trees.

Maybe it's just me but I find that I use hashmaps more than sets and ordered maps. Yet I find more people talking about trees than hashing schemes. Hmm.

A zillion monkeys

2010-04-16T17:47:00.001-07:00

C, Assembler, optimization; you know, "real" programming.

This is one of those places you stumble upon one day and go "geez where were you all my life?" :)

Popular goals

2010-04-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

Interesting list. Many of the items fall into the "what? you don't do this already?" list for me.

HTML 5 test

2010-04-13T09:47:00.000-07:00

Stuff that can and cannot be used

Note to self: browse around this

2010-04-13T07:07:00.001-07:00

There seems to be some interesting stuff in this blog

Discogs

2010-04-08T14:20:00.001-07:00

Might be useful at some point.

Black holes, white holes

2010-04-07T14:46:00.000-07:00

Interesting theory.

Pthread API design

2010-04-05T10:03:00.000-07:00

A nice post about good API design

One thumb up, one thumb down

2010-03-31T09:31:00.000-07:00

So, Chrome will start to come with Flash pre-installed. On the one hand, it's nice to see at least one browser maker finally step up and iron out this pain area: let's face, the average Joe usually would prefer to to have Flash installed rather than not, even if it hogs CPU.

In the end, there's no point in using the Internet if you can't actually use it. And for a lot of people, break.com et al is the Internet.

On the other hand, it's too bad Google didn't want to create a competing player. They probably know that the swf format specs are open and they certainly have the capacity to create a ridiculously fast implementation to rival Adobe's. I'd imagine that in a playing field where the status quo is "Flash Player is slow", being the one who can say "well, Flash runs natively and is super fast in our browser" would be a very strong differentiator for Chrome.

Here's for hoping that Opera will pick up the dropped ball.

How not to do a presentation on F#

2010-03-24T09:34:00.000-07:00

Pretty much sums up everything that I think is wrong with Lisp literature.

Time for Wall Street to pay?

2010-03-19T06:06:00.001-07:00

"We need accountability -- as in, jail time where warranted -- for those who created the financial disaster"

Right, because, you know, it's not like jails are run with tax money or anything.

Python + Linux Live CD

2010-03-12T06:51:00.000-08:00

Just plop the CD in.

Scott and Scurvy

2010-03-11T10:54:00.000-08:00

A story about Robert Falcon Scott's (tragic) expedition to the South Pole.

Sunyata

2010-03-11T10:53:00.001-08:00

Interesting essay about identity.

A few things you should be aware of if you still whine about Flash (vs HTML5)

2010-03-10T09:55:00.000-08:00

coLinux

2010-03-07T11:01:00.000-08:00

I keep forgetting the name of this project. It runs Linux without the need of a VM, i.e. about as close to a real installation as it can be.

ReactOS

2010-03-07T11:00:00.001-08:00

Basically, an open source Windows. Interesting project to watch for.

Little known things about javascript

2010-03-03T09:38:00.000-08:00

Here are some pretty obscure techniques you can use in Javascript.

Here's some more hacking with the tilde (bitwise not) operator. The indexOf() trick is pretty terse (but it might be a bit too cryptic for some people).

Is God a Taoist

2010-03-03T09:26:00.000-08:00

Very insightful write-up. God's explanations pretty much sums up my belief system.

Juggling

2010-03-01T10:19:00.000-08:00

"Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – Work, Family, Health, Friends and Spirit and you’re keeping all of these in the Air.

You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back.

But the other four Balls – Family, Health, Friends and Spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these; they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for it."

found here. credit attribution might be wrong.

Gcc to Java

2010-02-25T08:32:00.000-08:00

No idea what the point of this is, but it's definitely cool.

Snake-oil-o-meter

2010-02-25T06:34:00.000-08:00

This is kinda cool.

Snowclones

2010-02-23T08:32:00.000-08:00

These things have a name?

Emotional Accounting

2010-02-19T06:22:00.000-08:00

Crap, I'm irrational.

Aquaponics

2010-02-18T11:53:00.001-08:00

Note to self: get into this.

It's like winamp all over again

2010-02-18T10:09:00.001-08:00

Seriously, what are the Mozilla people thinking?

Cappuccino yummyness

2010-02-18T08:49:00.000-08:00

The Cappuccino guys are up to some really interesting stuff: apparently you can use base64 images in IE6 and 7 via MHTML, in combination with data URLs, to get some serious gzip compression goodness in every browser.

Cliches

2010-02-17T10:49:00.001-08:00

This looks very useful

How not to do a flash intro

2009-12-23T09:51:00.000-08:00

Yeaaaah!

Make time fly

2009-12-23T09:35:00.000-08:00

If you think you spent less time than you actually did doing something, you'll probably think it was more fun than if you thought you spent more than the real time.

On plants and veganism

2009-12-21T16:19:00.000-08:00

Interesting article. I've read pieces about various curious plant mechanisms before and it's funny to see that journalists like to make plants look vivid like animals when telling their stories.

The fact that we empathize more with things that look the most like us is probably no surprise, but it's interesting that we project that bias towards our food phylosophy: we normally consider chicken slaughterhouses gruesome, and yet boiling some chopped onions for soup is perfectly fine.

The irony of onions making us cry is almost poetic.

A nice CSS typography trick

2009-12-15T11:15:00.000-08:00

I just found out there’s a fairly obscure, but cool syntax to declare line-heights in CSS:

.mytext { font: 12px/14px Arial; }

Notice the slash and the second pixel value. The rule above defines the text to be Arial, 12 px, with a line-height of 14px. It’s short, sweet and it even works in all browsers!

Note, though, that this should be used mainly as a typography trick. For aligning forms and one-off elements, I’d still advise using the regular line-height property to avoid re-declaring fonts everywhere.

With that being said, it’s worth mentioning that most design and typography blogs use higher-than-default line-heights to great effect, as the extra bit of spacing between the lines of text makes content look more classy. For example, look at alistapart.com or smashingmagazine.com and try disabling the line-height via firebug to see the difference :)

So, in summary, those 5 extra characters can go a long way in giving a static site an extra oomph.

Screw Jesus, what would I do?

2009-12-01T06:40:00.000-08:00

So apparently we're all egotistical bastards.

Opera 10.20 widgets

2009-11-25T13:46:00.000-08:00

Widgets now don't need an Opera window to be open. I should play with this when I get some time.

Starcraft AI competition

2009-11-19T06:40:00.000-08:00

Competition. API.

CSS sniff table

2009-11-13T09:04:00.000-08:00

Got tired of googling for this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about conditional comments and graceful degradation and all that. I'm a web developer ffs.

Firefox getting pnwed

2009-11-11T08:22:00.000-08:00

Boo. "Among Web browsers, Mozilla Firefox had the largest percentage of Web vulnerabilities, followed by Apple Safari".

Shit my dad doesn't say

2009-11-11T06:13:00.000-08:00

Son, no one cares what your stupid Google thing does. You didn't work on any of their projects. You just type in the stupid box. Anyone can do that.

Small lisps

2009-11-09T08:18:00.001-08:00

I don't normally link to aggregators, but ah, what the heck.

Toronto open data

2009-11-03T10:21:00.000-08:00

I have to say, this is pretty darn cool.

Diax' Rake

2009-11-02T07:06:00.000-08:00

Be careful of believing things because you want to believe them.

Pop quiz: if I gave you $5 and 2 hours, how would you make the most amount of money?

2009-10-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

Great video about entrepreneurship and lateral thinking.

Assembly for C programmers

2009-10-23T06:17:00.001-07:00

I should check for more articles later.

Advanced struct initialization in C

2009-10-21T05:13:00.000-07:00

Wow, I didn't know half of these things were valid C.

LYSP

2009-10-02T06:20:00.000-07:00

Small lisp interpreter in clean C.

Quote from Douglas Adams

2009-09-28T14:58:00.000-07:00

People now looking at the way in which rice agriculture works in Bali are rather puzzled by it because it is intensely religious. The society of Bali is such that religion permeates every single aspect of it and everybody in that culture is very, very carefully defined in terms of who they are, what their status is and what their role in life is. It's all defined by the church; they have very peculiar calendars and a very peculiar set of customs and rituals, which are precisely defined and, oddly enough, they are fantastically good at being very, very productive with their rice harvest. In the 70s, people came in and noticed that the rice harvest was determined by the temple calendar. It seemed to be totally nonsensical, so they said, 'Get rid of all this, we can help you make your rice harvest much, much more productive than even you're, very successfully, doing at the moment. Use these pesticides, use this calendar, do this, that and the other'. So they started and for two or three years the rice production went up enormously, but the whole predator/prey/pest balance went completely out of kilter. Very shortly, the rice harvest plummeted again and the Balinese said, 'Screw it, we're going back to the temple calendar!' and they reinstated what was there before and it all worked again absolutely perfectly. It's all very well to say that basing the rice harvest on something as irrational and meaningless as a religion is stupid - they should be able to work it out more logically than that, but they might just as well say to us, 'Your culture and society works on the basis of money and that's a fiction, so why don't you get rid of it and just co-operate with each other' - we know it's not going to work!

via

SICP videos

2009-09-28T09:54:00.000-07:00

Here

WEIRD

2009-09-15T10:06:00.001-07:00

Goes to show why extrapolating is usually bad. (I just love the WEIRD acronym, btw)

Programmer reads

2009-09-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

There goes my long weekend. A compilation of nice articles for anyone who writes code.

small code

2009-09-02T09:07:00.001-07:00

List of small compilers / interpreters.

Snow Leopard for $30

2009-08-28T13:01:00.000-07:00

Even for Tiger users (like me). Awesome!

3.ly

2009-08-25T12:15:00.001-07:00

Let's see how long this link lasts.

Onthological argument

2009-08-24T14:42:00.000-07:00

I gotta say Alselm's argument is quite elegant.

Tightening screws

2009-08-21T14:38:00.000-07:00

Kinda funny how everyone was talking about web developers sucking / not sucking, and then someone pointed to this on Reddit: Guido basically giving up on CSS.

I read a comment by Josh Powell on this article that was resonated with me:

Whenever I hear people insult web developers, I remember the time when I was in the workforce for only one year and some java developers came up to me and said "we can't get this whitespace to go away in ie, but it isn't there in netscape" I went over and took 30 seconds to fix it, and afterwards they said "We spent hours on that! How did you know how to fix it!?!" All their knowledge of garbage collectors, destructors, compilers, etc, didn't help them remove the spaces between the last character on the line and the start of the ending td tag.

You may not think that's a big deal, but trust me, lots of real world clients could care less about what gc algorithm you use, but they will have your neck if you can't get their site looking like they want it in IE.

The whole thing reminds me of this one tale:

Once upon a time, there was company that had a big expensive machine that was critical to their business. One day, without much explanation, the machine buzzed and ground to a halt. They tried to restart it, they tried all the usual maintenance protocol. Nothing was making it start again. Management grew nervous. They were losing money for every minute the machine was down. They frantically searched high and low for anyone who could fix it.

After a long week, they finally found one technician who specialized in fixing that particular machine. They rushed him in to the corner of the factory, all the high executives trailing anxiously behind him.

The technician calmly opened a shaft, and looked at the unimaginably complex circuitry for 5 minutes. He reached into his toolbox and grabbed a tiny screwdriver, and then, without much effort, tightened a single screw. "Ok, turn it on, boys", he declared.

The executives looked at each other, a mix of hope and disbelief in their eyes. If the machine was down for a few more days, they'd literally go bankrupt. The workers powered the machine and, stunningly, it started working as if not had ever happened. Everyone rejoyced. With one flick of his wrist, the technician had saved the company. "I'll be on my way then", the technician said, humbly.

The next week, the company got the invoice for the technician's fix. It looked like a ordinary invoice printed in ordinary paper, except for one detail: the amount payable on the invoice was $10,000. A bit disconcerted, the managers called him to get some clarification.

"We believe you made a mistake on your invoice. We were all there when you fixed it and we saw that all you did was tighten one screw."

"You are correct that I only tightened one screw, but you're mistaken about one thing. I don't charge for tightening screws. Anyone can do that. I charge for knowing which screw to tighten."

Obviously not everyone is an unsung hero, but I think the world sure would be a nicer place if people stopped the whole holier-than-thou crapola.

Mixins in Java

2009-08-16T13:08:00.000-07:00

Rather neat framework, leaving aside that I personally would not implement UI on a business logic class.

Status anxiety

2009-08-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

A video by Alain de Botton.