16:32 12 Mar 2009.
Updated: 02:38 15 Mar 2009
While I’m familiar with a lot of them, I’d never actually read Yahoo!’s performance recommendations. They’re clearly laid out, with lots of good information in there. I should have a look at changing some of my own stuff into CSS sprites, as well as some of the other suggestions—these rules make a difference to users even on sites like mine.
Except for those of you who read all this via RSS, of course.
15:56 15 Feb 2009
Mozilla Labs recently introduced Bespin, a browser-based fully-featured text editor. I have mixed feelings about this, because I wonder if the time would be better spent working on other things (or improving other editors), but on the other hand I like the idea of a text editor written using languages that web developers can tweak, and being in the browser offers a tremendously rich framework for layout and presentation. I also wonder if it might lead to the kind of semantic “word processing” tool I’ve previously mentioned looking for.
16:29 13 Feb 2009
One of the first things I did with my resuscitated blog was to figure out how I could develop for it in a reasonable fashion.
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23:58 27 Jan 2009.
Updated: 01:13 30 Jan 2009
I’ve wrangled my old plugins and custom code so that it mostly works, except for one or two features (such as “related posts” based on tags) that I’ll revive later. Good enough for now, so I’m making the DNS changes and going ahead.
If you’re seeing this text, you’re on the new server, and all should be well. But if you don’t see another post after this one by about Friday, it suggests RSS problems, so please drop me a line.
22:30 26 Jan 2009.
Updated: 16:46 28 Jan 2009
I continued working on the blog move today, and most of the tricky database-related steps are done.
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23:53 25 Jan 2009.
Updated: 16:46 28 Jan 2009
I spent time today working on moving this blog to a new home, while also combining the articles from the old (real) blog and from this temporary one, and upgrading my version of WordPress in the process.
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19:40 22 Jan 2009.
Updated: 16:47 28 Jan 2009
I really like this jQuery sparklines plugin. I’m not sure what uses I can find for it right now, but my books/week or books/month reading rate, something like lines of code written or changed per day, the page counts of recent books, or recent MTG results would all work with it. Some of those things would be better expressed with full-size graphs using Flot, though. But while I don’t have a use case right now, this seems like a tool worth having in the toolbox (especially since it’s free).
17:49 01 Jan 2009.
Updated: 14:32 30 Jul 2009
Happy New Year!
That’s goals for the year 2009, not two thousand and nine goals, people.
I tend to start the year with a bunch of ambitions and projects—many of which I even accomplish. Some of them for this year follow.
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23:56 24 Nov 2008.
Updated: 17:12 28 Jan 2009
I haven’t got any graphs, despite what I said last time. I had some, but messed them up while experimenting with Flot, and in any case they weren’t quite what I wanted. However, I did solve some of the other issues I was having with my book-tracking application, and am relatively happy with the current view.
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23:56 16 Nov 2008.
Updated: 17:16 28 Jan 2009
Fun might be the wrong word.
(Also, this is long. Condensed: I’ve been using Freebase to store my reading data, I wrote an Acre app to provide a custom view, and I discovered that my data model has some shortcomings.)
I’ve been playing with Acre some more, specifically on a long-term project of mine: to store data about the books I read in some system and then create views about my reading habits. Yes, compulsive list-making combined with programming/data geekery.
Anyway, I could have used a lot of other systems, such as Delicious Library or LibraryThing or Books, to store this information, but none of them seemed to have quite what I want (and most of them are proprietary). I could have written my own, and planned to, but kept tweaking with the data model and generally wasn’t sure how I wanted to deal with it.
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23:51 11 Nov 2008.
Updated: 19:51 23 Jun 2013
23:59 13 Jun 2008.
Updated: 07:40 14 Jun 2008
19:04 29 Apr 2008
I’ve been playing around with literary awards in Freebase recently, mainly the novel/fiction Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards.
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23:55 28 Apr 2008.
Updated: 01:07 29 Apr 2008
I was going to post a link to this Clay Shirky article yesterday, but then saw that it had made it to BoingBoing and decided not to bother.
However, I think it’s worth posting even if most readers do check BoingBoing. It’s rather interesting, and worth calling out.
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19:23 31 Mar 2008
I didn’t really take part, but apparently today was Run Some Old Web Browsers Day. I think my first exposure to a Web browser would have been around 1994, although the first time I could really play around with one was in a Humboldt University computer lab, I think, and that would have been 1995. Before that I was restricted to ftp and gopher, but was never that into either of them. I think I have some email from a little earlier than that.
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23:29 18 Mar 2008
Depending on how well they can deal with spam, and how open they make it, this could be a big deal. Google are letting users edit locations in Google Maps.
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23:39 06 Mar 2008
Despite having worked at Metaweb for almost a year, and despite my OCD tendencies, I had avoided getting sucked in by the allure of correcting/completing/entering data in Freebase, the web frontend to our attempt at structuring all the world’s information. I had avoided it until today, that is.
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23:14 24 Feb 2008
I’ve been waiting for an article about computers versus apostrophes in names for a while. As a software engineer who has a name with an apostrophe, I’m usually very unimpressed with systems that can’t handle names with apostrophes, and there seem to be many out there.
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23:56 04 Feb 2008.
Updated: 08:56 05 Feb 2008
While working on the tournament runner application that’s part of the ongoing rewrite of sfmagic.org, I encountered a problem which I think is indicative of how important ways of viewing problems are for coming up with solutions, especially in programming.
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23:57 29 Jan 2008.
Updated: 23:05 25 Mar 2008
Date handling in JavaScript sucks. It’s quite astonishingly bad, in fact, and I always think that I’m forgetting to do something when I try to use it—but no, it appears that the major JavaScript developers have never pushed a robust date object. I’m not sure why, as the Web’s international nature seems to make that more important, not less. On top of which the browser should really tell the server what time zone it thinks it’s in, but that’s another story. Anyway, there’s a library I’ve been looking at, and which we’re apparently going to use at work, Datejs (available at datejs.com).
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14:37 27 Jan 2008.
Updated: 23:14 28 Jul 2009
I already have a buch of plans for larger projects, including finishing the sfmagic.org rewrite, but I think it makes sense to have some smaller projects to work on as well, things that I can switch to and make significant progress on in a relatively short amount of time.
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23:45 21 Jan 2008
Individual draft groups in MTG are called “pods”. The sfmagic group runs drafts every Wednesday (19:30, Milano’s Pizzeria), and it’s these drafts that I’m rewriting a site to track the results of. At the moment I’m writing the data entry side, and took a slight detour to write a utility to help in the weekly organization.
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