Molly Holzschlag has been one of the premier people helping define the web over quite a few years. I was honored to be an attendee at a workshop she (and a few others) led at Foothill College in 2005, which led to my really learning web standards, which later led to my job on the […]
Geek Humor
QA Engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv. — Bill Sempf (@sempf) September 23, 2014 @sempf was it a mock bar? — Brian H Prince (@brianhprince) September 23, 2014 @sempf You forgot about when he ordered 0’; DROP TABLE […]
Hilarity from the Spam Queue
A spam comment caught by Akismet: If the previous game is too adventurous for you, simply try flapping a blanket in the air above your ferret as if you were fluttering a bed sheet over a mattress. You don’t say. This particular spam comment ended with: …and ferrets love to cuddle.
Model View Culture / Bigger Issues
Elizabeth Spiers’s article about the magazine and its founder Shanley Kane has a great quote relevant to the art vs. artist debate of yore: But important work gets done every day by flawed people, sometimes even by assholes. No one should be more aware of that than people who work in the tech industry, where […]
False Assumptions About Names
I loved this article about names four years ago, and it continues to be relevant. There are entire novels in the comments. As someone whose name is frequently misparsed (my name is “Saoirse Moen, Deirdre” not “Moen,Deirdre,Saoirse”), I feel their pain. Yes, the article is written for programmers, but it’s still useful for writers. We […]
Apple Discontinuing Aperture
Daring Fireball comments on it. Aperture and I have had a difficult friendship. I migrated from iPhoto to Aperture after I started at Apple. But, since leaving Apple, I’ve been wondering if I should move to Adobe’s Lightroom. The split’s about 50/50 from the people I know who are serious photographers. Part of my dislike […]
Those Clubhouse Doors Are Tricksy Sticky
Below is a video of a panel called “Opening the Clubhouse Doors: Creating More Inclusive Geek Communities” panel from C2E2 2014, April 25, 2014. It happened in Chicago. At about 5 minutes in, one of the panelists tells the opening tale about an experience asking about diversity in comics: “What is the percentage of female […]
Heartbleed: Why SSL Certs Have To Be Reissued…and Salts
A friend of mine who’s a geek and I were talking about Heartbleed a couple of days ago. Said friend has never been a coder, and thus never really spent a significant time looking at memory dumps, unlike us old school programmers who have (especially back when we were, um, trying to argue with copy […]
Why IRC Still Rocks After All These Years
Slowly becoming less of a fan of HipChat, it’s really no better than IRC with a proper client. –Matt Jarjoura When I first looked at HipChat, I laughed. It looks, well, so 90s. Basically, it’s a revamp of IRC, where “revamp” means “we will charge you for it.” The only reason you should pay money […]
The Amount of Time it Takes
Just for the record, the amount of time it takes from the time someone decides to to use a new pseudonym to: Google the potential problems with the name, then register the variant that’s the most promising. Wait for DNS to propagate. Find a theme for a landing page site template. Upload the bare bones […]