Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

 ALL


  The Story of W&L: China’s Great Internet Divide

Here’s an introductory quote from The Story of W&L, a tale of China’s great internet divide:China does not have one so-called “national internet,” instead there’s a great divide. It encompasses the elite with ThinkPad laptops and also the grassroots with MTK Shanzhai mobile phones. Our elites are on par with America, while our grassroots are on par with Vietnam. This is the story of W&L, two representatives of China’s great internet divide.The original post (Chinese-language) was written in July 2010 by Simon Shen (申音) and&nb...

2,810 0       CHINA INTERNET DIVIDE ELITE GRASSROOT LAPTOP MOBILE PHONE


  FUCK PASSWORDS

I'm so tired of passwords. So, so, so tired.Most people don't understand this. Most people use the same password everywhere. Most people can just mechanically type out password3 in every password box, smirking to themselves at how clever they are, because who would ever guess 3 instead of 1?I don't do that. Let me tell you what i do.I generate a different password for every service, based on a convoluted master password and the name of the thing. I do this because it's what you're supposed to do; it's what security nerds (including myself for the purposes of this post) tell everyone e...

4,831 0       SECURITY PASSWORD RANDOM GENERATION HARD TO REMEMBER


  CSS Tools: Reset CSS

The goal of a reset stylesheet is to reduce browser inconsistencies in things like default line heights, margins and font sizes of headings, and so on. The general reasoning behind this was discussed in a May 2007 post, if you're interested. Reset styles quite often appear in CSS frameworks, and the original "meyerweb reset" found its way into Blueprint, among others.The reset styles given here are intentionally very generic. There isn't any default color or background set for the body element, for example. I don't particularly recommend that you just use this in its unaltered state in you...

3,783 0       CSS CROSS BROWSER COMPATIBILITY RESET PARTIAL RESET


  Web Consistency Testing

Introduction Web Consistency Testing is a new form of Web testing that aims to answer the simple question: does this page look right? It's an automated approach to making sure a page looks the way we expect, whether that be cross-browser, over time (regression), in multiple locales, or whatever else we can think of. Kevin Menard, founder of Mogotest, presented an in-depth talk about what Web Consistency Testing is and presented a roadmap for building such a system at GTAC 2011. You can see his presentati...

2,922 0       WEBSITE CONSISTENCY TESTING CONSISTENCY TESTING ADVICE


  If PHP Were British

When Rasmus Lerdorf first put PHP together, he - quite sensibly, despite his heritage - chose not to write it in Greenlandic or Danish. Good job too - that would have been rather unpleasant to work with. He opted instead, being in Canada at the time, for the local tongue. No, not French - that bastard dialect of the Queen's English commonly referred to as "US English"1.PHP developers in Britain have been grumpy about this ever since. What was he thinking? And more importantly, how do we undo this travesty? How do we developers ensure the traditions of the British Empire continue to be upheld, ...

2,771 0       PHP CLASS BRITISH STATEMENT ENGILISH LIKE


  Macro vs. Micro Optimisation

So there's recently been a bit of hype about another Colebourne article: http://blog.joda.org/2011/11/real-life-scala-feedback-from-yammer.htmlI'd like to respond to a few points he makes.First - You should evaluate Scala and pay attention to its benefits and flaws before adopting it.  Yes, there are flaws to Scala.   Working at typesafe makes you more aware of some of them.  We're actively working to reduce/minimize/get rid of these.   In my opinion, the negatives of using Scala are peanuts compared to the postives of choosing Scala over Java.  I think everyone s...

2,843 0       SOFTWARE PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION MACRO MICRO


  Emacs adventures

I have been using Emacs for over a year now. I actually didn’t learn a lot when I started using it (just the basics to get going and then some relatively common keyboard shortcuts), but lately I have been reading and learning much more about it. I’m so grateful by everything I’ve learned from different people on the net that I wanted to share a couple of things I’ve learned, and a simple major mode for editing AsciiDoc documents.As a long-time VIM user, I feel it’s my duty to make a micro-introduction to Emacs to VIM users (skip this whole paragraph if you...

3,715 0       LINUX VIM EDITOR EMACX SHORTCUTS


  The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible

Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful. Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing – like a paperclip, for example – everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a screen,...

2,361 0       SOFTWARE POSSIBLE EASY REQUIREMENTS OBVIOUS