Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me:
javascript
Although I’m no fan of Macromedia Adobe Flash, I have to admit the sIFR JavaScript / Flash typography hack is remarkably well thought out and quite effective. Here’s a small GIF movie of it in action: It always bugged me that our only alternative for decent web typeface rendering
css
The CSS Zen Garden site isn’t exactly new news these days, but I’ve been digesting the excellent CSS Zen Garden book over the last few months and we now have an opportunity to pursue a completely CSS-driven site layout on one of our projects. Although everyone has used
disk defragmentation
I tend to ignore defragmenting my hard drive until I belatedly realize it probably looks like swiss cheese by now: Wouldn’t it be nice if the operating system took care of defragmentation all by itself in the background when I’m not using the computer? Ah, to dream. Until
software development concepts
The 69 page e-book Client vs. Developer Wars documents one web design company’s struggle to formulate a rational development process: Up until the middle of 2000, Newfangled’s development process was much like that of every other web development company. The process started with the “planning/strategy phase,” followed
programming languages
Laurent Bourgeois sent in an amusing link to the story of SkiFree in the words of Chris Pirih, the original Microsoft programmer who wrote it: I wrote SkiFree in C on my home computer, entirely for my own education and entertainment. One day while I was playing with it at
audio encoding
I’ll probably never buy music from iTunes, or any other online music store, because they all use constant bit rate audio encoding formats. Once I heard the incredible difference in fidelity between variable bit rate (VBR) and constant bit rate (CBR) encoding, I can never go back. And if
google book search
Mike Gunderloy recently linked to an editorial by author Susan Cheever on the legality of Google's Book Search: Is it poignantly wrongheaded to want to get paid for my work? Is it a failure of understanding to think that when my father’s short stories are read and
html
I’m a big fan of showing the user visual feedback as soon as possible, whether you’re downloading a web page or rendering a windows form. Images already render progressively in a web browser – but you can do even better. Simply save your GIF or PNG images with the
ui/ux design
Ever wonder how you could possibly find something in that complex, ten-tabbed options dialog? How about a search function on the options dialog, as featured in Quest’s Toad for SQL Server: Aside from the fact that it’s completely insane to build an options dialog so complicated that it
indexing service
Microsoft’s ancient circa-1997 Indexing Service gets no respect. And that’s a shame, because it’s a surprisingly decent content indexing engine that supports arbitrary metadata. Sure, there may be better choices, but Indexing Service’s saving grace is that it’s completely free. It’s a default component
user experience
Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Building a Web Site that Works (6mb PDF) is a great reminder of how to build a popular website without becoming a marketing weasel in the process: Big Picture #1: A Web site must do at least one of two things, but probably both:
image compression
It constantly amazes me how many times I encounter pages where screenshots are inappropriately stored as JPEGs. Not to single Mike Gunderloy out, but there’s yet another example in his recent article on configuring an ASP.NET 2.0 website: That is just nasty. As in, Miss Jackson if