Progressive charts
Posted on April 12th, 2009
Back in 2001 Tantek Çelik dreamt up a little polygonal CSS hack, using the bevels of borders to create angles in-browser. Eventually, Lasse Reichstein Nielsen made the technique accessible. Back then, I was thinking about CSS and wanted to try my hand at unobtrusive DHTML.
So I was inspired to implement simple rendering of HTML lists as area charts. Naturally, once it mostly worked I lost interest, and let it rest assuming someone would have the same idea and take it much farther.
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Conspiracy
Posted on December 15th, 2008
“Watching someone writing an email on a Storm is like watching an antelope trying to open a packet of cigarettes.”
Here’s a rumor I’d like to start: the Blackberry Storm is a sacrifice play. RIM is purposefully taking the risk of alienating some users for a greater defensive purpose, to reinforce the reflexive disdain many Blackberry users have to (the idea of) the iPhone’s keyboard. If they pick up a Storm it will only further convince them touchscreen keyboards are a farce and dissuade them from investing the few hours’ use required to become proficient with an iPhone.
Tags: mobile, technology
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Classname of the day
Posted on April 14th, 2008
GodKillsAKittenEveryTimeYouUseMe: recommended static field type for storing injector references (if you must) in Guice.
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Encabulation
Posted on February 10th, 2007
Ryan shared this technical video spoof:
Rockwell’s retro-encabulator is a refinement of the turbo-encabulator, which Chrysler demonstrated to the world in a 1980s instructional video, although the design dates to at least 1946. Apparently work continues.
Ryan asserted we should produce nonsense jargon-laden material like this to describe our work. Indeed, it’s odd that software engineering has little such fictional self-deprecation, but maybe that’s because our discipline is still immature enough that our real work is worse than fiction.
Tags: culture, funny, geek, history, language, technology
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Steve’s dream, realized
Posted on January 9th, 2007
It’s an exciting day to be a Mac user and investor in Apple! Today Steve Ballmer’s company pre-announced Office 2008 for Mac. This includes such exciting, patent-protected innovations as the Ribbon. AAPL jumped 8.3%, enough that I could take the profit and buy 4 iMacs and still have enough for one of those phones I heard something about.
Tags: software
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