hans.gerwitz

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.”

Stephen Fry

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.

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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.

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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.

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