fredleblanc

Not to be "that guy," but the font you're using everywhere for your headers (which is called "Gothic" in the CSS) appears to be "Knockout" from Hoefler & Frere-Jones. The license for that font — as well as all of their fonts for that matter — isn't currently web-embeddable[1]. So either I'm wrong and you've got an extremely good replica font (maybe a little too good), or you're using a font against its license.

[1] http://www.typography.com/ask/faq.php#Ft_10 - choose #20

So this bill seems to target any link on your website. Let's say that you have a blog that allows for people to post things as comments using a service like DISQUS. Could one request essentially take down the entire DISQUS service? Same with Facebook comments that are becoming more and more popular: could one request take down something like Facebook?

I felt like this with my code for the first 5 years that I was coding as well. My code now isn't pristine or perfect, but I'm consistently satisfied with the quality of my final products. Here's what I did to get to the point where I'm happy with my code:

1. Debug and refactor. Early on, I'd stumble through creating a script. It was usually write three lines, see if that worked, repeat. I didn't plan ahead enough, and by the end, my code was just layers of ideas tightly held together by a file name. This aggravated me, so after I'd get my scripts working, I'd completely rewrite them from scratch, making improvements where I saw them, simplifying code wherever I could.

I've learned more debugging (generally my own) code than I have from any book or teacher.

This was a lot of time spent, but eventually I could start seeing ahead and could make those changes in real-time as I was writing them. I'm not saying that I don't go back and refactor my code now, but when I do it's usually to fix things for speed or bugs, not for code cleanliness.

2. Plan ahead. I know some people that write out the entire shell of their program -- all of the functions and names and comments of what each function will do -- before ever writing the actual logic. I never had the patience for that, but you can still plan ahead.

Take a look at what you're trying to accomplish, and find the areas where you know you don't know what you're doing. Do a bit of research on those points. See what others have done, there's a really good chance you're not the first person to do those things. If you're still not sure, ask for help. The community is almost always willing to help.

3. Clarity over cleverness, always. I always take the road that will be more easily maintainable in the long run rather than the code that will work the fastest. (But, you know, if you can hit both at once, awesome.) I like breaking things down into simple bits. All of my functions are either only accomplishing one task, or are strings to those one-task functions put together to do something complex (but is still considered one task).

4. Learn, practice, learn, practice, repeat. Don't just stick with one language, branch out and see how other languages tackle similar problems. Take a look at code that you thin is better than yours and figure out why you think that. Take a look at code that's worse than yours and figure out why you think that. Write those things down and keep a list next to your monitor. Review them each time you sit down. Put them into practice. A lot.

5. Perspective. Take a look at your own work from 2-3 years ago and look at how far you've come. You've probably covered more distance than you think. Even if you're not 100% happy with where you're at, the progress will be reassuring.

6. Finally, stop worrying about it. Think of some people that are really good at what they do: professional athletes, professional plumbers, professional anything. When they're in the clutch moments, they're not stressing about how what they're doing looks, they're in "the zone," their mind lets go and instincts take over. Programmers develop those instincts too.

You're probably much better than you think, and you're only going to get better every time you program. :)

Just cruising around the websites of local stores in my town, their websites that were made 5-10 years ago still look the same as ever, and for the most part still function the same as ever. (The exceptions being when they relied on third-party includes that have since gone out of business.)

HTML5 is just HTML, and unless that fundamentally changes, it should work "forever." JavaScript too, again, unless you're linking to frameworks hosted by companies that later go out of business. JavaScript usually adds, but rarely takes away.

The look of your HTML site 10 years from now may look more outdated than your Flash site does, but as long as we're all still around, I'd wager that they'd both still work, provided Flash player is still a thing.

Agreed. And in those charts, a view of Firefox 8 puts the memory back up a bit. A quick look makes it feel like two steps forward, one step back.

Where as Southwest has open seating (no assigned seats) and boarding groups, this has assigned seating, with those seats being placed into groups at random rather than by location in the plane.

In W.'s book (Decision Points), he wrote that he regretted the way congress named it because it eludes that if you don't support it, you're not a Patriot.

Not that that's of much help, but it's interesting to know that not everyone responsible for it was behind the name.

On the boredom thing, I think it depends. I think there is a lot of wisdom in what Merlin is saying, but sometimes it can take him 15 minutes worth of mixed metaphors and magical tangents to get to a point better found in a minute or so. This show is particularly guilty in the earlier episodes.

For me, I think I prefer reading his writing. While also lengthy, it's been edited and trimmed back. It focuses on just the metaphors that full apply.

(Although for long car/train rides, Back to Work is fantastic.)

For what it's worth, last night -- before and after the presidential address -- on the bottom of a bunch of TV channels (ESPN for one) the reports were that the operation was carried out last week, not yesterday afternoon. You may have been wrong, but you certainly aren't crazy. :)

I remember people saying this about the Wii before it came out.

Sorry, trouble unregistering services with Boxcar. He'd turn off notifications, but they'd keep on coming.

I use GoDaddy for all of my domains and I don't understand what all of the complaints are about. I may host 40ish domains through them, and I've never had a problem with price, support or control over any of my domains.

These days it seems like leaving GoDaddy is the cool thing to do. If a company's marketing tactics or a CEO's out-of-office actions put you off, then that's one thing, but as for the product itself and how well it performs: GoDaddy performs as well as anything else I've seen for what I consider a fair price.

(Their hosting, however, is a totally different story…)

It looks nicer than most of the Twitter apps out there, but I don't think I'm leaving Echofon yet. I love the desktop/iPhone/iPad sync, built-in push notifications and muting capabilities.

(I know there's Boxcar, but I've seen friends have trouble unsubscribing from Boxcar effectively, that's a bit worrisome to me however fringe case it may be.)

Agreed, just think of the number of "golf pros" out there that can't even make the tour. Every course has at least one, and these days most driving ranges have them. Unless he discovers that he happens to have some hidden raw talent, his chances are slim-to-none.

Would love to see this with an example featuring 50 or 100 sides. I'd be interested to see the rendering speed/delays in each browser.

Either way, good stuff.

I'm not really commenting on the price chosen, but the choice to charge for it. I've also created a jQuery plugin or two. I released it for free and now spend a reasonable amount of time answering questions about support, implementation, etc.

For some reason in my mind I had always assumed that open source type things have to be done for free: the building, the support, etc. Seeing someone doing something others helps put that in perspective.

Or, in short: I wish I was smarter about it and more business-savvy.

If you go back to the homepage, he's offering the plugin for commercial use for $37. I like this idea of monetizing the use of plugins, especially ones so well-built. (He's also offering direct support for $17, another interesting idea.)

I work at a big-ish ad agency, but I aspire to do something more.

I suppose I'm in the "problem" audience here as I usually go to Netflix with a particular title in mind. The title is almost always not available for instant watching, and I've come to the point where I just assume it isn't on Netflix.

Netflix may have a ton of streamable content, but if you have to approach it from a non-specific point-of-view, it's questionable how valuable a service it is for people like me.

Right, but the idea is that things are becoming instantly available again. It's not that these devices don't take any time at all from a cold start, but the fact that we're leaving things in standby mode these days. I don't power down my iPhone each time I'm done using it, I just lock it.

People seem really up-in-arms about this. I don't see the harm in having people look through the information and making recommendations. It's what the people do with these recommendations that matter.

One person that disagrees with something (for whatever reason) probably won't be enough to abandon research on it. I'm cool with taking a look at what is there.

If this all goes through, I suppose it's only a matter of time before websites detect your Do Not Track preferences and essentially limit the content you can see like the pay-walls some online content providers have now. "Add this site to your Do Not Track exception-list to view full articles."

I'm growing tired of these comparisons. For me: I prefer Mac. Other people prefer Windows. I actually have one of the new MacBook Airs (the 13" upped to 4gb RAM and 256gb hard drive) and it's hands down the best Mac I've purchased.

This doesn't mean that if I bought an equally priced (and benchmark-ed-ly faster) Windows machine that I'd be happier. I would basically just have a machine that is a little bit faster with an interface that I strongly do not prefer. Saving a couple bucks in this way would not make me happy.

These comparisons seem great for people that are truly apathetic to their interface, environment and workflow... the only people I know that fit that description are not playing Call of Duty.

I'm not saying that Mac is better than Windows. I'm saying my preference is a Mac, and with the perceived price-per-power that I normally feel with Macs, I feel like I got a great deal. It's quick, the battery lasts about twice as long as I'd ever need it to, and I'm happy with my purchase.

And at the end of the day, that is what matters.

I'm doing that no-Flash-plugin-on-my-Mac thing and couldn't get uploading to work (and I also see a box noting a missing plugin). I "let go to upload," but the window just sat there. Switching to Chrome (which has Flash built in), everything worked fine.

As others have said, just having a standard upload button would work nicely. Same with click-to-copy, there doesn't seem to be a way to get the URL without Flash. Detect Flash, and then add in the "goodies" like that, otherwise the interface is much less usable.

Other than that, when Flash is installed, the interface is nice and easy to use. It's a great start and I look forward to more!

Running on Firefox 3.6 on a Mac, both sides were very similar speeds. Didn't really see a change at all. Good concept and great execution.

We generally have a series of 1 on 1s, each interviewer with a different discipline with a little bit of overlap. This way it's more of a conversation rather than someone being grilled on stage.

Some may prefer the N on 1, but for me I see that I can get a lot more out of people just by myself. People are more relaxed, and I can get a feel for who I'll be working with, not just the person that showed up in the interview.

After all of the 1 on 1s, we'll sit in a room and talk about what we learned and how we felt. Everyone gives a gut-reaction rating and go from there. It takes more time and resources, but for us our hire-quality is... well... higher.

We just downloaded it and tried it (bringing my total Facetime experiences to two, both of which occurred about 10 feet from the person on the other end). The interface is more iOS-y than normal for OS X. The picture quality was pretty good (the Mac being wired, iPhone 4 being wireless of course).

Simple to use, pretty good stuff.

I like this train of thought. Who better to know who can replace Steve Jobs than Steve himself? (Maybe he just sees a lot of himself in Zuckerberg.)

Was this option not available? It seems like the only convenience is the bundling here, or were Mifis never without contract before?

We were just in Canada in early September. As soon as we crossed the border, AT&T send me a warning-text saying, "you're roaming now, data is $15/mb, so heads up." (Obviously paraphrased, but the number is real.)

However, it was still hard to know when we were and weren't using data. There are options in the iPhone to turn cellular data on/off (which needs to be on to use GPS), and not to allow data roaming, but I still was unsure of when it was being used.

Our bill ended up being $217 for the month. It could have went much worse.