greyhat

My linked-in doesn't really have anything related to my web experience, but here it is nonetheless: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/brian-farr/30/b67/b61

No formal portfolio at the moment, but I finished http://kristenbasham.com/ for a photographer friend this summer, and I'm working on a winery website on WordPress ( http://winetree.farrspace.com/ ), which will be finished as soon as they send me the rest of the initial content =)

I have previously done things as simple as a 3 page static website for my aunt's music company, to as complex as a PHP & database driven weblog for myself with users and music sections, and a "static site" CMS for a city government, along with design and content.

Thanks for responding.

I've tried Wordpress for this purpose in the past, and just took a look at it again, but since I don't need, and in fact don't want a blog or comments, these are just extra complexity that need disabled. In the several minutes I looked, I could not even find a global comments disable option. (Unless this is different for Wordpress.com hosted blogs.)

Also, Wordpress has such a bad reputation for security that I would be hesitant to use it even if it offered the best in page organization and editing. This could just be a consequence of it being the biggest target, but its not something I want to deal with.

I reported an issue related to the $ command:

https://bitbucket.org/egaga/open-vim/issue/1/tutorial-sectio...

I find this extremely hard to believe. Have you visited freelancing sites to check this assumption?

Do you know any good places to look for sysadmin jobs that might be more open?

I'm about to graduate BSCS from an engineering school, and every networking job I've seen wants experience + CCNA/CCNP, and the system administration jobs want BSCS + experience. I have 5+ years of part time IT experience and a summer of full time basically admin level experience and yet I can't even get interviews. Pretty depressing. =|

Seconded. Extremely entertaining, I was not expecting that.

Upvoted for rainbow parentheses, which I just added to my .emacs =D

Amazing. Check out his other stuff too, this guy is some kind of crazy browser genius. And I mean that in the greatest possible way.

I'm sorry, but it is not 10 years old. The original release of Windows XP was late 2001 (9 years ago). Most people are running Service Pack 2 (6 years ago) or Service Pack 3 (2 years ago).

I currently have no reason to switch to Windows 7, but if I do I really really hope I can change the shell to something approximating Windows 2000 and lacking the transparency and pseudo-Dock that they have going.

http://lucacardelli.name/indexArtifacts.html (click on fonts)

Whereas in a socialized system, we can let the government decide when you are old or sick enough to not be cared for.

America drives the rest of the world in health care, from the best doctors to the best equipment to the best drug company research. Where would we be without that?

Summary: Act like simple generalizations are somehow profound because they don't explicitly include the word "probably".

It's really jarring how this article switches between talking about linked lists and then explaining what multitasking is... is this for technical people or not? Reminds me of mainstream news coverage of any technology subject...

Thanks, I actually did fix it when I originally installed FF3, but I was referring to the behavior that everyone else sees by default. If it was a checkbox in the normal Firefox settings, that would be one thing, but its buried in a collection of keys and values with little documentation...

That brings me to another thing, the oh-so-cutesy "This might void your warranty" warning for about:config. I know they think they're being funny, but what would be a lot more useful is to actually explain whats going on, rather than scare users. I adjusted something for a less technical friend once, on their request, and they were slightly upset by the idea that Firefox could void the warranty on their computer. Seems rather immature, coming from the "Mozilla Corporation" with their flagship software...

This is fairly easily done already with many sites, if they accept an HTTP GET argument, using bookmark keywords... you can set up a bookmark to say, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s and then visit "w Firefox" to go to the Firefox Wikipedia page...

I'm not sure its useful for anything beyond search or direct navigation though...

Err... what?

* I hope they don't copy iTunes, with its extremely slow interface, lack of features, lack of extensibility, lack of options... etc...

* No tabs: They must use tabs in some confused and different way than me. Generally I have one window per browsing task, e.g. one for Gmail, another for HN with tabs of articles and comment pages I'm reading, etc... ironically it was much easier to work with 10+ tabs before the changes of Firefox 3 where they would scroll off the screen because of their fairly large minimum width... Maybe if people are using one window only, and trying to keep their mail, social networking, online radio, and everything else under the sun open all day, they might get confused, but this is sort of a solved problem. Just open another window.

* Taskfox/Ubiquity: umm, what? Most searches I do in Firefox go right to the built in search box with a simple Ctrl+K, couldn't be easier. I have over the years, starting in Firefox 2, added a few keyword searches to the location bar, because I don't like changing the search box. I have w for wikipedia, and so on. This seems similar, but I'm not sure of the utility of opening Wikipedia in a tiny dropdown... how is that faster, easier to read, or any other good quality? It seems like some kind of half hearted attempt at taking an autocompleting command line and adding some that useful on the web, but I don't see anything... useful.

* Possibly unrelated gripe: I took a while to "upgrade" to Firefox 3 from v2 because I didn't like the "AwesomeBar" and a couple of other interface changes. While I am mostly used to it now, I still can't reliably get the AwesomeBar to autocomplete some URLs. It seems to fixate on the first match, often not displaying the second match until I actually type the full URL, if at all. Not to mention the fact that even when it works, its not as fast as the Firefox 2 behavior of naively autocompleting visited URLs. I don't need to autocomplete my bookmarks, that's why they are bookmarks! I click on them!

I like Firefox, I have since Phoenix 0.4 or so, but I really don't know what they're doing anymore...

For a much more insightful breakdown, http://stimuluswatch.org/ has a pretty interesting listing that allows people to vote, comment, and offer arguments for and against individual items.

Read the fine print(!):

* Tax Relief - includes $15 B for Infrastructure and Science, $61 B for Protecting the Vulnerable, $25 B for Education and Training and $22 B for Energy, so total funds are $126 B for Infrastructure and Science, $142 B for Protecting the Vulnerable, $78 B for Education and Training, and $65 B for Energy.

So the largest bubble, tax relief, actually includes the other bubbles? Wouldn't the normal expectation that if there is one large bubble marked tax relief that it actually represent tax relief and not science spending? Or is that just an almost transparent attempt to pander to people who want tax cuts? Help me understand this!

The design of this and whitehouse.gov drive me crazy. The gratuitous use of italics randomly in headings always seems to emphasize the wrong part of the sentence. Right on the front page of this site we have "Your money AT work". Now why on earth would you emphasize the least important word in the phrase? It makes it sound like someone who can't quite make out some handwriting is narrating the page. Maybe a minor nitpick that not everyone notices, but in my case I find it really detracts from the readability and professional veneer these sites are trying to achieve.

When did the .GOV namespace become a wide open frontier for politicking? recovery.gov as a name flies directly in the face of the rules and suggestions for .gov, being a general and vague word. Although I will admit, its not nearly as bad as change.gov, featuring the phony Office of the President Elect nonsense.

It is also a political opinion statement, with the implicit assumptions that recovery is needed from something, and that the government should do it.

Why can't the BLS or Treasury or anything else host a website to explain this stuff? Or why not go one step further and create a US Economics website to teach people economics and track and explain current US statistics?

And don't even get me started on the new whitehouse.gov.

So why don't you show how he's wrong?

It might be sarcasm, and he does already post a fair amount about both subjects, but he has a point. You just have a smear.

(I'd still take a slashdot comment over many other websites)

Hmm, maybe more people agree with this guy than I thought. I have used all of the windowing systems I mentioned, and I vastly prefer being able to see open windows, with the few things that need to run in the background being tucked away in the tray. The OS X dock just seems wierd to me, in terms of being able to quickly access open windows and to get a good idea what is running on your system.

I agree with you partly, but if everyone did this, where would the innovation in CSS be? A lot of people that have done new things and pushed the envelope in CSS seem to have brought skills from the print design world...

With judicious use of images and some other techniques, almost anything can be done in CSS. It just shouldn't be the starting point for your visual design, imho.

Hmm, what is 'CSS Design' exactly?

This guy seems to be conflating design, which has principles that apply to newspapers, magazines, billboards, interactive kiosks, and web sites, with CSS, one specific technology for implementing your website's style.

No one should be worried about specific technical flaws in IE6's implementation of CSS at the same time they are worrying about how much white space they want to use in their design, whether to use a 2 or 3 column layout.

This article might have some good information here or there, but I'm not sure it is conceptually laid out well. This leads it to read more like "10 steps to a sweet web page!!!" than an introduction to design for the web.

My somewhat unoriginal advice: Read about design, decide how you want your page to look based on its contents, sketch it out, pick some colors, and THEN worry about translating it to XHTML/CSS.

I don't understand this guy's rage against the tray. Almost every desktop system, be it OS X, KDE, Gnome, or XP has something similar. What would he prefer? A taskbar entry for wireless networks? No information at all?

He also comments that we are "finally" given options to control tray icons... he must not be too observant then, because starting in XP you could choose to always hide or always show icons, or leave them alone. (e.g. to tell your Antivirus to always hide until you expand, but make sure that your instant messaging app stays in view.)

Maybe its just me, but these new OS reviews and previews are always the most ignorant, half baked and opinionated pieces of tech journalism...

Ah, if you had called it clean or minimalist then I would have agreed...

I guess it really comes down to taste after that =)

Hmm... evidently one man's gorgeous is another man's austere, monochrome, and drab.

I don't know, being an external PR rep for a large corporation to run your blog and keep your stock prices up seems extremely sketchy to me...

Even this inane article about how apple is sooo cool because they now sell phones includes a passing reference to why they felt the need to charge people for an iPod touch update.

He may have his long boring article full of numbers, but in the real world people change phones all the time, and lots of normal people are just as impressed with other manufacturers touch-screen phones, or don't want a touch screen at all.