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michaelcgorman

203 karma · joined December 16, 2010

http://about.me/michaelcgorman
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michaelcgorman··on Show HN: CaptainObvio.us - a place to share ideas
Just a tiny, trivial, aesthetic/grammar change: on http://captainobvio.us/auth/login you say "Login to Captain Obvious". I'd change that to "Log in …".
michaelcgorman··on See how many times a URL has been shared on Facebook
Looks like hashbangs mess up the counting; e.g. http://graph.facebook.com/http://www.twitter.com/ and http://graph.facebook.com/http://www.twitter.com/#!michaelcg...
michaelcgorman··on Why Fahrenheit is better than Celsius.
I've started using Celsius in my everyday life. As an American, it's not the easiest thing to do, but I'm used to that from my use of the 24-hour clock and the metric system (even my car is in km/h). I prefer Celsius because it seems much less arbitrary. (A physicist-friend is trying to get me to switch to Kelvin, but absolute-zero has no implication on whether or not I should wear a coat when I leave my house.)

Fellow developers: please allow me to use the measurement system I choose to use. In my transition, I realized how much we take this stuff for granted and assume everyone does things the way we do it ourselves. It doesn't take much work to give people a toggle b/t Fahrenheit and Celsius, 12/24-hour clock, or English/Metric.

michaelcgorman··on Poll: What OS do you currently use?
I use a CR-48 for email/Twitter/Facebook/HN/etc., and everything else when I'm not at home.
michaelcgorman··on Microsoft made their own IE6-countdown site.
I spent two summers interning at a giant insurance company (no self-installed software was allowed anywhere on the network). In 2008, everyone in the entire company was forced to use IE6. In 2009, they had transitioned to IE7 and developers company-wide were preparing their webapps for a rollout of IE8. Sure, everyone was still on XP, but even the higher-ups had begun to realize how important it was to update the browser.
michaelcgorman··on "…encourage your users to enter stronger passwords."
Handling of special characters could use some improvement. For instance, "Hello" (no quotes) has her in her underwear, but with "<H;>/", she still has pants on. That said, this site is more about the presentation than the algorithmic implementation; I'm sure someone will fork her on GitHub and teach her to keep her clothes on longer.
michaelcgorman··on List of all "Nokia Plan"-meme sites
Apparently Plan S is to do all of them.
michaelcgorman··on An idea for getting rid of the hashbang problem
SDCH looks to be going after a similar problem, but it would cache the templates between browsing sessions rather than just among consecutive pageviews. I'm not sure how well it would work for AJAX-y sites which rely on maintaining Javascript state, though, but potentially you could still use, e.g., localStorage for that purpose.
michaelcgorman··on An idea for getting rid of the hashbang problem
Another idea could be to include the separator character as part of the attribute (e.g. zone="profile:" or zonechar=":"). I'm not a huge fan of imposing mandatory URL structure, either, but I chose the colon since it is already valid and it's relatively pretty. (/profile:michaelcgorman looks nicer than /profile.php?id=michaelcgorman, at least to me)

Edit: I think I remember seeing something diff-like when working on a custom CalDAV feed a couple of years ago. Though that may have been CalDAV-specific, like a date-range.

michaelcgorman··on An idea for getting rid of the hashbang problem
All pushState does, AFAIK, is add things to your browsing history; it alone doesn't affect the content you receive. It does, however, make it possible (for recent browsers with JS enabled) to use the back button to navigate through AJAX-ed sites.
michaelcgorman··on An idea for getting rid of the hashbang problem
I've been playing around with this idea for a while, and given this week's context, I figured I might as well throw it out there. My main questions for HN are: (a) is this a good idea, (b) do you see any big pitfalls I'm overlooking, and (c) how might we get this to happen?
michaelcgorman··on Show HN: my new project, an anti-snub dating site
What happens if I have more than one email address and my crush enters a different one than I did?
michaelcgorman··on The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)
I like the http:/ typo. It really shows how unfamiliar the general public was with the internet just fifteen years ago.
michaelcgorman··on Google Needs Sex
I think he's suggesting a genetic algorithm... Google-style organisms, competing for fewest retried searches, most-different front-page results, etc., that over time merge and split in various ways. Seems pretty similar to some of the tactics Google's already trying to me.
michaelcgorman··on Governments shouldn’t have a monopoly on Internet governance
To me, this story was interesting to HN not because Google was commenting, but because Vint Cerf was. When he writes about Internet governance, I listen. The UN forms committees and working groups all the time; I'm not going to sign a petition to one of them unless someone I trust on the matter feels so strongly about it.