clipperhouse.com

Making Unicode things fast

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

By “Unicode things” I mean programs that process UTF-8. The basic logic of such programs is typically:

Allocations are a dependency

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I like to reduce or eliminate allocations in my projects, which use garbage-collected languages (Go and C#). Like you, I want efficiency – both in CPU cycles and memory.

YAGNI for distributed rate limiters

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

So, I am working on this rate limiter. It’s in-process and in-memory. I look at other fine rate limiters, and many offer the ability to store the state in a shared system, such as Redis. Should I offer that?

So, you’re inspecting strings on the hot path

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A follow-up to So, you’re splitting strings on the hot path

I have enjoyed optimizing my Go library for splitting (tokenizing) words according to the Unicode standard.

Designing a composable rate limiter

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Having used rate limiters a few times, I’ve observed that they must be thoughtfully designed. In particular, they are typically comprised of several policies which we wish to stack on one another. It can get messy.

The surprises of CDC on production workloads

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Motivated by this Twitter post by Craig Kerstiens

CDC (change data capture) tends to surprise in terms of expense on the production database. Each write becomes two writes — once to the system of record, and once to the changefeed.

So, you’re splitting strings on the hot path

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Can we make it less expensive? Probably yes. We’ll talk about Go and C# in this post.

90% of physics in 900 words

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I had a physics professor who said the most important skill in science was to be able to characterize a system quickly. Be approximately right instead of precisely wrong. This has stuck with me.

C# (almost) has implicit interfaces

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Background: I move between Go and C# a lot, and like to compare them

Tips for moving between Go and C#

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I’ve implemented a Unicode tokenizer in in Go and in C#, and my career has been ~equally divided between those languages. Here are some tips moving between them.

Go-style “alongside” testing in C# and .Net Core

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I move between Go and C#, and one idiom I like in Go is tests living alongside the things they are testing, right in the same project. In addition to style preference, it (IMHO) more easily allows testing internal functions. In the .Net world, having a separate test project is traditional.

Apple as MVNO for LLMs

Sun, 26 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s expected that Apple will be improving Siri in the upcoming iOS 18, exploiting the progress that Large Language Models (LLMs) have made over the past year or so. How might they do it?

Generics as builtin typeclasses

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In the spirit of Go’s ‘good enough’ type system, here’s a thought experiment for ‘good enough’ generics…

Saying true things is hard

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I think the replication & open science movement is great. I come from an epistemological, first-principles sort of mindset, and so I find this very encouraging:

Query expansions in Stack Overflow Talent

Thu, 26 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Stack Overflow Talent aims to connect the right company with the right developer. We call this a two-sided market – developers on one side and recruiters on the other.

Does TypeScript make for more performant JavaScript?

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I have a theory that the use of TypeScript de facto makes for more performant JavaScript, by making the runtime’s “type prediction” more accurate.

Having the courtesy to be wrong

Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

One characteristic I see in accountable managers is having the courtesy to be wrong.

Championship in practice (at Stack Overflow)

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is a follow-on to my introductory post on championship, please give that a read for background.

Championship

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Engineering and product managers often talk about “ownership” of features, when what we want is championship. When we orient ourselves around assignment of tasks, we ship a worse product.

A career decision influenced by Nassim Taleb

Sun, 10 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

On the occasion of reading Nassim Taleb’s latest book, an anecdote about how he influenced a career decision of mine.

Static file hosting with active content

Tue, 29 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The combination of Hugo & Netlify to host my blog has turned out to make easy things easy, and hard things possible.

Stack Overflow tag correlations

Sat, 26 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A tool to discover correlations between tags on Stack Exchange sites. Start typing a tag name below, or click one of the popular ones.

How to move from Medium to static hosting with Jekyll or Hugo

Thu, 24 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I recently moved my blog from Medium to static generation with Hugo & hosting with Netlify. I prefer static hosting for performance reasons, and because Markdown is so nice.

Jargon demo

Fri, 18 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Jargon is a Go package with tokenizers and lemmatizers. Source & docs.

The makings of a strategy

Wed, 02 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A product process is typically something like Strategy → Discovery → Specification → Build → Delivery.

Toward less injection

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a habit that may help to reduce the complexity of your dependency injection tree. Ask yourself: how much of an injected dependency are you actually using?

Alikewise (dating by the book)

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Thank you

As of December 2016 we have shut down Alikewise.com. We are thrilled with the response to the site and we hope you found romance, or at least a good read.

KPIs are software

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It’s easy to think of key performance indicators as a task to be tacked on to the end of a project. Rather, KPIs should be understood as a product like any other, and so:

Time well spent

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Critical to developer and company success is the idea of time well spent. Optimistically, the company’s and the dev’s incentives are aligned in this regard.

Decker, for a prettier Twitter

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I made a Chrome extension which makes Twitter.com’s UX more tolerable, called decker. It:

Lore

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Code has a user experience. Our methods have a UX. Our data models have a UX.

Principles of null-free programming

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Nulls are a notorious source of bugs in many programming languages. Here, I sketch out a way to avoid them, using C# for illustration.

Imagining version control for APIs

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Versioning is, right now, merely a human label. We have helpful conventions like semver, but one still relies on human judgment as to the definition of a “notable” change.

Three ways the new iOS ad blocking hurts Google

Fri, 18 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Apple’s ad blocking API is good for users and bad for Google, in 3 ways:

Three outcomes of the adpocalypse

Mon, 07 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It appears that Internet advertising is going through a bit of a shakeout. Ad blocking is becoming more pervasive (perhaps 30% of users), and a study by Google indicates that as many as 50% of ad “impressions” are never actually put in front of a human being.

Improve the median, not the mean

Mon, 20 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I like seeing Google Fiber prompt incumbent dinosaurs into boosting speeds. It’s great.

Liquidity, open source and security

Sat, 04 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Jeff has a thoughtful post about open source, security and incentives. A few points stood out to me.

Statements are statements, and expressions are expressions (in Go)

Fri, 03 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I got trolled by a facetious article on Go on April 1. But it did trigger a conversation about why Go doesn’t do certain things other languages do.

Theory of the firm: opt-in initiatives

Sun, 08 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve become adamant about making internal initiatives opt-in for the following reason: it brings more information to bear.

Bugs are a failure of prediction

Sat, 07 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

We think of bugs as flaws in code. This is incorrect, or at best, banal.

The legacy ad industry is wrong about ad blockers

Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I was recently directed to a couple of papers on browser ad-blocking software (here and here). They are not so much alarmist as they are self-serving and hindered by status quo bias.

Embedding a struct declaration in a text template in Go

Sat, 31 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a nice little technique I came across in developing gen.

Say you have a text template, and that template is intended to output Go code. You’d like to pass a data structure into the template, and have the structure appear in the template as its own value literal.

Uncanny valley tech recruiting

Thu, 22 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As recruiter pitches show up in my inbox, it’s clear there’s a lot of “fake it til you make it” when it comes to tech terminology.

Yes, net neutrality is conservative. That’s the problem.

Sun, 16 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Fred Wilson makes the argument (here and here) that net neutrality is a conservative idea. That’s correct, and that’s the problem.

My security and privacy tools

Tue, 14 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A quick list of the things I use to improve my web experience:

A type system in runtime’s clothing

Mon, 25 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. — Greenspun

Hierarchy and orthogonality in C# and Go

Mon, 25 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Prompted by this question I got to thinking about methods in C# and Go. It’s another example, I realized, of Go’s (logical) insistence on orthogonality and (stylistic) insistence on flatness/lack of hierarchy.

Know your guarantees, Go edition

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was directed to a thread about a poor soul who started a project in Go, eventually had to hand it off to the community, and discovered that his original source no longer compiled, due to third-party dependencies having changed. Key quote: Not even the original programmer, with the original files on his original dev machine, can compile the source anymore.

The two edges of “culture fit”

Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a smart and funny bit about culture fit. I think it’s brutal and by and large true. [1]

How a savvy landlord would handle Airbnb

Sat, 21 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Megan McArdle describes the understandable discomfort that some tenants and property owners have about Airbnb’ers coming into their buildings.

De facto immutability

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Another in a series of posts wherein I spitball about things that computer scientists already know, but have only just occurred to me.

What Netflix bought from Comcast is a CDN

Thu, 08 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

With the hubbub about net neutrality, fast lanes and Netflix, I though I would illustrate what we are dealing with technologically.

Middle class in NYC

Sun, 04 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There is a notion I hear from time to time that earning (say) $100,000 while living in NYC makes one “middle class”. The logic being, NYC is expensive and $100K doesn’t go as far as it would in other places. Or, that many nearby people earn similar or higher incomes, putting one “in the middle”.

NYC doesn’t need to be Silicon Valley

Mon, 28 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

An idea for bookifying the web

Sat, 19 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I use Pocket, a handy “read it later” tool. The idea is that I can “pocket” a web page by clicking a bookmarklet (or browser extension), and the page is:

Web Components: have we not been here before?

Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Addy Osmani describes Web Components, of which an important part is custom tags. The promise: In one word, a future with Web Components is declarative. JavaScript still exists in this future, but is relegated back to a role where it acts as a glue holding the other bits of a component together. Web Apps in the near future will be composed almost entirely from elements (tags). Some of these elements (like the <audio> tag) will be given to you by the browser but others like <slide-show> will be custom elements provided by UI libraries or you can write it yourself.

Nesting is state

Sun, 30 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There are stylistic debates about how much nesting or indentation one should choose in code. This slide and the one that follows illustrate the issue well. The slide refers to “cognitive load” without explaining, and it occurs to me that nesting is state.

Ben Horowitz on wage-fixing

Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I am really, really enjoying Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It’s blunt and refreshing, and lives up to its title. It’s a nice counter to the notion that running a business is dreamy and life-affirming all the time.

What Stack Overflow and Go have in common

Fri, 21 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working at Stack for over three years now, and over the last six months or so I’ve been doing playing with a programming language called Go. Both are highly regarded and, for many, controversial, and I’ve realized what they have in common.

How I optimize conversations

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I had a realization some years ago in working with a person at a previous firm. After many interactions, I noticed that my productivity, my happiness, my motivation consistently were diminished after dealing with them.

Threshold thinking

Tue, 18 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I consider our industry’s current approach to ads to be wildly inefficient. Very “good” click-through rates are in the single-digit percentages, and more likely one or two orders of magnitude below that.

The trouble with interfaces in Go

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I am working on a tool for generics-like functionality in Go. Despite what you may have heard, Go does have generic functionality, in that you can create (e.g.) methods which operate on any type, by using interface{} — the interface that all types implement. For example, you can do something like:

New release of gen

Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve a new release of gen, the generics-like tool for Go. It includes API changes so I suggest reading the changelog. Highlights:

Another reason publishers should adopt SSL: referrers

Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I previously mentioned that advertising-based publishers should embrace SSL as a product upgrade, a service to their customer. Here’s a more self-interested take.

Publishers and SSL

Sun, 15 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a good article about why news sites on the web are slow to embrace SSL. The short answer is, the advertising services they use are not prepared to support it.

Multi-credentialing

Mon, 28 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

John Maeda of RISD has a riff about the future of college credentials, including the notion of an automated ‘degree’, which is generated by a machine based on the sum your achievements. He makes an analogy to Coinstar: pour in a bunch of individually valuable stuff, get out some paper which aggregates its value.

Progress bars cannot be accurate

Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We all see progress bars and some of us even implement them. And we’ve all seen how hilariously wrong they can be. There’s a reason for that.

Your site doesn’t need a novel progress indicator

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

There’s been healthy talk about progress indicators in the age of ajax. In our will-to-design I think some things are being missed.

Language and social signaling

Sat, 24 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I like language. I came to it causally at first, and more formally of late.

1.6% of what?

Sun, 11 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The NSA has published a paper claiming that it “touches” only 1.6% of Internet traffic. Now, 1.6% of something the size of the Internet is already enormous, but let’s demonstrate that the number represents are much larger share of human communications than one might intuit.

Incidence of compulsion

Thu, 18 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is an encouraging story about Google exploring the ability to encrypt ‘sitting files’ in their Google Drive product. This is distinct from something like SSL, which only protects items in transit; most companies store the canonical file in the clear.

Epistemology and human factors: deal with ‘em

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This study that Google conducted to find predictors for success in their hiring process is very interesting. Among the things that are not predictive of success: the candidate’s GPA, their ability to solve brain-teasers, and which manager did the interview.

OCD is id, high standards are ego

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

As programmers, we have a powerful tool that we deploy often: OCD.

A few thoughts on flat

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I played with iOS7 today for a bit and discussed the flat design with a couple of Stack’ers. I also read Matt Gemmell’s review, and John Gruber’s take on flatness.

For want of parens in Ruby

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Ruby is beautiful in many ways. The opportunities to create tight, readable code are impressive. More than other languages, it affords the opportunity to make code look like what it does.

Fasctimidating

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Chris Baus laments that developers are rarely impressed by other developers. It’s often true. But why are developers hard to (outwardly) impress?

Alerts as spam

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I went to a talk last night by John Allspaw at Etsy, about alerts and how they are hard to get right.

What if ‘source code’ were a serialized syntax tree?

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

At the risk of revealing my lack of a CompSci degree: what if ‘source code’ were replaced by serialized syntax trees?

Debugging is debugging

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I use CoffeeScript here and there. And JavaScript everywhere else.

Depending on the scenario, and this is a matter of taste, CoffeeScript is more elegant, readable, and usable.

Your phone is faster than Amtrak’s wifi

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Amtrak is improving its wifi, it claims. Fine. The problem is, it’ll never be faster than your phone’s 4G connection.

Ad blocking, like piracy, is a market phenomenon

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A French ISP has started blocking ads at the router level for its customers, enabled by default. Advertisers are, not surprisingly, upset.

Labor costs make way for Maslow

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

That Apple, and other companies, are deciding to move manufacturing back to the United States is evidence of the diminishing importance of labor costs in decision-making. This implies several things.

A political approach to hiring creatives

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This article offers a lot of sound advice on hiring a designer. As techies, we’re often out of our depth in knowing what a good designer is — often, we hire a decorator instead (or as the article calls it, a stylist).

Microsoft’s political privacy game

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve suggested many times that Microsoft should disable third-party cookies by default in IE10 (and Safari does currently). This would be strategic for them: it devalues Google’s main income source and allows Microsoft to trumpet a commitment to privacy.

The good might be the enemy of the perfect with software patents

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I have a few concerns, relating to unintended consequences, with a proposed loser-pays bill on software patents.

The quaintness of “content” vs “infrastructure”

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a really informative article on the economics of Google’s fiber offer. One of the key takeaways is that Google’s ownership of high-bandwidth content (YouTube) gives them leverage in peering arrangements.

Two, billion-dollar UI mistakes in Windows 8

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I am very interested in Windows 8 both as a user and as a tech industry watcher. Big bet, big changes.

Resolution vs “real estate”

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The new Retina Macbook looks quite beautiful, but from a productivity standpoint I am a bit disappointed. While they have quadrupled the pixel count (to 2880 x 1800), they have not increased real estate, per se.

Fluency

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

At my ripe old age one might expect me to give up programming and focus more on management. Which I do, if informally. But I have never seen the need to put aside programming in order to manage.

This way madness lies (thankfully)

Mon, 28 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Tim Lee offers two views of the economic case for innovation. I am certainly more Hayekian — I think expertise and information is inherently dispersed and the Hayekian view is more granular, if you will. It’s more likely to discover and serve niches and inefficiencies.

Conservative and liberal

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The ideas of conservative and liberal have become very confused, and in many cases exactly backwards. Let’s try to understand them — as adjectives instead of nouns — and strip them of some connotations.

What’s next for Better Bird?

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve got a few hundred folks using Better Bird, my Chrome extension for fixing the Twitter web UI, and I’m thrilled.

The inorganic app

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It occurs to me, as I look at my Google+ stream for the first time in two months, the reason I never use it: it never had a chance to grow on me.

A failure of empathy

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Consider for a moment the logic of the leading paragraph of this article: Research suggests that consumers spend only about one second looking at nutrition information when making myriad choices. A parent dashing through the grocery store aisles with kids in tow has to decide, in that one second, which is better: Triscuit vs. Saltines vs. Wheat Thins vs. Ritz? This is why Americans need a simple, standardized and truthful label on the front of all packaged foods.

C# should be truthy-y

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

While “truthy” values in JavaScript can cause no small amount of heartache, one must admit they help readability. For objects anyway, it’s very nice to say if (object) {…} and get on with business. If the object is null or undefined, “false” strikes me as a perfectly legitimate behavior in that context.

Nobody cares about “channels”

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

There are rumors afoot that Apple will offer TV channels as apps in an upcoming release. This might work as an interim idea, but it has no legs long-term.

Suspension of disbelief

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

You watch a movie. In order to get something from it, you have to enter the world that it presents. You must suspend disbelief.

Try “Better Bird”

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I created a Chrome extension to fix what I think are some rough edges and poor choices in the Twitter web app. Have a look:

Craigslist can help fix the NYC apartment market

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As I’ve written in the past, there are several unique inefficiencies to the Manhattan apartment market. Many can’t be helped in the short term, owing to an endemically tight market.

Owning a data type, or, be the switchboard

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I was chatting with my colleagues at Stack Exchange the other day and we wondered what it means to “own” a data type.

Disrupting the NYC rental information market

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Manhattan apartment rental market is unique, as anyone who has experienced it will tell you. The very low vacancy rate (high demand) allows for behavior that other markets don’t bear.

The friction constituency

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Having learned that both the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO support SOPA, it’s becoming clearer to me just how much of our economy is based on extracting rents from friction.

What legacy politicians actually fear

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I was at the PIPA/SOPA protest in front of the offices of Senators Schumer and Gillibrand today. All fine and good, but why should the senators care?

Quality of life in NYC

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Every time I get out of NYC, I am reminded at what we put up with to live here. It’s a known trope: we deal with sh*t that suburbanites couldn’t imagine, in exchange for being around amazing people (and companies, and $$).

Please don’t lobby

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I agree with Clay Johnson that the our industry’s ignorance of Congress might be greater than Congress’ ignorance of the Internet. He comes to the conclusion that we need to lobby more.

Me doing techno

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Watch the original first. Then:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dvltmlBVNU]

Why can’t mobile apps have URLs?

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Dave Winer laments that mobile apps are not universally addressable via a locator like a URL.

The binary web

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It’s easy to see the web as sets of advances that come in waves. The first was its emergence as a consumer (and corporate) phenomenon, starting with Netscape and continuing through Internet Explorer 6 (which, we often forget, was the first “legitimate” browser for many businesses).

The law is not Turing complete

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

In recent comments on Hacker News, I suggested, with some snark, that the definition of net neutrality is slippery and ad-hoc, and therefore exploitable. I was promptly voted down.

Going about your business, or pleasure

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t tried Google+ (pronounced ploo, the French way), but I note that there hasn’t been the dismissive pile-on that greeted Buzz and Wave. My meta-analysis is that they might be on to something.

Inversion of scarcity

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Every business, if it’s smart, should realize that the Internet has the ability to drop out its pricing floor, or more precisely, to eliminate the scarcity on which price depends. This is what is usually meant by the catchphrase “disruption.”

The NYT paywall is about segmenting, not security

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It may be intemperate of me, but why do geeks respond in such a…Pavlovian way when given the opportunity to assume another person’s stupidity? The latest exhibit is Gizmodo, claiming that the New York Times has implemented their paywall poorly.

Implicit vs. explicit social graphs

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

There are two kinds of social graphs in the world, explicit and implicit. The explicit ones are the most rare and give their owners disproportionate market values.

Design is information

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It seems to me the companies with the greatest customer loyalty are those where design has a strong presence in the corporate culture. I don’t mean this in a touchy-feely way. I mean that customer loyalty is worth billions of dollars, and most companies see fit to leave that on the table.

Every programming problem…

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

…can be entirely described in these four dimensions:

Cache: The browser is a cache for a web page, whose canonical version lives on a server. A web page is a cache for structured data, whose canonical version lives in (say) SQL. Structured data is a cache for bits that live on a spinning piece of rust. The questions for the programmer are, how similar is a piece of data to its canonical source, and how similar does it have to be?
Abstractions: You’ve hidden some words behind a smaller number of words. What words are you really saying, when you say DoThing()? It’s turtles all the way down.
Scope: What does this variable (symbol) mean at this moment? Will it mean the same thing a moment later, after we’ve gone off and done other stuff? There is a symbol over there which seems to be the same guy. Is it? And if I change it here, what happens elsewhere?
Delimiters: Aka encoding. Nothing is understandable without rules describing where meaning begins and ends. White space is a delimiter between commands in your programs. Slashes are delimiters in URLs. HTML, JSON, GZIP: defined by delimiters and encoding.

Every bug fix is an exercise in asking one of these questions until the answer is satisfactory.

Fixing the jQuery “jump” on slide

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

You may notice in some situations, when using jQuery’s slideDown(), that the last little bit of the animation “jumps”. It feel un-smooth and frustrates those who like to dot our i’s. (Here an explanation.)

Chrome breaks 10% market share; modern browsers at 80%

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The headline say most of it. Google’s Chrome browser popped up over 10% market share for January. Modern browsers* are creeping up to around 80% market share, which means the user experience of the web is moving forward.

How Microsoft can make Visual Studio cool among the cool kids

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I am quite partial to ASP.net MVC and C#. I’ve played with other platforms, esp Ruby, which have appeal as well.

This is what a non-neutral net looks like

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Gogo, which offers in-flight Wi-fi on a bunch of airlines, is now offering Facebook at no charge — but access to other sites will cost $$.

A call for industry-wide pixel-doubling

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Computer screens have not changed much over the last 20 years, relative to other technologies like processing power and bandwidth. Yes, panels are better in many ways in terms of color accuracy and “resolution”. But most applications are designed around an assumption of 72 or 96 pixels per inch.

The Internet is not a public commons, and it is not Beetlejuice

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

There are some stories making the rounds that “the Internet” is a public commons built on private property. This is wrong.

The scourge of paid prioritization

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I received a pair of earmuffs today via Amazon Prime. Great service! They got to New York in just two days, all the way from a Nevada warehouse.

What Ricky Gervais doesn’t understand about God

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I am not a religious person. I also happen to believe that religious people bear the brunt of more everyday bigotry than most groups.

Ben Bernanke’s list of economic participants

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Bernanke: “The Federal Reserve cannot solve all the economy’s problems on its own. That will take time and the combined efforts of many parties, including the central bank, Congress, the administration, regulators and the private sector.”

A couple of easy wins with SQL indexes

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I was lucky enough to watch a great talk by SQL expert Brent Ozar courtesy of Fog Creek. A couple of actionable takeaways that stuck with me are about creating and choosing indexes.

Is Fred Wilson arguing for “Content Neutrality”?

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Fred Wilson, whom I admire, comments on a recent dust-up where a content provider blocked their programming from customers of a specific ISP. This is the kind of stuff that should not happen on the web. […]I see more signs every day that we need some basic rules governing Internet access. Maybe we shouldn’t call it Net Neutrality. Maybe we should call it a bill of rights for consumers on the Internet.

Market share for the taking, or, outrunning the bear

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Much of the commentary I’ve seen for today’s announcement of Windows Phone 7 revolves around whether Microsoft can catch up with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. Fair enough; feature-wise, they are in the same ballpark.

Avoiding “magic strings” in jQuery, C# and ASP.net MVC

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The longer I program, the less tolerance I have for “magic strings”. You might be familiar with them — they are strings that have programmatic meaning but are trapped between quotes in another language.

Alikewise learnings #1: DIY PR

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Thought I would write a few posts to reflect on what I’ve learned with my startup, Alikewise, day jobs, and NYC. This is the first.

Sherman’s law of prior knowledge, or, predicting the past

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

“When a disaster happens, large or small, there is a 100% chance that a headline will be written claiming ignored warnings.”

I’ve come to realize, that’s the narrative. It’s always the narrative, and the details of the incident matter little.

The busiest people at Apple right now…

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

…are the ones planning the hardware recall. The second busiest are the ones figuring out how to coat the antenna with an electrical insulator that doesn’t hurt the aesthetics.

When “infographics” jump the shark

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Mashable offers an “infographic” describing Google’s history in social networking. And it’s pretty and all well and good, except that the graphic adds no information.

HTTPS is the least of your problems

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It’s cool that the EFF is offering a Firefox extension to use SSL where it’s available. I prefer to encrypt things too, but really, that’s the least of your problems.

Stacking up

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I am happy to announce that I’ve taken a job over at Stack Overflow.

Beware the truth-tellers

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I find it is so funny and ironic when a person has to tell you they are telling the truth before they tell you the true thing that is truthful. Today, as part of a otherwise interesting and opinionated post, we learn: I try to be a totally dispassionate truth teller.

Please don’t write “efficient” CSS

Mon, 31 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Contra many smart people, I am going to make a contrarian request: please do not attempt to optimize your CSS for performance. Instead, please optimize for correctness, specificity and maintainability.

0.facebook.com is not neutral

Tue, 18 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A while back I mentioned the idea that some content sites would offer free shipping for their bits. It would be the inevitable result of metered pricing on the Internet, an idea with which major (wired) carriers are experimenting.

Adobe: call it Flash 11 already

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I feel like I’ve been hearing about Flash 10.1 forever. The earliest public announcement I can find is October 5 of last year. That’s over 6 months of development for a point release.

Standards: why?

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

There has been some fun stuff today following Steve Jobs missive on Flash and standards. Joe Hewitt (former Facebook and Mozilla dev and rock star): How it should go: browsers innovate differently, users pick the best one, later W3C standardizes what users chose, losing browsers conform.

Tip: random sort order in C#

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to randomize the display of a List on my site — meaning I would retrieve (say) 20 records, but display only 5, chosen at random. I was imagining a loop that generates a bunch of random indexes, which I use to individually pull elements from the list. Yuck.

Epistemology in everyday life

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In school, (cough) years ago, I did a bit of epistemology. It’s the study of knowledge. It asks the questions “why do we know that?” and “how will we find that out?”.

Dear tech journalists: please announce a one-year, self-imposed Apple embargo

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

San Mateo county police, presumably at the bidding of Apple, broke open the front the door of the home of the editor of a technology blog and seized his property. This is in relation to Gizmodo’s revelation of what is presumed to be the next iPhone.

Dear Facebook: let us define the relationships

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve begun implementing some of Facebook’s Open Graph on Alikewise, my dating startup. By Dare Obasanjo’s definition, books are our main “social object”.

“No carry-on fees” simply means everyone pays carry-on fees

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I can’t imagine why Congress is involved in this, but apparently it’s an outrage that airlines are charging fees for carry-on bags.

Entrepreneurship and health care

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Some folks are putting forward theories that the new health bill will increase entrepreneurship in the US, as individuals are freed from reliance on large employers for health care. I think the theory is both wishful and unempirical.

The point at which your project becomes bigger than your head

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve seen it argued that a measure of a good programmer is the amount of “stuff” they can keep in their head at one time.

The artificial distinction between “content” and “delivery”

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In the arguments over net neutrality, the discussion is often around “content” vs “delivery”. The concern is that the delivery people (ISPs) might cut off or otherwise extort the content people. Eg, what if Comcast slowed down YouTube so it could push its own video?

jQuery appears to be incompatible with IE9 preview

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It would appear that jQuery (1.4.2) is not compatible with the new IE9 preview:

Don’t confuse syntax with reasoning

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This article asks if programming is the new literacy: …we have in a sense returned to the Middle Ages or ancient Egypt, or even before. Then, if you needed to communicate your thoughts on paper, you couldn’t do it yourself. You had to hire a better-educated person — a scribe — who knew the writing code. Then, at the other end, you needed someone to read or decode it — unless, of course, you were “well educated,” that is, you had been taught to read and write and thus had become literate.

A few more reasons to use Progressive Enhancement

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Progressive Enhancement is a methodology where a web application is developed in layers. Each layer works correctly on its own, and additional layers on top enhance the user experience.

How about jQuery-style “property methods” for C#?

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s an idiom that I think would be useful in C#: “property methods” in the style of jQuery.

Net neutrality and preserving the dinosaurs

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I recently had a chat with a peer/CTO-type who has argued before Congress a local board on net neutrality. Got me thinking again. Even though I made these arguments in the mid 00’s (in a more, um, polemic venue) I thought it might be worth revisiting.

IE8 becomes #1 browser, Chrome up, Firefox plateaus

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We have January browser numbers. Firstly, we note that Internet Explorer 8 is now the most popular browser, overtaking IE6.

Google throws down the gauntlet on IE6; you and I get a free ride

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Today, Google announced that it will begin phasing out support on older browsers, most notably IE6, for Google Docs. It will take this step with Gmail and Calendar later in the year. This is a big step.

Preserving the back button on Ajax pages

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

So, I’ve been going a little Ajax crazy lately. I am using a progressive enhancement approach — make everything work solidly without Javascript, then drizzle on some Ajaxy goodness as refinement.

Will Apple emulate the “Kindle everywhere” strategy?

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I like the concept of e-books, if not their current state-of-the-art. The Kindle device sounds very impressive, I’ve only played with them a bit, and I know they have a lot of devoted fans.

Modal performance in browsers, or, exploiting z-index

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I did a little test. I am using jQuery UI’s dialog, and setting it to be draggable. Pretty standard stuff — after all, dragging windows around your computer is commonplace.

Breach by design

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It appears that the hack against Google was perpetrated via their law enforcement compliance system. As an eminent group of security experts argued in 2008, the trend toward building surveillance capability into telecommunications architecture amounts to a breach-by-design, and a serious security risk. As the volume of requests from law enforcement at all levels grows, the compliance burdens on telcoms grow also — making it increasingly tempting to create automated portals to permit access to user information with minimal human intervention.

Google’s China move: don’t be played

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Hat tip to Sarah Lacy for laying it out so well: Google is ready to burn bridges. This is not how negotiations are done in China, and Google has done well enough there to know that. You don’t get results by pressuring the government in a public, English-language blog post. If Google were indeed still working with the government this letter would not have been posted because it has likely slammed every door shut […] This was a scorched earth move, aimed at buying Google some good will in the rest of the world; Chinese customers and staff were essentially just thrown under the bus.

Netbooks and computer theft

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I am sitting in a cafe and a woman is impressed that “this is the kind of place where people leave their computers unattended”, which I guess is true. With the coming age of the netbook, let’s look at the economics of crime.

Everyone wants to “own the relationship”, until they actually do

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It would appear that Google is learning something about customer service: Google is selling the phone directly to end-users. That means many users are turning to it first, and the search giant doesn’t have the kind of customer support that mobile-phone users are accustomed to.[…] Another [customer] using the name SouthFlGuy was also sent back and forth between HTC and T-Mobile after finding no help from Google. “I guess I was under the wrong impression but I thought Google would handle the service on the phone,” he wrote.

What follows the “no-fly” list?

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, we get a foreshadowing of the new, lawless use of the “no-fly” list: Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said a “very comprehensive no-fly list” would be “the greatest protection our country has.” In an interview, she said the definition of who can be included should be expanded to include anyone about whom there is “a reasonable suspicion.”

“Modern browsers” nearly doubled share in 2009; IE6 lost a third of its user base

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

So, we have December browser numbers, giving us complete year of browser stats for 2009 [browsers | browser versions]. Here are a few observations.

How about implied interfaces in C#?

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I took a look at Google’s new language, Go. Some interesting stuff in there.

Questions about the Apple tablet that no one is answering yet

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t underestimate Apple’s ability to create unprecedented stuff, and to make it much better than anyone imagined. Yet for all the breathlessness about the supposed Apple tablet, no one seems to be asking the right questions.

Is this a good “non-profit” idea?

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So, an idea I have been kicking around a while is BillableHour.org. Would like to gather some feedback.

Programmers and “productivity”

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There have been some interesting posts lately asking the question, “if some programmers are 10 times as productive as others, why aren’t they paid 10 times as much?”. It’s a good question, though I don’t think the recent posts quite get to the heart of it.

AT&T etc etc

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

AT&T etc etc

According to Gizmodo, AT&T comes out #1 for data performance. My interest is two-fold. First, I get a geek thrill is watching networks getting built. Second, I have a pet peeve about the whole AT&T-hating thing lately.

Preventing mission creep in your Views, or, ignorance is bliss

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

An important concept in MVC is that Views are meant to be “dumb” — and by that I mean, your View should only care about outputting a user interface, and should know very little about business logic.

John Resig jQuery talk

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Very interesting (if-you’re-a-nerd) talk by John Resig. It’s real geek stuff but the takeaways are:

The Man sticks it to The Man; or, the Country-club Revolt; or, Whitey’s Revenge

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So Fake Steve, who I like, thinks it would be funny to try to overload AT&T network tomorrow. Which, fine, OK, but consider this.

Amazon’s core competency? Pricing.

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I think it’s quite brilliant that Amazon has introduced spot pricing for servers. Great way to exploit unutilized CPUs and bring prices down. Nicholas Carr explains it in utility terms: At the end of the nineteenth century, Samuel Insull, president of the then-tiny Chicago Edison, started the electric utility revolution when he had the counterintuitive realization that to make more money his company had to cut its prices drastically, at least for those customers whose patterns of electricity use would help the utility maximize its capacity utilization.Amazon Web Services is emerging as the Chicago Edison of utility computing.

Speeding up localhost in Visual Studio

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I recently put a new SSD in my system (yay!) and did a clean install of Windows 7, Visual Studio, etc. I found that when viewing my web app on localhost (using the Cassini web server built into VS), it was very slow. This was true across browsers.

Tegra notebooks wanted

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I would love to see notebooks based on Nvidia’s insane Tegra chip:

Wi-fi cafes in NYC

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve begun compiling a list of wi-fi cafes in New York City, with a bias toward those in my neighborhood. Hope it helps, and let me know of your finds.

100% data loss at Coding Horror??

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This can’t be good:

Can servers really fail that spectacularly? I mean, yes of course they can but something running on RAID 5 should be recoverable. For this to happen, it would require a lot of neglect plus a healthy dose of bad luck. Yikes.

Schneier and Schmidt

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Schmidt: if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have no need for privacy

Shorting Firefox

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

If Firefox were a stock, I’d be shorting it. That’s what I said a few months ago, too, and one of the Mozilla guys took issue.

Browser-specific CSS without Javascript or horrible syntax

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So, we all know that browsers have differing levels of CSS support. Working around them can be a pain in the a**, requiring non-standards-based hacks which are very hard to read and debug.

Logic as data, and a case where strong typing impeded learning

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

These days, I am doing a lot of Javascript, or more accurately, a lot of jQuery. A concept I have gotten comfortable with is the idea of passing logic as data.

{less} CSS for .Net

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A while back I asked whether some enterprising-person-who-is-smarter-than-I would offer a version of the {less} CSS framework for .Net. Looks like they have, and they did it as I’d hoped: an HttpHandler mapped to the .less extension. So your .less files are compiled on the fly and served to the browser as plain ol’ CSS.

A gold mine for StackOverflow

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is a gold mine for Joel and Jeff over at StackOverflow: careers. It’s something I thought of a while ago, and I am sure the SO guys were ahead of me by a millennium.

Betting on a future without IE6

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

My startup is developing a new web site, and every web developer must decide the extent to which they will support old technology — especially Internet Explorer 6.

Why is Intel having so much trouble shipping its solid-state drives?

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I know I am getting repetitive but I have to ask again — why is Intel having so much trouble shipping its second-generation solid-state drives (the X25-M G2)?

Wizards in ASP.Net MVC: being selective with ModelState

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So, there are many ways to skin the cat we called form validation. With a wizard-style application, it requires some nuance.

Using the Microsoft Ajax Minifier, some gotcha’s

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I am playing with the Microsoft Ajax Minifier, which removes whitespace from your Javascripts for quicker download. Stephen Walther has a nice how-to.

Unsolicited iPhone suggestions #2: internet radio

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Since moving from Cali to NY, I’ve come to miss my favorite radio station, KDFC. They rule, especially Hoyt Smith on my clock radio in the morning.

WTF Intel?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

One would think, after announcing the product in July, that Intel might be shipping its next-gen solid state hard drives. One would be wrong.

IE9 preview coming?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Rumors of an IE9 announcement. Let’s find out if my predictions are correct.

keyCode vs charCode vs Firefox

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I am working on a filtered HTML field. The idea is to only allow alphanumeric characters to be typed, and have all other keystrokes ignored.

The iPhone calendar has a separate time zone from the phone

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

After my recent move to NYC, I discovered that my Google Calendar was 3 hours off from my iPhone calendar. No worries, just go into the iPhone Settings — General — Date & Time and make sure the phone understands the time zone. Huh, well, it’s set automatically, over the air.

Unsolicited iPhone suggestions #1: email

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

OK, so a friend is raving about his Droid phone, and it sounds quite cool. The Palm Pre has some good ideas too. Hopefully a little competition will keep Apple from being Apple — “we know what’s best for you” — too often.

The emergence of Big Data (2.0)

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve written previously on the idea that data, not algorithms, will be a main differentiator for web companies moving forward. What does this mean?

Teevee on the peecee

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So I’ve moved to a new place in NYC, and it’s a bit…cozier…than what I was used to in San Francisco. So I am looking for ways to save space and for now I’ve decided to go without a TV.

Google Closure based on naive server-side notions?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I rely on libraries (mostly jQuery) instead of writing a lot of serious JavaScript these days. I mean, of course I am writing JavaScript but the libraries allow me to stay in “script space” — small procedure bits that are scripts as opposed to applications.

Google music previews songs based on lyrics

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Neat, if you type in a partial lyric to a song — without even referring to the title or artist — Google finds it and gives it to you to play right there.

Windows virtual machines get competitive

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Rackspace has announced that they are getting into the Windows virtual machine bizness. I’ve been waiting for this market to heat up, and have competition drive down some prices.

A new language from Google

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Neat, Google has a new language called Go. Clever branding, that.

It seems to be Google’s attempt to step into the Java/C# space. Perhaps I don’t know enough about languages to make such an assertion, but the thing that clued me in was its type safety. That seems decidedly untrendy.

The Paris Hilton problem

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Joel Spolsky has an article in Inc describing the tension between growth and quality at his company. The issue is, if your competitor is outgrowing you, their dominance might become self-fulfilling: customers prefer a safe choice, and the safe choice is what other customers are buying. Even if your product is better, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.

The flagship strategy of mobile phones — Microsoft needs one

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The flagship strategy of mobile phones — Microsoft needs one

In the wake of the iPhone over the last few years, it seems that the market is responding to a business model different than the PC’s that preceded it. Mobile phones seem to require a very tight integration of hardware and software (and arguably service) to make a splash.

Why is Apple treading water with the Apple TV? Because the real product is in the works.

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Apple has come out with version 3.0 of its Apple TV product, and it appears to be little more than a visual refresh with a couple of nice bits of iTunes integration. It still doesn’t do what we expect of a “set-top box” or “media center”: things like recording live TV.

Does this metric pass the smell test?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Via Silicon Alley Insider, an analysis by a company called Drake Direct claims that 1 in 4 pageviews in the US goes to Facebook.

IE6 users and status-conscious creative directors

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A friend directed me to this site , belonging to a creative director at Squarespace, and containing the following message for IE6 users: Hi, if you are coming to this site via Internet Explorer 6, you might not be getting the best experience possible. Honestly, I can’t even begin to think about what your entire experience on the internet must be like? (…probably like riding a bike on the highway while cars blow by you on their way to Costco to get gallons of mayonnaise and 60-inch plasma TV’s). How will you ever be able to use this website?????? You wont. You’re an asshole and your browser is an asshole. So look, I’m going to be honest: I kind of hate you. BUT we c-a-n make this work. Here is what I am going to need you to do: fire up your Toshiba ShitBook© that weighs about 45 pounds, wipe the Cheeto dust off the screen, download Safari ( http://www.apple.com/safari/download/ ), delete Internet Explorer from your computer, punch yourself in the face, and get me a pulled pork sandwich.

California says the iPhone costs $599

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I recently purchased a new iPhone 3GS since my previous phone bit the dust (or pavement, more accurately). I went to order online via AT&T, and was surprised to find out the tax on a $199 phone was $56, or over 25%. Wha? I went to make the same purchase at Apple’s online store, and found the same thing.

Will Apple fix Boot Camp for Windows?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote earlier about how Windows running on Mac hardware via Boot Camp appears to have serious battery-life issues — getting only around 2 hours of life on a machine that should offer at least twice that.

Is Verizon’s network better, or is it simply untested?

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This article over a TechCrunch is putatively about the iPhone, but the take-away for me is that AT&T’s data traffic has grown 50-fold over the last 3 years:

Mozilla VP: “mistakes were made”

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I love the language of Mozilla VP Mike Shaver’s non-retraction retraction regarding a Microsoft plugin for Firefox: We received confirmation from Microsoft this evening that the Framework Assistant add-on is not a mechanism for exploiting the vulnerabilities detailed in the earlier post, so we’ve removed it from the blocklist.

Word nerdism #1: Make mine a medium

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I am a word nerd, I love crosswords and love to wonder how words and expressions come to be. I also love thinking about computer languages as languages, with style and grammar. (For example, see the interplay between terseness and readability.)

Think of SSDs as multi-core storage

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve written a few times why solid-state hard drives (SSDs) are a sea change, similar to our transition from CRT to LCD a few years ago.

StackOverflow == Facebook * .0001

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Apparently, Facebook is running around 30,000 physical servers. That hurts my head. With 300,000,000 users, that translates to around 10,000 users per server. They are doing (back-of-the-envelope) ~4.2 billion pageviews/day. Each server, then, is doing around 140,000 page views per day.

Solving the n+1 problem in Linq to SQL, using projection

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Rick Strahl has a nice solution for mitigating the n+1 problem in Linq to SQL. The n+1 problem is a situation where, as you iterate over a set of query results in a list view, one or more additional database queries are fired for each row in the list. Since database calls are relatively expensive, you want to keep these to a minimum.

A simple way that Apple can improve iPhone battery life and user experience

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I dig my iPhone, but when I switched over from my Blackberry, I was very surprised at how many steps it takes to find out about new email.

When Apple aligns with a carrier, act II

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Apple is not really a partnering company. They make their own hardware and software — and services like .Mac Mobile Me — to ensure a certain user experience. This is their offer, and it works.

A thought experiment: serial vs parallel

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Now that solid-state drives are arriving in the mainstream, I’ve been thinking about the implications of serial vs parallel and how they affect overall perceived performance. And by “perceived” I mean, what does the client — both the technical and human variety — experience?

Compile-time checking of views in ASP.Net MVC

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I noticed that syntax errors in my views were not being caught during the build process — instead I would find them at run-time when I actually hit the view.

Is Google building an anti-spam empire?, or, size matters

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Google acquired reCAPTCHA today, a company that provides a simple means of adding a spam-limiting mechanism to your site. (I’ve implemented it several times and I recommend it to clients.)

The dullest blog

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I navigated on my computer to the web site called “The dullest blog in the world”. I was mildly amused for several minutes. After which, I visited other web sites.

Your bottleneck is you, or, why I’ve stopped worrying about performance

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Provocative headline, no? Let me explain.

Like Jeff Atwood, I consider end-user performance to be a feature. Pages should snap. It sends a very positive signal to customers, IMHO. And the site should snap with 10 or 10,000 users.

What the heck is going on with Intel’s next-generation SSDs?

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Intel first announced its second generation consumer solid-state drives on July 21. There were plenty of positive reviews at the time, and the price drop combined with better performance made me ready to take the plunge.

Quickie geek quiz #4

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

For fabulous prizes, or perhaps a hearty attaboy, the question is:

People are throwing things at you and yelling “horn high yo”. Who are you, and what are they asking you to do?

Deploying an ASP.net MVC project

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So, I was looking around for a simple way to emulate the “Publish” function of Visual Studio for my first ASP.net MVC project.

Scale means reversing your thinking on the database

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There are only a small number of sites in the world that require truly tremendous scale. Usually, this is referred to as “web scale”, and describes a site where the data is user-generated and highly dynamic. Among the first that come to mind are Facebook, Digg, MySpace and the like.

The “var” thing

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve come to really enjoy using the “var” keyword in C#. Although it’s been written about many times, I want to clarify what it is.

What’s the word…?

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Oh right…bollocks. This report seems to be circulating that “Braidwood”, Intel’s inexpensive flash-memory-disk-cache-helper-outer, will somehow negate demand for full-blown SSDs (solid-state drives).

Why I heart jQuery

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I am one of the many people who have fallen in love with jQuery over the past year or two. I haven’t seen it articulated why this might be, so here’s my stab at it.

Quickie geek quiz #3

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Alright, today’s geek question relates to branding:

Which company trademarked the brand name “Heroin”?

It’s the data, not the algorithm

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Chris Dixon points out that the challenge in “artificial intelligence” — which in a mainstream definition would be “making computers learn like humans” — is not so much the cleverness of the algorithm but in finding useful data. He cites the Google example where the breakthrough was realizing that links are a good (and previously untapped) source of data on what people think is a relevant web page. Modern AI algorithms are very powerful, but the reality is there are thousands of programmers/researchers who can implement them with about the same level of success. The Netflix Challenge demonstrated that a massive, world-wide effort only improves on an in-house algorithm by approximately 10%. […] It’s relatively easy to build systems that are right 80% of the time, but very hard to go beyond that.

Barber shop recommendation

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Tech blogging shall resume shortly.

So, it was 90+ degrees in NY and I went for a run. I’ve never perspired that much in my life. On the walk back to where I was staying, I stopped in a barber shop and said “how much to take it off”?

Quickie geek quiz #2

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

OK, I might or might not give out a prize like last time. Times are tight, y’know. Impress me and we’ll see. The question is:

Chair in the sky

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In a few years this will seem quaint, but I am posting this from 30,000 feet. Gogo wi-fi on Virgin America, it actually seems to work.

Will Microsoft “subsidize” Zune HD pricing?

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Microsoft announced pricing for its upcoming Zune HD today, coming around 25% below the prices of equivalent iPod Touches. I wondered if Microsoft is making any money at such prices — after all, it’s based on a fancy new chip and has other nice specs.

Tell me your favorite expression for “dead”

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I was amused by this article’s title. So I’ve decided to compile clever expressions for “dead”. Tell me your faves in the comments below. I’ll update this page with the best ones.

Killer app for the Zune HD: Tivo for radio

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The upcoming Zune HD sounds pretty nice. I use my iPhone less as a recorded music device and more like a radio. I listen to podcasts or Pandora. Honestly, in the age of subscription media I have no interest in buying-and-syncing music.

Quickie geek quiz #1

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

OK, $10 on iTunes or Amazon for the first person to answer this:

Random numbers web service

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Generating numbers that are truly random is quite difficult. Every random number needs to be based on some starting place — the time of day in milliseconds, perhaps. As such it’s actually a predictable number; it’s deterministic, even if a regular human won’t realistically guess it.

What is Google going to do with On2?

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Google recently acquired On2, a company that creates video codecs, most notably for Flash (which is used on the most popular video sites). Dan Rayburn runs down and debunks a number of theories as to what Google has in mind. Rightly, he says that none are obviously correct.

The most viable reason for Apple’s rejection of Google Voice (so far)

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So, in the Apple-Google-AT&T kerfuffle over Google Voice being rejected from the iPhone, I haven’t heard many reasons I consider viable. This one is: I’ve been asking myself exactly why Apple or AT&T would stir up the hornet’s nest to deny the technology and risk the ire of both the government and one of their most valuable partners, and also why each company’s stance is full of contradictory actions.After a little reflection, the answer became resoundingly clear: Apple is building a similar service to add to MobileMe.

Do you have “grit”?

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A very interesting study of the idea of “grit”. It attempts to quantify personal characteristics than lead to success via perseverance.

403 Forbidden (and 400 Bad Request) errors with Amazon Product Advertising API

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I recently experienced an issue using the Amazon Product Advertising API (formerly the Amazon Associates Web Service). I was getting a “403 Forbidden” error for what seemed like a normal request.

A market opportunity for Verizon and Sprint

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In the current FCC-involved kerfuffle over why Apple or AT&T blocked Google Voice on the iPhone, I see opportunity.

Is proprietary Mac hardware killing Windows battery life?

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Dong Ngo over at CNET has a review of the experience of installing the final Windows 7 on a new (unibody) MacBook Pro.

Someone please sell me a solid-state drive with Windows 7 on it

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The thing that computers are good at is brainless repetition. They are perfect when you’ve figured out a logical problem and need to exploit it over and over.

The Googlebot runs Javascript

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had idle chats with techie friends wondering whether search engines such as Google simply index the raw HTML of your web page, or do they actually parse and “display” it as a true browser would.

Meetings are error states

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Graham explores the difference between the maker’s schedule and the manager’s schedule. People that know me have heard me say that “meetings are the opposite of work”. Paul offers empathy: When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. […]

Making good programmers feel like bad programmers

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A web developer friend of mine has been doing a lot of backend-integration-type work over the last year, and has therefore has not been developing web sites. He made a point of wading back in to the web this week, so as not to get too “rusty”, in his words.

How to tell the new Intel SSDs from the old ones

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Intel today announced faster and cheaper versions of their very impressive solid state hard drives (SSDs). I didn’t see any ship dates so I guess they are making their way into the sales channel now.

Known and unknown unknowns

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Jeff Atwood has an article revealing some things that I’ve learned about software and business in general: the dangerous belief in certainty.

Is the VP of Monetizing Synergy off today?

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So, I’m a bit surprised that the upcoming Web version of Office isn’t based on Silverlight (Microsoft’s “rich internet application” framework). Instead, it appears that it will be browser-native, which is to say, written in Javascript.

Google Maps goes physical, Gavin Newsom doing product endorsements

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Walking to my client’s place this morning, I couldn’t help but wonder what-the-hell-is-that? as I approached the cafe:

Holy licensing costs, MasterCard

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In one commercial, you’ll see Marlon Brando, Carols Santana, Marilyn Monroe and the Ramones, with a David Bowie tune in the background:

Javascript is now strategic for Microsoft

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In this video, Chris Bryant of Microsoft makes an offhand comment that the components of the new Microsoft Office 2010 for Web are “some of the biggest Javascript applications ever built”.

Subscription media consolidation gets started

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There are rumors that Amazon is interested in buying Netflix. I like the idea, though it’s just one step toward the sort of subscription media consolidation that I outlined a while ago.

Pandora’s trying to change my tastes

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I got nothing against Jon Secada, but that ain’t what I’m listening to, Pandora.

Is Wolfram Alpha too clever by half?

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

An excellent and exhaustive survey of Wolfram Alpha by Mencius Moldbug. I think he thinks like I do: an engineer that looks at user interface analytically.

The iPhone needs multi-tasking, stat

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Joshua Topolsky offers a very funny and insightful take on the iPhone’s very fundamental flaw: it is designed for doing one thing at a time. […] my work requires that I use a bunch of web tools, look at lots of news sites, and have a feed reader open… basically, things that would require some level of multitasking. Imagine the frustration of having to constantly break the connection in chat to go look at a site or work on a post. It’s frustrating, let me tell you. The idea of jumping into and out of applications — of having to actually quit an app to move to another one — is an incredibly outmoded and foreign idea in 2009 […] Funnily, the Safari experience provides better multitasking than the phone itself.

A prediction of EU hypocrisy

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Google’s search market share in Europe is over 80%. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — the target of repeated anti-trust charges by the EU — hovers under 50% in Europe.

Can Google Chrome OS get traction?

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Google has pre-announced the “Google Chrome OS”. It’s intended as a lightweight operating system built primarily for hosting a browser.

The new wave of self-shorteners

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So, my previous bit on the attraction of shortening one’s own URLs seems to have some traction. Obviously it wasn’t original to me, but I see that sites like Ars Technica and Flickr have begun doing their own URL shortening. Check it out:

Why is a Social Security Number considered a secret?

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Identity theft boggles my mind a bit. It’s no mystery why criminal enterprises attempt it. It’s a mystery that we have systems where public information is used for security.

Use case: the metric system, or, all that useless beauty

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Ah, nothing gets international rivalry boiling like soccer football and the metric system. One wonders why the metric system hasn’t taken off here in the US. I posit this: it doesn’t offer any advantage to end users, ie, regular citizens. Let’s do the use case.

More about {less}

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Raena Jackson Armitage offers an interesting exploration of LessCSS: I have a confession: I think parts of CSS suck. It’s repetitive, tedious, and … well, kind of dumb.

Domain names are too cheap

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I am not sure I’ve ever used the term “cyber” for anything, ever, but that’s the name given to those who squat on domain names. Here’s my story.

Birthday suggestion

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

My birthday is in December, just sayin’.

Network, network, network, network or network?

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I love how Vista offers me so many choices in getting on the interwebs. I can:

Google as censor? Of course.

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Daniel Indiviglio semi-condemns Google for its compliance with Chinese censorship laws. The “condemnation” is that they put profits before ethics. But that’s way too simplistic and strikes me as a bit insincere — as if we are shocked that Google is trying to make money.

iPhone activation servers overwhelmed?

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I am upgrading my iPhone 3G to the 3.0 software but am getting this:

Use case: SSL and email

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting article in the NYT about using SSL for email. It’s an option for Gmail which I turned on some time ago.

Imagine CSS evolved as a programming language

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve gotten reasonably good with CSS, but I often find myself feeling that certain concepts are conflated or a bit ad hoc.

“Built-in” jQuery (and how IE can get some dev cred)

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve mentioned in the past that jQuery is an API as much as it is a set of functions. As syntaxes go, it’s very nice — consistent, logical, readable.

What is a “programmer”?

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Phil Haack has a nice exploration of what it means to “program”. As long as I’ve been doing this — since the early 90’s — there has always been the promise that “programming” will go away. This usually takes the form of visual tools that offer the ability to drag-and-drop the logical chunks of your programs together.

64-bitness: what it is and what it ain’t

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Very interesting post from Rico Mariani on the why’s and why-not’s of doing 64-bit applications, specifically Visual Studio. It’s important to understand that Visual Studio is about manipulating code, not the data that your code will ultimately handle.

The cloud! The cloud!

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Everything in technology is an abstraction of something else. The browser is an abstraction, the keyboard is an abstraction, C# is an abstraction; they all sit on top of other things and hide the details, with the goal of making you productive. (And each of those layers is actually comprised of many substrata.)

More jQuery performance tips: 11 keystrokes buy you 10x

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Dave Ward has a very extensive post (with benchmarks) on jQuery selector optimization. Really interesting stuff — the lesson is, the more specific your query, the faster it executes. The DOM is a data source, after all. He was able to achieve a 10x performance improvement by adding just 11 characters.

Leopard : Snow Leopard :: Vista : Windows 7

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m excited about the new announcements from Apple today. Can’t wait to update my iPhone to the 3.0 OS and use the bitchen ZipCar app.

URL shortener for ASP.net

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

If you use Twitter, you are familiar with URL shortening services like bit.ly and tinyurl.com. They are useful for saving characters in the space-limited messages that Twitter allows.

Windows Live Writer works great with BlogEngine.Net

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Just experimenting a bit with using Windows Live Writer as a publishing tool for BlogEngine.Net. So far, it works really nicely. For one thing, it respects the theme of the blog right in the editing environment. Check it out:

Mayor at the movies

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Ed Koch is doing movie reviews. What’s not to like?

blip.tv [http://blip.tv/play/g8s2gYbdKZfJDA]

Highslide as ASP.net control

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Dave Ward has updated his ASP.net implementation of Highslide, a very nice ajax-y photo browser. I like the idea of encapsulating javascript into controls, btw.

The OS still matters, or, platform abstraction is hard

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Google has released some preliminary versions of Chrome for Mac and Linux. They announced it almost apologetically.

The DOM is a data source, query it wisely

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Nice set of performance tips for jQuery selectors: http://www.artzstudio.com/2009/04/jquery-performance-rules/

They are all quite logical if you are used to selecting from data sets or file hierarchies. More specificity = faster selection; don’t do the same “query” twice.

GM + Men’s Wearhouse = Tootsie Roll

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

For perspective, here are a few companies whose market cap is greater than GM:

Displaying the Subversion revision number in your web application

Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I found a nice technique for automatically displaying the SVN revision number in the footer of a web site. It is based in CruiseControl.Net.

New build of jQuery Controls [1.0.3433]

Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a new build of my ASP.net jQuery Controls, with a couple of conveniences. Details are in the Version History.

Can haz Mifi?

Sun, 24 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This portable 3G-to-Wifi hotspot looks really great. Apparently Verizon and Sprint will offer it. The size is amazing — they claim it’s equivalent to “8 stacked credit cards”. (I am a bit shocked that no one has used the brand “MiFi” before!)

New build of jQuery Controls [1.0.3429]

Sat, 23 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a new build of my ASP.net jQuery Controls, adding the ability to use server-side control ID’s in selectors. Download is here, version history is here. Gimme feedback here.

Javastrict

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

John Resig (jQuery guy) talks about advances in the next rev of Javascript (properly known as ECMAScript 5). It now has a “strict” mode, which makes Javascript look a lot more like a compiled language.

Go craigslist

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t know what declaratory relief is, but clearly craigslist is on the right side of this argument. I am tempted to hire a South Carolinian hooker out of principle.

Subscription music consolidation

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I am a fan of subscription music services. I consider music a service, not a product. I am not interested in keeping track of what I own and where it’s stored. What I want is to queue up my tracks when and where I please — I don’t need to “own” anything to achieve that.

Educator extension for BlogEngine.net released

Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve created an extension for BlogEngine.Net to improve typography. It “educates” the text, so that quotes and apostrophes are transformed into their smart (curly) counterparts. This blog uses it.

Philip Greenspun…

Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

…is someone I hadn’t heard of until I read this very amusing post: Ruby on Rails and the importance of being stupid. The comments are every bit as interesting as the article.

Hidden features of C#

Sat, 16 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I just came across this, many nuggets:

Does null ever equal anything?

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday’s discussion of nulls got me to thinking about this common bit of syntax in C#:

Nulls and knowledge

Thu, 14 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Eric Lippert has a worthwhile post about what nulls are and why we use them. I like reading Eric because I think we think alike — computer languages are languages, with grammar and semantics.

Firefox has a user base; does it have a future?

Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Firefox is a fine browser. Really, the current release of any of the major browsers is very good.

jQuery controls alpha available for download

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve made an alpha version of my jQuery controls available for download. I hope you will give them a try and let me know your thoughts. Comment here or hit me at matt at clipperhouse.com. Cheers.

WebClient, Fiddler and SSL

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I am developing a credit card authorization library which uses the WebClient class. In addition, I am using the excellent Fiddler to watch the requests and responses.

Hammering the DOM

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

As I work on my ASP.net jQuery controls, I got to thinking about what “animations” really are. The core animation framework in jQuery (as far as I can tell) is to simply iterate in small steps between two CSS states. So if you are going from 0% opacity to 100% opacity, jQuery applies (say) 100 CSS changes in 1% increments.

Just getting started

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to ClipperHouse.com. It’s a place for my work and thoughts and stuff. There are lots of blank spots but you’ll see them filled in soon. Feel free to get in touch.

Free shipping: getting closer

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Public Knowledge points out AT&T’s new Terms which give different treatment to video based on its source. (No, it’s not neutral but of course, I think that’s fine.)

The long game on metered pricing: free shipping

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Time-Warner cable has begun to roll out its metered pricing plan in Beaumont, Texas. Alley Insider says it won’t work, and Mike Arrington declares it a moral outrage. Both are missing the “third way” which I wrote about earlier this year.

The biggest threat to your rights? Scarcity.

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I would not have predicted this: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should allow broadband providers to manage their networks and slow “bandwidth hogs,” despite concerns that such practices arbitrarily target some customers, said a coalition of seven civil rights groups.Net neutrality rules for broadband providers would protect bandwidth hogs at the expense of other customers and civic organizations, said the coalition, which includes the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association, League of Rural Voters, and National Council of Women’s Organizations.[…] “Regulations prohibiting network management risk undermining free speech on the Internet by allowing P2P traffic to overwhelm the network and prevent non-P2P traffic from reaching its destination,” the coalition said in its filing. “The effective prioritization of P2P traffic would represent an altogether new type of ‘back of the bus’ second-class status for our speech on broadband networks — and ought to be resoundingly rejected.”

Somewhere in Brussels, some buggy whips need gilding

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

One might think we live in feudal times, what with an unelected bureaucrat being able to tax companies arbitrarily and retroactively. However, since it’s an “anti-trust” issue, the European Commission gets around calling it a tax or tariff, and thus can charge whatever the Commission decides. There is no rate schedule to adhere to, no trade agreements to abide. Didn’t we get past this kind of thing hundreds of years ago?

Demand first, then supply

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Buchheit, whom I’ve never read prior, has a very nice article about what makes a successful company: You can take the smartest, most experienced, most connected, most brilliant people in the world and have them build the most stunningly designed and technically advanced product in the world, but if people don’t want it, then you will fail.This is roughly what happened with the Segway, for example. […]Even if you aren’t the smartest person around, and your product is kind of ugly and broken, you can still be very successful, if you just build the right product. YouTube and MySpace are both fine examples of this.

Entrepeneurs vs bureacrats

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

A great story about TJ Rodgers’ personal green revolution.

Rich: UN committees. Reach: entrepeneurs. Advantage: reach.

Regulation, incumbency, haves and have-nots

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

When we talk about regulations, in housing or agriculture or the Internet, it is usually sold as being intended to protect some “little guy” — be it the “family farm” or the file sharer. The insight that is most lacking is that regulations often have the opposite effect, which is to weaken consumers, the poor, or the upstart competitor.

What advertising means

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Whenever I see a new ad for a product or industry, I am relieved and encouraged. Why? Isn’t advertising the most crass, manipulative expression of our capitalist system?

Podcast on broadband with your humble host

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The good folks at Technology Liberation Front asked me on to discuss the ideas behind this post, broadband policy and net neutrality. Be sure to grab someone you love, crack open a Colt .45 (“works every time”) and give a listen.

Internet diversity & cut cables

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Internet diversity & cut cables

Following on to my previous post that multiple broadband strategies are better than a single one, we’ve been hearing quite a bit about cut cables in the Middle East and India. While not perfectly analagous to our domestic infrastructure, these events point out a fundamental quality of the Internet: diversity.

What we have are multiple broadband strategies; this is a good thing

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Over at Ars, the normally reasonable Nate misses the point on a national broadband strategy. He despairs over the fact that “we”, meaning the government, have no broadband strategy.

The long game on metered pricing and Net Neutrality

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, Time-Warner announced that it is experimenting with metered Internet pricing in a couple of markets. The same week, HBO (owned by TW) announced that it will be offering a number of its shows free over the Internet to existing HBO cable subscribers.

gen: force flag