Catching up on technology
As one would expect, my blogging has fallen by the wayside as I’ve been occupied by other things, such as programming, wiki’ing, and Real Life™. Just a few quick, technology-related links to let you know that I’m still alive, unlike some people:
- Backlash Brews Over Blue LEDs
-
What ever happened to green?
- New Top Level Domains Considered Harmful
-
ICANN is having a ball adding scores of TLDs like .aero and .cat and .mobi and .xxx, only a few have recalled that this wasn’t supposed to happen: it’s against the architecture of the Internet. The W3C, headed by Internet author Tim Berners-Lee, published this document more than a year ago, yet ICANN chose not to heed the advice against their corporate interests.
- Why I Hate Comic Sans: a character assassination
-
Still wondering why your fourth-grade teacher always got mad at you for using 24pt Comic Sans for all your homework? Didn’t think so. But still, c’mon, we’ve got a host of good (free) fonts now; if you’re not going to say something creative, at least make it look like you’re saying something creative.
</irony> - JavaScript 1, 2, and in between
-
What we’ve been seeing is not your grandfather’s JavaScript. And what we’re going to be seeing is not the JavaScript that you’ll remember wallowing in as a child.
- The next big thing is not my concern
-
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us that the creator of Firefox, Blake Ross, is a smart guy. So why do the countless reporters always target this college student by day, programmer extraordinaire by night with cliché questions that only the science fiction aficionado would ever be interested in? What makes Firefox so popular is that it does things The Right Way™. In the Mozilla community, we used to take that to mean rendering webpages according to spec. But Firefox has proven to us that doing things the right way takes a lot more thought, and this is what reporters should be asking Blake about: “Why did you embrace the Less Is More philosophy in designing your browser? How do you think it has benefited the everyday user?”
- Automating Wikipedia History
-
Ever seen a statement in a Wikipedia article and wondered how it got there, or how a certain paragraph evolved over time? We now have that capability, and – not surprisingly – it requires Firefox, with the Greasemonkey extension installed. Gotta get around to installing it someday; there’s just too much that I’m missing…
I’ve got some more coming your way for tomorrow.
Thanks to Gervase Markham for the Comic Sans link, and to Jeremy Dunck for the Wikipedia history link.