It’s hard for me to write a WTF — not because I can’t remember one, but because I remember too many. Netscape was one giant WTF — or, as they called it back then, AOL. The company had grown so inept that “WTF” became just another thing we said each day, like “Hey,” or “What time is it?” or “We just lost another 5%,” or “Marketing wants to replace the Back button with an ad for Bowflex.” In fact, as I’m sure you know, the Mozilla movement itself was born when Jim Barksdale looked at the old Netscape 4.x codebase and announced, with tremendous gusto and wondrous pride: WTF?
I consider myself humbly fortunate to have been added as a member of Prototype‘s new core development team. My first patch: optimizing getElementsByClassName. Browsers with XPath support get an eightfold performance gain; others get a modest gain of 50–100%.
Note to self: Add “douchebag” to OS X’s dictionary so that it doesn’t get flagged by the spellchecker.
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil‐minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well‐meaning but without understanding.
Louis Brandeis
Viewport Dimensions in JavaScript
Adapted from the functions posted on QuirksMode.
var Client = {
viewportWidth: function() {
return self.innerWidth || (document.documentElement.clientWidth || document.body.clientWidth);
},
viewportHeight: function() {
return self.innerHeight || (document.documentElement.clientHeight || document.body.clientHeight);
},
viewportSize: function() {
return { width: this.viewportWidth(), height: this.viewportHeight() };
}
};Ze Frank at TED 2004
Ze Frank talks at TED 2004. He spends about 4 minutes talking about creating online spaces. The rest of the time he spends being silly.
Prototype 1.5.0 has a new release candidate. New stuff since my last post: awesome DOM navigation via Element.(up|down|next|previous), Array.uniq, and a few bug fixes. There’s some more cool stuff in the pipeline.
Dear God — Idiocracy was hilarious. It’s not a great movie, to be sure, but it’s a brilliant movie. It lags at times, and the narration is a crutch, but it’s the first movie in a long time that has been so ambitious in creating a world and actually making it believable. (Well, not believable, but you know what I mean.) It’s probably not playing near you, but if it is, please go see it — if only to send the message that no studio executive gets to fuck with Mike Judge.
Sorting through my photos of San Francisco, I was reminded how much I love DoubleTake, panorama software designed for human beings. It lets you stitch a series of photos together in an unintimidating manner — something hugin can’t seem to do.