In my current development house, we have the painfully obvious “different settings for different stages of the development cycle.”  Production, obviously, isn’t in DEBUG mode so users don’t see the underlying technology when things go awry, and each dev has his own database.   The solution we’ve found is to create separate settings files with [...]

• 1 Comment

I have this t-shirt.  It reads: “Knowledge is power.  Power corrupts.  Study Hard.  Be Evil.”  Because if we take those two first popular truisms and put them together, we get a very unpopular conclusion.
The truisms of our business are “It’s an attention economy, where revenue is driven by how much attention you can get,” and [...]

• 0 Comments

I need to make clear that I did not invent the code below. I’m not sure who did, but the topic of making vi’s “paren bounce” feature work in Emacs came up in a conversation I had the other day, and I’m posting the chunk of code that’s lived in my .emacs file since, [...]

• 0 Comments

Metacritic is an interesting website with a pretty stylish layout, but one thing that drives me nuts is the use of Flash for a simple slideshow on the home page. I decided, as an experiment, to try and replace that with one driven by Javascript.
The choice of javascript turned out to be simple: I’d [...]

• 3 Comments

This is probably a “no-duh” to some people, but I had not known this. When you upload something to the CDN, you get a url that looks like this:
http://cdn.mycompany.com/images/someimage.jpg
Which is all fine and good. Django’s MEDIA_URL is usually suffixed with a closing slash, meaning that if you’re in the habit of typing something [...]

• 0 Comments

I recently implemented a new subsite for IndieFlix using LessCss, the Leaner CSS metaframework. LessCss is a programming language that abstracts CSS out into a hierarchal language, where instead of writing:
#header { … }
#header img { … }
You write:
#header {
…
img { … }
}
Which, believe me, makes [...]

• 2 Comments

Sharper FX
They do nothing but churches. Black churches, too. Sharper FX is an 11 on the scale of Manliness. Watch some of the Flash splash pages. They’re amazing. I love this site.

• 0 Comments

A friend of mine pointed me to the website of CB Richard Ellis, a real-estate investment and management house with a big footprint here in the Pacific Northwest.
Their hiring website is a horror. No, really, go look, unless you’re an epileptic. (Sadly, the effect only seems to be present for [...]

• 0 Comments

A few weeks ago, I installed the latest version of the Gnome Accessibility Toolkit (Gnome-AT), and while I never quite got it to work the way I wanted to, it didn’t seem to be doing any harm.  I figured once I got to the point of showing the client the work we’d talk about accessibility [...]

• 0 Comments

Functional. Elegant. Foolproof. Pick two.

• 0 Comments