December 2011
2 posts
The LBJ Book Club: New job, New deal / discussion... →
Our LBJ Book Club is getting interesting…
Random observations:
- Johnson giving dictation on the toilet is one of the most told stories about his time in the White House, and its genesis is revealed here. I wonder if anyone has tried to emulate this tactic?
- Johnson felt that coffee would distract Latimer and Jones — not only making the coffee, but also the small act of drinking it...
The LBJ Book Club: Is this the trap? →
Guan and I are teaming up to bring you an online book club over the next few month. We’ll be reading the Robert Caro’s series of biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson to celebrate the forthcoming release of the fourth book in the series, The Passage of Power.
If you aren’t rushing out to buy the books just for the pleasure of our company, here’s the pitch for why you need to...
November 2011
1 post
Is it a box or a TV? Yes...
There’s been much speculation about Steve Jobs’ “I finally cracked it” remark on Apple’s role in the TV industry. I am not following the Apple blogs closely, but the future Apple TV strategy has been a recurring topic on my weekly soaps.
Mainly, the discussion has centered on whether the product will be a new box (as the current Apple TV) or a full-fledged...
September 2011
2 posts
Watch[DK] Podcast med @jacobchr, @guan og jeg selv om perspektiverne i den nuværende valgkamp. Det er spændende og heldigvis bredere end blot, hvem der har vundet i meningsmålingerne i dag.
Du kan downloade eller abonnere som podcast og i iTunes
A call for a progressive IT agenda
Version2 is using the upcoming Danish election to run a series on the IT policies of the individual parties running for Parliament. The first two articles interview the IT spokespeople for the two largest parties, and frankly the outcome is disheartening. In each interview, fifteen questions are asked and the result is vague and non-committal statements on issues affecting us all — both in...
August 2011
6 posts
Watch[Danish] Tryk Optag #3: Men drømmen slutter jo ikke dér, Morten
Jeg og Morten Saxnæs tager fat i de højtflyvende emner, som cyborg tattoveringer, rumturisme og flydende lande, men slutter af med en mere jordnær debat om open source-bevægelsen og fængselsstraf for Facebook opdateringer.
Du kan downloade som MP3 eller abonnere som Podcast eller i iTunes.
“Android has been so successful through a) hard work by engineers and b) a...”
– Dion Almaer on webOS’ troubles at Palm an HP, because going on to make a pitch for Facebook to take over
Deploying on stage for the hell of it sound like fun.
Watch[Danish] Denne uges podcast fra hr. Morten Saxnæs og jeg selv under den fine titel Det er jo klart, de skal sige det. Vi snakker om ytringfriheds og politik i sociale medier, og åbenhed i Android og om min nye titel som JACSHT developer.
Du kan downloade som MP3 eller abonnere som Podcast eller i iTunes.
“HIRING MANAGER: So, do you know JACSHT?
CANDIDATE: No, sir, I don’t know...”
– HTML / CSS / JavaScript – We Need An Acronym
Org-Mode: Your Life in Plain Text →
It’s one if the joys of being an Emacs user that you will always find another hidden gem in your text editor. Here’s a plain-text todo list mode for Emacs which seems built for the world git and Dropbox.
July 2011
2 posts
I'm a developer and I hate "networking". Here's...
Tine Thygesen, a previous colleague from 23, declares provocatively that developers hate networking for the wrong reasons:
The reason developers, and many non-business people,
hate networking because the terms is largely misunderstand
and misused! … The reason [is] they think they have
to entertain hot shots they have nothing in common with
with witty oneliner or deep...
8 tags
Fault-tolerant HTML5 uploads with Resumable.js...
With 23 Video we (at 23) receive a large number of really, really large files every day. At times, we get files of several gigabytes transferred over a simple HTTP connection. Usually, this works out alright, but we’ve wanted to make better use of some new features in modern browsers to make uploads more stable — specifically, to allow users to pause their uploads and have the uploads...
February 2011
1 post
1 tag
Paranoid
Guan is paranoid, but it’s probably a good list to consider. My own strategy is much simpler and involves both a trade-off in terms of immediacy and restorability:
I’m running Backblaze to do an almost full back-up. It doesn’t include my VMware machines or my system files so I won’t be able to restore immediately — as Guan would from his SuperDuper! drive once...
November 2010
1 post
1 tag
Updated stalkering
I’ve managed to add a few bonus features to Stalkify tonight. So far, Stalkify has been awesome at keeping Spotify in sync with your Last.fm account, but I wanted to add a bit of music discovery to the site as well.
To accomplish this, Stalkify now lists top artists for any user:
… and Stalkify will now also recommend other people for you to follow based on you musical taste:
...
May 2010
1 post
1 tag
Stalkify: Last.fm + Spotify = ♥
I’ve been playing around with a new web service called Stalkify for the past week or so. The notion is simple: Stalkify makes the social graph from Last.fm available in Spotify. So all the tracks you’re scrobbling to Last.fm (and have been for the past decade or so…) suddenly makes sense in the brave new world of Spotify.
Stalkify was inspired by @Claus’s Spotify DJ, which...
January 2010
1 post
1 tag
Taking out node.js for a spin with Bomber
The node.js project has been getting a lot of good press and positive attention over the past few months. With good reason. If this is the first you’re hearing of node.js, it’s officially an “evented I/O for V8 JavaScript” but more generally it is used as a tool for writing non-blocking network servers. This means that it can easily be made into a JavaScript-based and...
October 2009
1 post
1 tag
Using the keyboard to navigate a web site...
I’m beginning work on a project which requires users to be able to navigate the content of a web page using only the keyboard, and where switching focus using the standard method of tabbing is not an option either. To solve this problem, I’ve pieced together KeyboardFocus.
KeyboardFocus does one thing: Look through all elements on a web page with a given class name and make those...
April 2009
2 posts
1 tag
Twune: Tweet your tunes
A while back a spent a little time creating a simple service that allows tune-tweeting with legible, short URL. For example, twune.net/DioDiver will play Holy Diver by Dio. And twune.net/BeatlesHand will give you The Beatles’ I Want To Hold Your Hand.
The scheme was inspired by some of the cool work that Morten Just has been doing by mashing up YouTube videos with different data sources...
1 tag
Announcing TwitterEngine: Your own twitter...
About a week ago some friends launched Twittertinget.dk, a sleek app that aggregates tweets from politicians in the Danish parliament. In the name of democracy, the web application has a vital flaw though: It only lists tweets from politician, not to them. That makes for one-sided communication.
As a friendly gesture, Socialsquare asked me to create a complementary service, which does the exact...
September 2008
1 post
1 tag
Could Gears be the trojan horse for Chromium?
Wouldn’t it be nice if Google Gears included the entire Chromium rendering engine?
A few people have been posing the idea of using Flash’s own WebKit-powered browser to render web pages in Internet Explorer, which would achieve the duplicate goal of leap-frogging the web platform forwards and not forcing users to upgrade their browsers. (Such an approach would be a hack at best, and...
June 2008
1 post
1 tag
No location history in FireEagle
I was surprised to learn that there’s no way to access a user’s location history in Fire Eagle. And, in fact, Yahoo only stores the most recent user location. This a really, really, really limits how Fire Eagle can be used from both a user perspective and from a developer point-of-view.
As a user I’d much, much rather have Fire Eagle store my history centrally (and even forbid...
May 2008
4 posts
1 tag
Walking the talk -- OIO Rest
I wrote about the huge potential in government as a service the other day, and apparently i’m not the only one who has seen the opportunity. The only difference is that while I just wrote a few thought and did nothing, others have actually done exciting work on this front. Some articles in English:
Public Danish Data REST Interface
OIO REST: RESTful web services developed by the Danish...
1 tag
BrowserPlus looks interesting, but something's...
uploadr is a demo of Yahoo’s upcoming BrowserPlus and it looks amazing. When you install the browser extension, developers get access to features usually not available in browsers. Such as drag-and-drop from the operating system and browsing-for-multiple-files. That should some on handy. And I want it for 23. Now.
Now the question though: What do I do with those files? How do I transfer...
1 tag
Public formats in more than one sense
ReadWriteWeb just posted an intriguing article about the next generation of e-government. The post basically lists the arguments from an upcoming scholarly article about the subject. The main argument is simple: Government shouldn’t spend it’s time building web sites, instead it should “focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the...
1 tag
Using magic mail addresses to guard against spam
Apparently many email systems, include gmail, support magic in the local part of an e-mail address. For example, if your mail address is mymail@gmail.com you’ll also receive mails from mymail+randomword@gmail.com.
The obvious use for this feature is some manual spam protection: When signing up for a web service you can easily include a unique address for that specific service. This might be...
March 2008
3 posts
1 tag
Panning/Zooming/Browsing within a photo [script]
So I’m doing this great new product for 23 and I’ve built some simple code which allows you to navigate large images in a way quite similar to Google Maps. This is what it looks like (best in non-IE browsers for now):
See the entire thing in action…
1 tag
Fire Eagle is in beta
I’ve written about Fire Eagle before and it’s no secret that I had high hopes for the projects. A few hours ago the nice people at Yahoo sent me a beta invite, and greedily read through the developer docs to see what goodies awaited… The result, sadly, is that there aren’t many goodies at the moment.
Most importly, Fire Eagle doesn’t come with any applications yet,...
1 tag
Meta3
Wow, that’s good. Makes one believe that even IE is susceptible to reason.
February 2008
2 posts
1 tag
Playing silly games [spilletmedbyer.dk]
Yesterday I spent about ten minutes assembling the map of the s-trains in this nice mashup game. It gave me an urge to do something silly and utterly pointless myself, and the result is stunning: Spilletmedbyer.dk
If you clicked the link, you’d know exactly what I did: Something Google Maps and a bit of data, and you can now guess the location of Danish cities and towns. You’re...
1 tag
I cannot wait to try Fire Eagle
Since Plazes made the concious decison to start sucking and sucking badly, it’s been hard to be a free agent floating in space (or something like that). I never know where anyone is. Hopefully, Yahoo! is going to solve that problem soon.
January 2008
3 posts
1 tag
About meta
I’m quoting way too much from John Resig, but his points about the IE8 backward-compatibility meta tag discussion are well worth repeating, and there’s also way more poignant than most other comments I’ve been reading today:
The end result will be one in which: A) You’re either constantly dodging mistaken bullets from the Internet Explorer team as the push out new releases...
1 tag
Acid 3 test
John Resig has a nice overview of the upcoming Acid 3 test, which will designed to test browser compatibility with recent innovation in the world of JavaScript and the DOM. Of course, most browsers are nearing perfect rendering of the Acid 2 test, which stressed CSS support. Mostly, I wanted to post this absolutely extraordinary screenshot from Internet Explorer 7:
Considering that the...
1 tag
Recap of CSS techniques [Link]
Smashing Magazine has an absolutely wonderful list of CSS techniques vital for any web programmer.
December 2007
10 posts
1 tag
Do you apologize in code comments?
Apologetics in comments are usually a sign of the presence of design smell.
− from webmonkey
1 tag
Gears doesn't just do offline
Dion Almaer (of Ajaxian fame, of course) is writing a cool series about Google Gears. Apparently the nice people at Google have further-reaching ambitions than “just” an offline browsing api.
Reading through the Gears wiki you’ll sense that there’s no distinct direction for the developments of the tool, but there’s plenty of stuff to look forward to: The Location...
1 tag
Chart with selectable legend [yui demo]
I wrote about YUI Charts the other day and I guess my conclusion was that the library is promising, but still a long way from being perfect. Today, I have been using it in a real-life setting a found that I wanted to do some stuff that’s isn’t supported out of the box in order to build something that looks like this:
Merge multiple dataset into one graph
By default the library...
1 tag
Library for easy sparklining
I’m actually not planning on writing much about charts and graphs — but since we’re prototyping the back-end of Nosco’s prediction market application I’ve been reading a lot about the subject. For big and interactive charts we’ll be using either YUI Charts or some native Flex stuff depending on the level of ambitiousness, but John Resig’s JavaScript...
1 tag
On pleasurable code
This:
The idea that a language should be designed from the ground up for the purpose of providing you with an experience of harmony, calm, and enjoyment is fundamentally alien to American programming culture, and when American programmers discuss why they prefer Ruby, the fact that it was designed for their enjoyment vanishes from their own vision even when it’s right in front of their...
1 tag
Efficient stylesheets [Link]
This blog post provides a few simple tricks for coding efficient stylesheets — in the sense of having an organised structure which is easy to navigate and to modify. The color grouping seems like the most useful tip.
1 tag
Custom select boxes with JavaScript...
It’s sunday and I’ve been looking for something reasonable to do while not actually working. So I though I’d address an issue we’ll be having at 23 within the next month or so. We want to let people choose their language from a drop-down select box, and we want each option in this box to have a flag icon representing the language. Such specific styling isn’t doable...
1 tag
Charting is a nightmare...
It’s nice to see Google entering the scene for easy chart building — along with Yahoo’s Chart library and new JavaScript/Canvas-based stuff like Ole Laursen’s Flot. Frankly, I’ve been postponing doing a pretty chart based reporting tool for Nosco’s prediction markets for quite a while now (we do build nice charts for the web app though) but all of this could be...
1 tag
Styling from scratch [Howto]
A while back Dustin Diaz did a nice explainer on pieces needed for your own personal JavaScript and AJAX interface — if you’re not using a prefrabricated one, that is. The basic idea was that you’ll save both time, bandwidth and debugging troubles by getting the foundation right. And the same thing goes for the CSS foundation.
Reset for a level playing field
First of all, your...
1 tag
Charting with YUI
Yahoo’s web programming framework, YUI, is out in a new version, which frankly wouldn’t be too exciting if it wasn’t for the new Charts library. Basically, quite a few people have been experimenting with doing charts and graphs with on html canvases (including myself). This method can work well for specific purposes, but it certainly doesn’t scale well, and nobody has come...
November 2007
3 posts
1 tag
A simple guide to CSS positioning
BarelyFitz Design has written up a very nice explainer on how to position elements through CSS. Their step four is probably the one that is most easily forgotten: Combining position:relative with position:absolute. In a nutshell, setting a ‘relative’ position on the container element will allow you to position subelements absolutely within that element. And the explainer goes to show...
1 tag
Cross-browser hovering [Howto]
The CSS :hover pseudoclass is nice and allows you to easily modify behaviour on web page elements when user moves her mouse, and pretty much every web programmer has written something like this in her stylesheet: a {text-decoration:none;}
a:hover {text-decoration:underline;}
And all these programmers have found that CSS hovering doesn’t work well in Internet Explorer when it isn’t...
1 tag
Introducing Refresh for the web practitioners
When we started building 23 in 2004 the advanced javascripting of today was still in its infancy, and accordingly much of what we did back then was based on a nice mix of server-side scripting, HTML and CSS with very little client scripting in the mix. Of course, time have changed dramatically since then, and along with every other web programmer I’ve become a practitioner of this web 2.0...