When “infographics” jump the shark

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

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

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

Beware the truth-tellers

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

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

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

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?

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#

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

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?”. ..