Other people contributing to my projects is often the cause of my improving them. This is because people tend to contribute something that works for the case they care about, without necessarily testing how it combines with the rest of the product. There’s nothing wrong with this. They did some work and wanted to give …
Author Archives: kemayo
Hiring developers
It turns out to be quite difficult to hire good developers. I’m involved in the hiring process at deviantART, and it has opened my eyes to just how unqualified the majority of applicants to these jobs are. To give an example of this, I estimate that we hire perhaps 0.2% of the people who apply …
Random recommendation: Virgin Mobile
After resisting smartphones for many years, I got one a few months ago, just before I moved. It turns out that they’re pretty nifty. Who knew, right? I got an LG Optimus V on Virgin Mobile. One of the big things that had been stopping me from getting one before was that I couldn’t quite …
Signs of adulthood
I bought a house. Strangely, this makes me feel like more of a “grown up” than producing a daughter did. Possibly because health insurance meant that producing the daughter cost appreciably less. Actually, according to the explanation of benefits letters I got from my insurance company, childbirth was almost exactly one third the cost of …
Unmentionable
So, funny thing, I realized that an important life event occurred when I wasn’t paying much attention to this blog, and I never got around to mentioning it. I have a daughter now, and have for a bit over two years now. She’s pretty cute.
Maphilight 1.3
I released maphilight 1.3 just now. (Though really I consider github the more authoritative source.) So, IE9 broke maphilight because it was finally exposing the has_canvas codepath to IE. Turns out all the canvas stuff worked beautifully, but one call to setTimeout was relying on a non-IE feature. So that’s fixed! Also changed since the …
Unintuitve effect of overflow:hidden
I found myself having to fit a textarea into a space which had user-provided CSS (“skins”) applied to it. This worked surprisingly well, but someone found a skin which had a right-floated sidebar which was playing hell with the textarea, since the textarea needed a fixed width and textareas refuse to overlap floats. So the …
Change your surroundings
I work from home. I like it. However, it’s easy to get distracted and slack off. I find that the longer I spend with my workplace set up in one location at home, the less productive I get. I seem to come to associate that spot with being distracted, instead of working. So I move …
Ooo capitalism
“Clickable Maps” is selling pre-made maps explicitly for use with Maphilight. The pre-purchase samples are pretty good examples of what’s possible. This USA map shows remote triggering of a hilight, for instance. Note: I wouldn’t have released under the MIT license if this sort of thing bothered me.
Simplecomic
Another new-ish release, this time a PHP webcomic content management system called simplecomic. Features: Multiple comics per day Schedule posting of comics in advance Masking of comic filenames so scheduled comics can’t be easily found Comic descriptions, alt text, and transcripts Optional chapter divisions for comics “Rants” as a lightweight blog, with scheduled posting Theme …