Category: Programming
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Want to make some money?
Can you write Facebook or iPhone Apps? Do you like money? If so, have I got a deal for you: We’re looking for some help building out our iPhone and Facebook applications for Mahalo Answers. If you know of any great developers who have done a really solid application for either platform (or who are…
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I invented Facebook
Ok, well not really. But I like to think that I *could* have. The summer after my senior year of high school (that’s 2002), I came up with an idea for a website while delivering pizzas, and I had this exact conversation with my then-girlfriend (now my wife): Me: “Wouldn’t it be cool if there…
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I took 5-Hour Energy, and I feel great!
For anyone who isn’t in the industry, this is what computer programming really looks like.
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Sprites and the new Mahalo homepage
On Friday, we at Mahalo launched a revamped homepage and site-wide redesign, the result of months of technical and editorial development. I’d like to talk specifically about one new technical aspect of the homepage. The old Mahalo homepage had, at any given moment, between 8 and 10 content images. (By “content images,” I’m referring to…
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What was your first program?
The first computer program I ever wrote was written in GW-BASIC. I was 8 or 9, and my dad had gotten me a book from the library that included the BASIC code for simple text-based games; after typing them into our IBM and playing around with them for a few hours, I decided to use…
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Finding unused entities in your Firefox extensions
If you’ve maintained a Firefox extension for any amount of time, you know that you can accumulate unused entities as you change the UI or add/remove features. They just pile up in your .dtd and .properties files, taking up space. Here’s a bash script that will list out any entities or entries in .properties files…
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7 ways to be a better developer
Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking about ways to become a better software developer, specifically in terms of Firefox extension development. I’m listing the ways that I came up with here; most of it can be generalized to the development of any end-user facing program or application, but I wrote it with extension…
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Firefox development productivity tip
Since I always use Firefox as a single window with many tabs (and have become quite adept at switching quickly between tabs, but not so fast at switching between windows), having the Error Console open in a separate window always slows me down. What I’ve done is created a bookmark on my toolbar (right-click, select…
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Looking for some alpha testers
Is anyone interesting in helping alpha test and/or do some QA on a side project I’m working on? It’s a fairly simple Web application that should be relevant to pretty much everyone, but it will obviously be more useful to some people than to others. (How’s that for specifics?) If you want to take a…
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At least it’s easy to remember…
My wife just used the “Forgot my password” form on the MNCPA’s website. The automated response was, how you say, not very helpful: This is definitely a candidate for WorseThanFailure.
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Easy-peasy podcasting
Want an easy way to generate a podcast or RSS feed? At Eliot’s request, I wrote a PHP script that generates an RSS feed based on the contents of its parent directory, so whenever you add files to that directory (or its subdirectories), the feed is updated with links to those files. It also supports…
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What’s old is new again
A few weeks ago, I started a little side project, and I decided to write it in Python with the Django framework based on all of the good things I’ve heard about it. I may never go back to PHP. It’s like this: imagine you’ve been driving the same 1987 Dodge Dynasty for the last…
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History Cloud
Something I’ve always been fascinated with is the way that certain words can define a time period. Over the last decade, for example, there were periods of weeks where you couldn’t turn on the television without hearing “anthrax” or “lewinsky” or “taliban” or “tsunami.” I’ve been working on a little project to help visualize what…
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Feed Statistics Plugin Fixed
Update: Feed Statistics has been discontinued and is no longer supported. {{ the_content }
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Netscape Navigator 9.0 Beta Released
The long national nightmare is over: the beta of Netscape Navigator 9.0 has finally been released to the public. Read the official announcement here. Read a more informal introduction to the browser here. Download it here. Read the release notes here. Discuss it here.
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Building a better multi-link opener
After giving up on GoogleTabs, I was thinking about how there is no acceptable (by my standards, anyway) Firefox extension for opening multiple links. Linky is too general, just opening large swaths of links, and Snap Links requires you to physically indicate every link that you want opened. An ideal extension should know the links…
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Decommissioning GoogleTabs
I’ve decided to retire GoogleTabs, one of the very first extensions I ever wrote. GoogleTabs adds a context-menu option to open all of the Google search results on the current page in tabs. I made this decision for several reasons: I don’t have time to keep up with Google. Every time they change the HTML…