Measuring the coastline of England
I started to make another screencast but I got distracted by the problem of making a feature work while doing it, and then I was suddenly in the middle of measuring the coastline of England at a particularly craggy bit and oh dear. Screencast tomorrow, I think. I will tease you with this screenshot.
That’s sort of but not quite Firefox. I installed Firefox Aurora the other day, after ages of not using Firefox at all. Chrome was just so much faster. Firefox seems to have had some performance work in the intervening time, though. I was pleased: Firefox has a much healthier plugin environment.
I of course installed it for Firebug, which is still the best javascript/html5 development tool out there. The Mozilla Foundation is doing some interesting work all around these days, though.
Privacy online, an ongoing symposium: Here are two plugins that let you figure out who’s tracking you online and then stop them. Ghostery, for Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, not open source. Collusion, by the Mozilla Foundation, Firefox only.
Ghostery is fascinating. It’s amazing to visit pages that have ten or more bugs on them. This is why that web site is so fucking slow, I realize, because those weasels are tracking me ten times over. Or their advertisers are. Ha ha, now they’re not! BLOCKED. Block everything, man. Install an ad blocker while you’re at it.
Kickstarter is kickin’: Ze Frank! All kinds of interesting things going on there these days.
The Doctor is everywhere: Was pondering this js messaging library and had to laugh when I hit the examples. I, too, put jokes in my example code, which is otherwise quite boring.
Inspirational: The Pinboard Guy(TM) once again being inspirational.
I conclude with another teaser. It involves Xander. And Giles. I personally was happy just to have any fictional words whatsoever stringing together in my brain, so hey.
It all started when his mother needed him to assemble a piece of furniture she’d bought from the confusing Swedish furniture store place in LA. She’d been there with his aunt and come back with this giant flat cardboard box full of media center, allegedly. Not that Xander knew this when it started. All he knew was that Giles had just come over for an afternoon of unemployed slacker bonding, and he’d just poured him a glass of the punch he’d mixed for the occasion, and his mother was calling him up. Which was uber-embarrassing, so Xander waved vaguely at Giles and said, “Back in a minute”. Which turned out to be many minutes, because of the whole media center de-flattening thing and then the moving the television into its magnificent new home thing.
Afterwards, with the soap opera that both his mother and his aunt were into blaring away, Xander emerged victorious. He ran back downstairs to his cellar fortress of unemployed slacker solitude, a little flushed and sweaty from his struggle with the flatpack of doom. He had an apology ready to go, because he was vaguely aware that it taken him a long time, and definitely aware that he didn’t want Giles to have wandered off or become annoyed with him.
Giles, to his dismay, didn’t seem to notice that he’d returned. Giles was sitting in his reclaimed totally retro recliner reading, with the pitcher of fruit punch sitting on the table at his elbow. The level of punch had gone down considerably, which Xander was okay with given that it plus the book had kept Giles occupied without complaint during however long it had been. An hour? Longer. Whatever it was Giles was reading had him absorbed. What was he reading? Xander didn’t have much other than the comic books and the really embarrassing books that he kept hidden on the shelf beside his bed, which he would rather die than have Giles find and read.
So what- Oh. Shit.