Douglas Crockford's The Department of Style

I have a telephone instrument on my desk. I rarely use it. Most of the calls I get are recruiters, evil telemarketers, and wrong numbers. I mostly communicate with people using email, im, and the old reliable f2f. The office phone is as usef

The Ajaxians picked up Peter Michaud's story about another problematic Firefox feature. This one involves a second parameter to the sinister eval function that breaks closure encapsulation. Peter's story is timely, but it ain't news. This blunder has

This week I attended O'Reilly's Velocity conference. This was the maiden event for this conference, and excepting some trouble with space management, it came off really well. The talks were kept short and they kept to the schedule so there w

Unicode is (or should be) the single encoding for the transmission of all of the world's text. But Hollywood teaches us that when all else fails, our very survival may depend on our knowledge of Morse Code. Samuel Morse was a portrait painte

The first person I ever heard use the word minify was Alvy Ray Smith who was at the Lucasfilm Computer Division in 1982. Alvy used it to mean to reduce the size of an image by scaling down or zooming out. In 2000, at Electric Communities (aka C

Our best immediate hope for safe widgetting with state-of-the-art web browsers is safe JavaScript subsetting. A safe subset of JavaScript restricts or eliminates features of the language and runtime environment that grant excess authority to

One of the most important textbooks on computer programming is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman. It is available online at http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/. This book is essential, just as Knuth's The Art of

I like the progressive income tax. The people who are benefiting the most from this civilization should pay more to sustain it. I'm doing pretty well, so I don't mind that I pay more in taxes than people who aren't doing as well. But I do no

David Stifel did a lot of the programming on the NES conversion of Maniac Mansion. Now he acts. You may remember him as Lycon, the eyeless inhaler dealer in Minority Report.

Many years ago I created, but never produced, a low-budget children's show called The Jesus The Clown Show. The theme song went like this: Honk your nose if you love Jesus Honk your nose if you love Jesus Honk your nose if you love J