found drama

• The Word "Hacker"
  Why have I never seen this before?

  Hacking predates computers. When he was working on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman used to amuse himself by breaking into safes containing secret documents. This tradition continues today. When we were in grad school, a hacker friend of mine who spent too much time around MIT had his own lock picking kit. (He now runs a hedge fund, a not unrelated enterprise.)

  (tagged: culture programming hacking politics technology essay )
• Strict Mode Is Coming To Town
  at Yahoo! User Interface Blog
  (tagged: javascript webdev )
• PNG alpha transparency: AlphaImageLoader filter flaws in IE6
  at satzansatz — the short version: even when you fix PNG images in IE6, you still need to do battle with its other quirks.  Quirks within quirks within quirks!
  (tagged: png css hack webdev )
• The TITLE element and jQuery’s text() function
  By Rachael F. Arnold; because even everyone’s favorite cross-browser JavaScript solution can get it wrong sometimes…  The short version:

  jQuery('title').text('my new title');

  …completely blows up in Internet Explorer.

  (tagged: javascript jQuery IE quirks webdev )
• Google Closure: How not to write JavaScript
  After my brief skimming: I believe that some of the methods cited are relatively trivial, and are addressed by JavaScript engines like V8 that do optimizing during the JIT compilation but (a) I'm not 100% positive about that and (b) we're not all using Chrome anyway.  Either way, it's an interesting and in-depth article with some valid critiques of Google's Closure tool suite.
  (tagged: javascript google ClosureTools performance todo )

About Rob Friesel