I picked up a copy of Elisabeth Robson and Eric Freeman’s Head First HTML & CSS (O’Reilly, 2012) as schwag at a conference I attended 1; judging this book by its cover, I was pretty clearly not the audience for this book but hey: when have I turned down a book? So who is the […]
You’re running from building to building and rooftop to rooftop along with (and in support of) the Dread Pirate Roberts. Only this is neither Florin, nor Guilder — unless either have become modernized. This is a modern port town the same as you’d see depicted in the movies: cranes and shipping containers and ear-splitting horns […]
The Value of Subverting Authority Sherman Alexie: These religious fundamentalists are unaware that freedom of religion necessarily brings with it the freedom to mock religion. (tagged: religion Sherman Alexie ) President Obama Is an Introvert and So Am I: But that doesn’t mean we don’t like you. Scott Dodd, writing for Slate Magazine ("Obama’s Denver […]
You do not mess with Big Bird Mary Elizabeth Williams, writing at Salon.com: Romney made the error of looking like a man who is not on the side of innocence, whimsy, learning or childhood. Nor did he seem to grasp that Big Bird is an integral part of a show that was created for and […]
The Secret to Good Writing: It’s About Objects, Not Ideas John Maguire, writing for The Atlantic: How should one train students to give good, vivid examples in their writing? Should you tell them, Be more specific? I used to do that but I don't any more, because it's too vague, not operational. Today I give […]
Automate Jasmine Agile and Introversion the zombie Reagan “Search Term Haiku” is a series wherein I examine this site’s log files and construct one or more haiku poems from search terms and phrases that led visitors to the site. Where possible, I attempt to keep the search phrases intact. However, as these are haiku poems, […]
Q3 of 2012: wrapped up. For those playing along at home: the original 2012 goals post, and the Q1 and Q2 check-in posts. And now… the Q3 check-in:
The Flawed Theory Behind Unit Testing By Michael Feathers. My "tl;dr" take-away: testing for the sake of testing is useless unless you're using the tests as an exercise in critiquing and scrutinizing your code and the intent behind it. (tagged: testing Michael Feathers ) Setting Up a Command Line Clojure App Mike Ebert, writing at […]
Katie Cunningham’s The Accessibility Handbook (O’Reilly, 2012) is a concise and specific introduction to accessibility (a11y) and 508-compliance. Cunningham provides a “walking tour” of the major types of disabilities that web developers need to consider when creating a site for a11y, illustrating how people with those disabilities will use a site, and then detailing easy […]
This past weekend at Vermont Code Camp, I caught Mike Fowler’s presentation, “Crafting Scalable Stylesheets”. In that presentation, he discusses this notion of “smart” variables (slides 32 through 35), wherein we provide an argument to a mixin (or even just a simple @if statement), and then based on that argument’s type-of value, we select a […]