jwz

Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

Conway's Game of Life, using floating point values instead of integers

A continuous version of Conway's Life, using floating point values instead of integers: supports many interesting phenomena such as gliders that can travel in any direction, rotating pairs of gliders, wickstretchers and the appearance of elastic tension in the 'cords' that join the blobs. Slides showing how the rule…

Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh

Those dicks at Google are shutting off Reader at the end of the week, and the world is in a mad tizzy trying to find a feed reader that will continue to function. First a word on why it is stultifyingly stupid that this is even a problem in the first place: I want to read my feeds on three devices: a desktop computer…

Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"

In a shamefully credulous statement, they say: Proponents of pseudonymity scored a major victory today, when Google executive Vic Gundotra revealed at the Web 2.0 Summit that social networking service Google+ will begin supporting pseudonyms and other types of identity. According to Mashable, Google+ will be "adding…

Facebook doesn't like privacy countermeasures

German tech-news site Heise changed their "Like" buttons to be locally-hosted images that only transform into real Facebook "Like" buttons once you click them -- meaning that if you don't click anything, Facebook can't track you, and that actually "liking" the page requires two clicks. (Also presumably meaning that…

If you were involved in the OpenGL ES specification, you are an idiot

XScreenSaver 5.15 is out now. Along with the usual set of minor improvements, this version runs as an iOS application. As all of the 3D modules in XScreenSaver are written against the OpenGL 1.3 specification, and as the iPhone only supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and newer, this was something of a big deal. I accomplished…

Some killjoys have removed the blink tag from Firefox

Some killjoys have removed the <blink> tag from Firefox. Dropped blink effect from text-decoration: blink; and completely removed <blink> element. Of course, <blink> still works on my sites. And with proper MILSPEC 3 units on, 1 unit off timing, as is right and proper, and which I believe the non-Unix versions of…

The game of life emulated in the game of life

Conway's Game of Life, emulated in Conway's Game of Life: The life simulator used is Golly which has a built-in script to generate these metapixel grids (select a pattern, and choose "metafier.py" from the scripts list). Outer Totalistic Cellular Automata Meta-Pixel: The metacell uses a period 184 tractor beam, which…

Remember when people tracked bugs?

I've done some well-known bitching about the halfassed and haphazard way that Open Sores projects have handled their bugs in the past, but man, things have only gotten worse since then. I mean, projects used to actually have bug databases. Boy, those were the days. Failing that, developers used to put their email…

Google seems to have broken email forwarding

Basically: I'm finding it impossible to reliably convince Google that email from my employees, to my employees, is not spam. I run my own mail server, but most of my employees use Gmail. So I have forwarding set up: employee@dnalounge.com simply forwards to employee@gmail.com. When sending mail using their Gmail…

PSA: Back Up Your Shit

Here in this modern world, you talk to your friends over all kinds of different media: SMS, Facebook, Twitter DMs, GChat, and maybe even AIM if you're really old. These conversations aren't ephemeral and disposable, they are your life, and you want to save them forever. You don't just throw your letters in the trash…

Engineering Pornography (2002)

This is one of my favorite geek stories of all time. I know I've mentioned it to a few of you recently, and you hadn't seen it, so here it is for posterity. Date: Wed, 27 Sep 89 10:27 PDT. From: "Thomas L. Mc Mahon" <tlm@riverside.scrc.symbolics.com> Subject: Cuts and jumpers (on a different scale) To…

Mobile web design: The reign of morons, indeed

If you are Esquire's web designer, please find another career. Stop. Stop hurting the internet. I am still constantly amazed at the level user-hostility -- actually outright contempt -- in mobile web design. Remember in the 90s when those oh-so-clever web sites would pop up little Javascript dialogs trying to better…

The secret history of the about:jwz url

I realized recently that while I have written about the history of the about:authors URL , I have never explained the history of the about:jwz easter egg . Well, I guess it's been long enough, so now it can be told.

The software fixed the hardware

software solutions to hardware problems, and outbreaks of the future. © 2007 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>

Message threading (1997-2002)

In this document, I describe what is, in my humble but correct opinion, the best known algorithm for threading messages (that is, grouping messages together in parent/child relationships based on which messages are replies to which others.) This is the threading algorithm that was used in Netscape Mail and News 2.0…

YouTube's joke of a fair-use appeal process

Remember last month, when I was working on a screen saver and I reviewed all nine Hellraiser movies and made a supercut of every on-screen appearance of the Lament Configuration? As soon as I posted it, it was immediately blocked with seven content-ID matches. So I filed a DMCA fair-use counter-claim, because this…

Confiscating your ice cream cones

Hey, remember that awesome Hello City Planner video about how the Government is going to have to come and confiscate your ice cream cones? I thought the best thing about it was that it was actually created by the SF Planning Department, but I was wrong. It gets better: it turns out, it's a true story!! Before Ice…

Nym Wars (Google+ "real name" rules)

I hadn't been paying much attention to the Google "Real Names" clusterfuck, because it was so obvious to me that they were going to lose this one in the press that it would all be over soon. But it's still not over, and the Google brass appear to be digging in their heels, despite the universally bad press they're…

jwz: Apple recently broke Ctrl-Y

Ever since MacOS 10.0 was released, text fields have supported Emacs bindings for the single-character Control commands, showing that there were people inside Apple (and, presumably, NeXT) who were right-thinking and sensible. But some time late in the 10.6 release cycle, and continuing into 10.7.1, the binding for…

The Netscape Dorm (1994)

If someone has linked you to this page, they're probably trying to con you. Don't fall for it. In fact, stop reading right now. Don't read this page. Go read this page instead.

The Rise of "Worse is Better"

Previous: Lisp's Apparent Failures Up: Lisp's Apparent Failures Next: Good Lisp Programming is Hard

And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)

April 1st, 1999 will be my last day as an employee of the Netscape Communications division of America Online, and my last day working for mozilla.org.

JWZ, on Garbage Collection

In a conversation at work about the architecture of a new product, someone made an assertion along the lines of, ``then we'd need to use a garbage collector, and that would hurt performance.''

Every day I learn something new… and stupid.

Hey kids, did you know that JavaScript doesn't have integers? That's right! All JavaScript numbers (either primitive numbers, or the Number object, and don't even get me started on how stupid it is that there is even a distinction between the two) are actually double floats! Now, in any Lisp-derived language, you…

The CADT Model

In February 2003, a bunch of the outstanding bugs I'd reported against various GNOME programs over the previous couple of years were all closed as follows:

Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!

Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! In honor of the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla project, home.mcom.com, the Internet Web Site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, is now back online. It took some doing. There is comedy. First, the fun stuff: Until now, home.mcom.com and all URLs under it just redirected…

the Lemacs/FSFmacs schism

In 1991, I was working at Lucid Inc., and our newest product, Energize, was an integrated development environment for C and C++ on Unix. The design of this development environment involved very tight integration between the various tools: compilers, linkers, debuggers, graphers, and editors. So of course we needed a…

really bad attitude

The first three newsgroups created inside Netscape (then Mosaic Communications ), when our news server went online the first time, were mcom.general, mcom.humour, and mcom.bad-attitude.

I would like Debian to stop shipping XScreenSaver

If any of you reading this have decision-making ability along those lines, I would appreciate your assistance in making this happen. If you're wondering why: they are still shipping a version of my software that I released in 2014. Since that's roughly a decade in software years, it recently began popping up a single…