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Urban Decay: Exploring an old abandoned particle collider facility
Learn about public engagement activities from the American Physical Society
Unladen Swallow Retrospective
I wrote this while I was at PyCon, but I kept revising it. Anyway, here goes. :) As is apparent by now, no one has really been doing any ...
The strange story of etherpad
I don't actually know this story - certainly no more of it than anyone who has read a few web pages. But luckily, I'm pretty good at making...
Making of Crash Bandicoot - GOOL
I’m always being asked for more information on the LISP based languages I designed for the Crash and Jak games. This post is about GOOL, the LISP language used in Crash 1, Crash 2, and Crash …
How Thomas Jefferson prepared for meetings
Here's an interesting historical anecdote from Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software on the value of preparing for meetings. In his multi-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson and His Time, Dumas Malone tells the story of how Jefferson handled the first meeting held to decide the organization of the…
Chrome Developer Tools: Back to Basics
It’s been an exciting past few months in the Google Chrome Developer Tools world as we keep adding new features, while polishing up existin...
Ultima Underworld bugs
As we (Blue Sky Productions, later Looking Glass Technologies / Studios) were developing Ultima Underworld in 1991–1992, largely in a basement room in an office building in Somerville’s Davis Square, we received bug reports both from our own people and the QA team at Origin Systems, who published the game. “Our own…
The secret life of punctuation - ¶ (The Pilcrow)
This is a pilcrow: ¶. They crop up surprisingly frequently, bookending paragraphs on websites with a typographic bent, for instance, and teaming up with the section symbol in legal documents to form picturesque reference marks such as §3, ¶7. The pilcrow even appears in Microsoft Word, where it adorns a button which…
"It'll never work": a collection of failed predictions
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
Native Client: Getting Ready for Takeoff
Over the last few months we have been hard at work getting Native Client ready to support the new Pepper plug-in interface. Native Client ...
Skype's Crazy Regex Easter Egg
Today I was chatting with a colleague on Skype, and as is often the case, misspelled something in my rush to get something across. A habit I picked up in the IRC days, days I realize have not...
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 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.
Nokia’s Suicide Note
Stephen Elop has jumped his company off the burning platform, all right. And, I judge, straight into the fire.
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.
Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” released
[02 Nov 2011] DebConf12 Nicaragua dates confirmed [08 Oct 2011] Updated Debian 6.0: 6.0.3 released [01 Oct 2011] Updated Debian GNU/Linux 5.0: 5.0.9 released [18 Sep 2011] Upcoming point releases and call for test [16 Aug 2011] Debian Community celebrates its 18th birthday [30 Jul 2011] DebConf11 ends as another…
What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?
On December 17, a 26 year old Tunisian man named Mohamed Bouazizi reached the end of his rope. An unemployed university graduate, Bouazizi had become a seller of fruits and vegetables in the southern Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When authorities confiscated his wares to punish him for selling without a license…
Chromium Blog: More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change
There has been a lot of discussion regarding this week’s announcement of upcoming changes to HTML video codec support in Chrome. The future...
Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome
The web’s open and community-driven development model is a key factor in its rapid evolution and ubiquitous adoption. The WebM Project was ...