AngularJS: The Bad Parts
Hey! If you do front end development, you should know about CatchJS. It’s a JavaScript error logging service that doesn’t suck. Below is a graph over the amount of searches for AngularJ…
MLB.com is using my Google Analytics code
After seeing a little spike in traffic on Analytics I did some further investigation. Lo and behold Websanova is tracking MLB.com!
Surfing the Modern Web with Ancient Browsers
I spend a fair amount of time working with legacy operating systems. Apart from being obsolete themselves they suffer from a common problem – the web browsers are simply unusable on a present day Internet. You start by getting JavaScript error on google.com and it only gets worse once you go further. Try going to…
Nobody expects CDATA sections in XML
I made a very explicit, pragmatic design decision with afl-fuzz : for performance and reliability reasons, I did not want to get into stati...
Let's Talk About Beacons
Let's Talk About Beacons If you’ve been following the tech scene lately, you may have heard a thing or two about “Beacons”. What are Beacons? Beacons are hardware devices emitting a unique signature...
The No CAPTCHA problem
When I read about No CAPTCHA for the first time I was really excited. Did we finally find a better solution? Hashcash? Or what? Finally it...
React: Another Level of Indirection
React provides a better abstraction over the DOM than MVC frameworks ever can. React is the last piece of the puzzle for ClojureScript web frontend development.
Fat JSON
Most server-side APIs these days are JSON-over-HTTP. Developers are generally comfy with this, but I notice when I look at the JSON that it’s often, uh, what’s the tactful term these days? Let’s say “generously proportioned”. And I see clumsy code being written to walk through it. The options for dealing with this are…
Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 – The Future of Color Fonts?
Error - Opentype Information and Resources - Opentype. Learn more about Error - Opentype Information and Resources with details, resources and...
The Case for React.js and ClojureScript
A comparison of MVC web frameworks with React.js and ClojureScript circa 2014.
The Worst API Ever Made?
A call-by-call look at context switch logging with the Event Tracing for Windows API.
The Scroll Up Bar
A design pattern that is currently growing more popular is the fixed position bar at the top of the page. Sometimes the bar stays the same throughout, sometimes the header morphs into a slimmer bar as you scroll down, sometimes a completely new bar appears.
German freemail sites trick Firefox and Chrome users into removing AdBlock
German freemail heavyweights web.de and gmx.net (several millions of users combined) are using deceptive techniques in order to manipulate Firefox and Chrome users into removing AdBlock and its var…
Chrome's experiment of hiding the URL is great for security
iOS has hidden the pathname of URLs for some time now, but recently Chrome Canary introduced something similar behind a flag.
Firefox 32 Supports Public Key Pinning
Public Key Pinning helps ensure that people are connecting to the sites they intend . Pinning allows site operators to specify which certif...
Developers: stop re-AOLizing the web!
I recently succumbed to the hype and downloaded Mailbox, a mobile email client that tries to help you manage your overflowing email inbox and achieve the mythical “inbox zero”. Mailbox does this by encouraging you to immediately archive, trash or schedule the email for a re-read or response using a swipe interface…
Two "WontFix" vulnerabilities in Facebook Connect
TL;DR Every website with "Connect Facebook account and log in with it" is vulnerable to account hijacking. Every website relying on signed_r...
GitHub dropped Pygments
My first-ever open source contribution, a couple years ago, was to a project called Pygments. My motivation? GitHub was displaying Racket source code poorly. Pygments didn't have a Racket lexer. GitHub was using a Scheme lexer for Racket code. The Scheme ...
How Apple Pay works and why it matters for developers
A blog for third-party developers on the Clover POS platform.
Implementing a web server in a single printf() call
A guy just forwarded a joke that most of us will already know Jeff Dean Facts (also here and here). Everytime I read that list, this part stands out: Jeff Dean once implemented a web server in a single printf() call. Other engineers added thousands of lines of explanatory comments but still don't u
Chinese Mobile UI Trends
A summary of common idioms and visual language found in Chinese smartphone apps.
RFC 2616 is dead
Don’t use RFC 2616. Delete it from your hard drives, bookmarks, and burn (or responsibly recycle) any copies that are printed out.
Why I like XSLT
I first fell in love with XSL in 1999, when Microsoft rolled an XSLT processor into MSXML. I got my hands on the works of Shakespeare marked up in XML