Tag Archives: Computers

Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2009

Last weekend Google hosted their 3rd annual mentor summit, following the end of their 4th annual summer of code. The mentor summit is when a few hundred mentors gather together and participate in an unconference style conference. I went for … Continue reading

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Yahoo’s IM formatting

I’ve been working on instant messaging software for seven years, so I’ve been exposed to a lot of IM protocols. The “protocol” is the structure of bytes that gets sent back and forth between your computer and the IM service. … Continue reading

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Why I work on open source

I haven’t written about this before, have I? I think the world is better off with free software. I don’t have anything against closed source or non-free software, I just think typical development processes for free software produce better products … Continue reading

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Scrobble Scrobble

Last.fm’s audio scrobbler has an option that “scrobbles” a track after to listening to anywhere between 50% to 100% of the song. So the song is considered listened to if you only listen to 4:30 of a 5 minute song. … Continue reading

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Best Practice: Rembember Application State

From Firefox I learned that applications should always save their state. When you close and restart an application is should restore its state to what it was previously. Open windows, open documents, which text was highlighted, how far down you’ve … Continue reading

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Changes in Gmail

Google recently made a few changes to the buttons in Gmail. Here’s a before and after comparison: But they got two things wrong: The mouse cursor doesn’t change when hovering over the new buttons. With the old buttons the cursor … Continue reading

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Web browser SSL warnings

These are the warnings that Firefox 3.0.5 is capable of showing: I once heard someone lament that as soon as a user does a web search and the browser asks “you’re submitting information that’s not encrypted, do you want us … Continue reading

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The Startup Ambience

This whole “computer startup company” thing really is different than what I was used to on the east coast. I mean, I had heard about Google and Yahoo! and PayPal and eBay and Amazon and Netscape, but it’s hard to … Continue reading

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