Me Posts

  • 07.03.09 Career Update, Part ++n (Web, Me, Computers)

    I’ve now ended up working on Chrome, Google’s web browser. The team I’m on is responsible for implementing HTML 5 features, as well as designing and implementing other new features (for standardization) that will help web apps become as powerful as native apps. Much of what we do will go into the WebKit source tree, where it will also directly benefit Safari, Android, the Palm Pre, and other WebKit-based browsers.

    In fact, everything I work on (more or less) is going to be open source. Both the WebKit and Chromium source trees are public. You can view, if you care to, the one patch I’ve contributed so far and the one that’s currently out for review. That’s kind of mind-blowing, in a good way, to me, steeped as I am in the secrecy of Apple.

    I’m pretty excited by this. There are quite a lot of things I’m interested in working on—client-side storage, local apps, drag-and-drop, better font support, menus, even far-out stuff like peer-to-peer networking. Forward in all directions!… MORE

  • 05.08.09 Murky Mailing List And Progress Report (Me, Computers)

    I’ve set up a Google Groups mailing-list for Murky, my Mercurial version-control app. It’ll be for both developers and users of the app.

    Speaking of “developers”, I’ve been really pleased with the reaction to my initial source-dump to Bitbucket! So far, in nine days:

  • 04.29.09 Murky: A Mercurial Client App (Me, Computers)

    After repeated prodding, I’ve finally gotten off my butt and released Murky, a GUI client app for the Mercurial version-control system. I’ve been working on it for over a year, and using it a lot myself; I had always planned to open-source it “when it’s ready”, but never actually got around to doing the necessary cleanup and uploading.

    I’m happy to say that Murky is finally blinking in the light of day, with its own Mercurial [natch] repository on Bitbucket.

    Murky is by no means complete (or particularly polished) but here’s what it can do:… MORE

  • 03.07.09 VoodooPad 4.1 and VP Reader for iPhone Released (Me, Computers)

    Flying Meat Software has released a VoodooPad Reader app for iPhone, as a complement to their great desktop wiki. So now you can sync your VP docs to your iPhone and access them on the go, with or without a network.

    What’s especially cool, to me, is that VP Reader uses my MYNetwork library and BLIP protocol for its networking. Gus calls it “an awesome network library … It made moving pages from VoodooPad to the iPhone over the network completely painless. A++ would recommend again.” Thanks, Gus! I believe this is the first appearance of BLIP in a shipping product, since my own apps remain in limbo.

    The VP Reader source code is available if you want to see how it was done.… MORE

  • 02.24.09 Music, Alone (Ideas, Me, Music)

    The feelings created by music are so strong, for me, but so ineffable. The problem of perception is usually described using color — how can we know if the visual sensation I call “red” is anything like the one you call “red”? — but only gets worse as you ascend to higher order perceptions, where even names become harder to apply. What do you call the feeling incited by “Guernica”, and even if you find the same words I would, is it the same feeling? And yet vision is our strongest, highest-bandwidth, most describable sense. We struggle to describe sound without using the technical terms of musicians, or vague metaphors.

    It doesn’t help that so much of the music I like is so inward-focused: the guitarist gazing (not at shoes) at effect pedals, the producer sliding waveforms around a timeline, the listener bracketed in headphones like my picture above.… MORE

  • 01.13.09 Security hole in Safari RSS (Social Software, Me, Computers)

    Brian Mastenbrook has discovered a really bad security hole in Safari RSS. He hasn’t released details yet, presumably to give Apple time to release a patch, so I don’t know what the bug is. But it’s my fault, since I either wrote the bad code myself, or at least didn’t notice a mistake a co-worker made. And since I’m not at Apple anymore I can’t help fix it.

    Shit. I’m sorry, everyone.… MORE

  • 08.17.08 Career update (Web, Me, Computers)

    FYI, I ended up taking the position at Google. I started two weeks ago, and it’s been quite exciting, despite (or because of) the “drinking from a fire-hose” aspect of learning my way around the big G.

    I’m on the Google Sites team. I’ve been interested in wikis for years, and now I get to actually work on one. (Although Sites, née JotSpot, is not a typical wiki.)

    I could write a lot about my experience of … MORE

  • 08.09.08 Beautiful snej soup, yum (Social Software, Web, Me)

    I’m fooling around with Soup, a newish micro-blogging service I just discovered. I’ve never signed up for tumblr or its other clones, but I’m kind of smitten with Soup, so I set up my own:

    beautiful snej soup, yum

    I’ve got it aggregating stuff from my del.icio.us, flickr and last.fm accounts, as well as this blog. And I’m directly posting some things I’ve run across today, via its very nice bookmarklet.

    Part of the reason I got sucked in is that Soup has the single best new-user experience I’ve ever seen on the web.… MORE

  • 07.14.08 Testers Wanted (Me, Games, Computers)

    I need a few brave people to test a pre-beta app for me. No, this is not Cloudy; it’s another app I’ve been working on in parallel. It’s called Your Move, and it’s the expanded version of my GeekGameBoard sample code. It lets you play board games against a human opponent; either at the same machine, over a local network, or by sending moves via email or iChat.… MORE

  • 07.14.08 The Ramones Sing iPhone Development (Me, Humor, Computers)

    (This is more or less to the tune of Rock’n’Roll High School, or any other Ramones song for that matter. You have to imagine Joey Ramone singing it. Johnny, you just switch between C and F every couple of lines, got it?)

    Well back in March I got my feelins hurt
    When Apple wouldn’t gimme no developer cert
    The SDK they gave me had a “simulator”—Fooled around with it, then said “see you lator!”

    (iPhone, iPhone, iPhone developer)… MORE

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