Evocateur

Paul Graham’s latest essay, Lies We Tell Kids, is long, insightful, and well-thought. I don’t agree with everything Mr. Graham writes, but I do try to read everything he writes. Whenever my muse decides to wake up from its long slumber, I hope to approach the craft much as Paul does.

I wrapped Facebox in a WordPress 2.5-compatible plugin for easily implementation on a recent freelance project. It’s pretty slick.

Go to the project page to download

If you’re on github (and you should be), follow me here.

Update

1.2.1 is out! Download it from the WordPress Plugin Directory

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge
Charles Darwin

Also of interest, the Dunning-Kruger effect. This Google-trail brought to you by sidebar on page 30 of Pragmatic Thinking & Learning: Refactoring Your “Wetware”, which I am thoroughly enjoying so far.

I cannot express how important this speech is to my generation, my community, my country. If you’re not misty-eyed (at the very least) by the end of it (and you will watch all of it, I guarantee it), you’re not listening.

Some much-needed levity, with monkeys.

All you ever wanted to know (and more) about “woot”

It occurs to me that re-introducing myself to Ruby on Rails (new shiny 2.0.2) after ~2 years in Siberia (VBScript, for $deity’s sake) and digging back into the legacy trenches of ColdFusion (in the past 2 months) might not be the smartest thing I’ve ever done. In fact, it’s downright stupid to taunt my inner developer, starved of grace and beauty for lo these many years. Like pouring out a glass of water in front of a man dying of thirst.

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

(Which is a roundabout way of saying I’m loving every goddamn minute, poking things with sticks and regaining my Ruby-legs (I was sad that I couldn’t work in the glorious pun “sea-legs” until I realized that meant I’d actually be dealing with C. (shudder)(When you think about it, I’m practically writing Lisp, as it is))

Upon reading this charming post on the IEBlog (a clueless attempt at self-deprecatory humor concerning IE8), I am urged to quote from this old chestnut (links & emphases added, with apologies to Zeldman):

Old software does not support standards. […] It would be swell if we could have backward compatibility and pure standards compliance. But we can’t. We have to choose. […]

For years, we’ve been taught to be good little web designers, building sites that work in browsers that don’t. Each site we build the old-fashioned way becomes one more dung heap of bad code, one more web destination that will eventually stop working as browsers and standards evolve.

The longer we do it, the more doomed sites proliferate. […]
Enough already. We finally have good browsers. Let’s use them.

I am sick unto death of dragging IE kicking and screaming into the 21st century. For personal projects, I no longer give a damn about how it looks/behaves in IE. Professionally, I will continue to utilize the concept of progressive enhancement (with a much sharper edge), longing for the day when we can all kick IE to the curb.

I will shortly be adding this snippet in a strategic location in my blog template:

<!--[if IE]>
  <h1>
    Page look weird? 
    <a href="http://getfirefox.com">Get a real browser.</a>
  </h1>
<![endif]-->

I really don’t care whom I offend, thanks to the example set by the IE team.

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently.”
Nietzsche