“It’s a UNIX system. I know this!”

Films rarely depict computing accurately – largely because, let’s face it, sitting in front of a terminal hacking away is hardly the most exciting thing to watch. Back in Jurassic Park, when Lex was trying to hack into the computer system to get the power back online, she used a 3D file manager. Lots of …

Echochamber.js – All of the commenting, none of the comments.

echochamber.js is a third-party script you can install to add a simple comment form to your blog post or website. Nothing new, right? Wrong! There’s a rather cunning twist: When a user submits a comment, echochamber.js will save the comment to the user’s LocalStorage, so when they return to the page, they can be confident …

Lightyear.fm – A journey through space, time, and music

Radio broadcasts leave Earth at the speed of light and travel outwards into space. Follow them through the Milky Way as you scroll backwards through time and listen to what the stars hear. Built using Three.js. Taking a look at the source code reveals all tracks used. And oh, don’t forget the “Inverse Square Law …

Quantity Ordering With CSS

Here is your mission, should you choose to accept it: create a table of items. Each item should span a third of the content area, with the fourth item starting on a new row, much like floats. However, a particular item must always display the price at the end of the first row. Visually, we …

Sublime Text 3 for PHP Developers

I admit, I’m a Sublime Text user. Why? Because it’s an IDE that plays nice for a lot of languages. Using Sublime Text I can let my students – from the first year up until the third – write SQL statements, HTML, JS, PHP, etc. in it all without needing to learn to work a …

Trending at Instagram

We identified three main elements of a good trend: Popularity – the trend should be of interest to many people in our community. Novelty – the trend should be about something new. People were not posting about it before, or at least not with the same intensity. Timeliness – the trend should surface on Instagram …

Targetting the OS X System Font in CSS

body { font-family: system-font, -webkit-system-font, -apple-system-font, “.SFNSDisplay-Regular”, HelveticaNeue, LucidaGrande; } On a fresh install of OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) there’s no San Francisco font installed. But it’s the system font, so how is this possible? Hence the sort of magic above to actually get it working. I Left My System Fonts in San Francisco …

Layers of Technical Debt and Complexity

On July 8, 2015 the New York Stock Exchange went down due to a software glitch. Over at Medium, Zeynep Tufekci went into detail on how it comes that software sucks. Software sucks for many reasons, all of which go deep, are entangled, and expensive to fix. […] LAYERS AND LEGACIES: A lot of software …