Spin is an end-of-the-world story. One night while childhood neighbors and friends Tyler, Jason, and Diane are outside looking at the night sky, all the stars disappear. The Earth has been surrounded by some sort of barrier that blocks out the starts and slows down time for everything inside it ...
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The fixie of blog software
Recently I stumbled across NewsBruiser, which runs Leonard Richardson's and a bunch of his friends' blogs. It's got this pleasing low-tech homebrew feel to it. I've been programming web applications for 10 years now. While my specialty is the back-end I can crank out a passable user ...
Thinking Differently About Free Network Services
Sometime in 2007 Tim O'Reilly started talking about applying free/open-source ideas to things besides software, like hardware, government data, personal data in web applications, etc. He had a great post about this around that time which I can't find at the moment, but if my memory serves ...
Nonprofit == Startup?
I work for a non-profit, so I've always thought of my work as being apart from and unlike the business world. But lately I've been spending free time on Hacker News, a sort of moderated Reddit social bookmarking/news site sponsored by a venture capitalist firm. There are ...
Magnificent
Oh. My. God. Magnificent. It's the second song from U2's latest album "No Line On The Horizon". It's an incredible song. It's an anthem. It breaks my heart and lifts me up at the same time. Lots of good stuff on this album. U2 hits a ...
"Peace" where there is no peace
My wife and I go to a "peace church". Specifically, a Mennonite USA church. It's called a peace church because Mennonites, along with several other denominations like Quakers and Amish, have historically refused to participate in war or other forms of violence. My grandfathers were both conscientious objectors during ...
The System of the World
Several years ago I tried to read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. I really wanted to like it, since I loved Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age. His essay In The Beginning Was The Command Line, was the tipping point that got me into Linux and open-souce, and poking around the etymology ...
Transistorize the World
Back in the summer of 2007 I came out of the Open Source Hardware session at OSCON pretty jazzed about the x0xb0x -- somebody had actually made an open-source clone of the Roland TB-303! I signed up to buy a kit as soon as I could fire up a browser. Late ...
Good-bye Dojo, jQuery is my new Javascript framework
Getting Dojo's dijit.Editor to work in a form
dijit.Editor is one of those so-close-yet-so-far things. It gives users a way to enter fancy formatted text without having to learn HTML, and is part of the Dojo Toolkit, which is supposed to make Javascript easier to work with. But it was a real PITA to get Editor working ...