John Cox

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Interesting

GitHub

HTML5 Cross Browser Polyfills - GitHub

A sprawling, community-maintained directory of shims, polyfills, and fallback libraries for bringing HTML5, CSS3, and ECMAScript features to browsers that lack native support, curated by Paul Irish. The premise is that developers should code against the standard APIs and let scripts fill the gaps, so nothing needs rewriting as users move to native implementations. It is organized by feature area, including SVG, canvas, storage, forms, video and audio, WebSockets, History, CSS layout and selectors, and ES5/ES6, with short notes on each library's approach (Flash, VML, or pure JS) and caveats like deprecation or non-standard APIs, plus pointers to Modernizr, HTML5PLEASE, and Polyfiller for related needs.

Permalink programmingdevelopmentopensource

webdesignledger.com

20 New Examples of Minimal Websites | Inspiration

This is the comment thread under a 2011 roundup of minimalist website designs by Gisele Muller. The article body didn't come through, so only the reactions survive. The central dispute is over whether the featured sites are truly minimal: several commenters say many rely on rich photography or are busy, and that only Infinise, Nizo and Chance Graham qualify. Others defend the picks, and a few argue that real minimalism means stripping away whatever stands between users and their goal. One commenter criticizes the navigation on Chance Graham, and others favor Infinise, with a few self-promoting links and one "tired of minimal" dissent mixed in.

Permalink designminimalisminternet

Remy's b:log

Signs of a poorly written jQuery plugin

Offers a quick way to judge a jQuery plugin's quality: skim its source for telltale signs that the author doesn't understand how jQuery works. It takes one bloated plugin skeleton and strips it down step by step, removing a throwaway variable before the return, the redundant `$(this)` wrapper (since `this` is already a jQuery object inside a plugin), a pointless `return` inside `each` callbacks, and finally the `each` itself, because `bind` already iterates over the collection and returns it. The end result is a one-line plugin, `return this.bind('someEvent', fn);`, and each cruft pattern is presented as a red flag when evaluating third-party code.

Permalink programmingdevelopmenttipsplugins

kottke.org

A "new" Leonardo painting

Reports that scholars have authenticated a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci painting, a panel that owner Simon brought to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's conservation studio about two years earlier. It had been bought at auction as a gamble, since heavy overpainting and past botched cleanings, including a grayed artificial resin, made it look like a dark, ruined copy. Once restorers painstakingly stripped the overpaint, they found delicate original paint beneath, and according to an anonymous source close to the Met, all the experts agreed it was by Leonardo.

Permalink arthistory

hellowebapps.com

abdera.apache.org

Apache Abdera

This is the homepage for Apache Abdera, a Java implementation of the Atom Syndication Format (RFC 4287) and Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023). It carries the project's release history from its 2006 incubator acceptance through graduation to a top-level Apache project in 2008, to 1.0 and the 1.1.x line, with the latest, 1.1.3 (December 2012), a set of bug fixes covering Java 7 builds, classloading, and an Axiom dependency update. Each release is paired with download links and checksums. The page also points newcomers to the getting-started guide, the mailing lists, and ways to contribute.

Permalink programmingsoftwaredevelopmentopensource

eddieonfilm.blogspot.com

Edward Copeland on Film...and more: Comic Training, Sir!

Plays from YouTube. Nothing is loaded from Google until you press play.

A 30th-anniversary appreciation of Stripes (1981) that treats it as the high point of the early Saturday Night Live-alumni comedies, with Bill Murray's slacker and Harold Ramis's straight man pitted against Warren Oates's drill sergeant and a rigid military order. It covers the film's origins as a Cheech and Chong pitch, the casting stories, Murray's small improvised touches, and the unusually tense, unjokey washroom scene, while faulting the Eastern Bloc final third as forced and noting mixed contemporary reviews from Ebert, Maslin and the Washington Post. The writer closes by observing that enlisting on a whim feels less funny in a wartime climate, but still calls it a comedy they don't make anymore.

Permalink filmcomedy

net.tutsplus.com

Integrating Two-Factor Authentication with CodeIgniter | Nettuts+

A hands-on tutorial for adding Duo Security's free two-factor authentication to a CodeIgniter login system, building on the author's earlier "Easy Authentication with CodeIgniter" piece. It first hardens the base app by swapping in phpass/bcrypt password hashing and adding a per-user `two_factor_permission` column so some users can skip the second step. It then walks through embedding Duo's Web SDK iframe and JavaScript, generating a signed request with integration, secret, and self-made application keys, and verifying Duo's signed response in a `process_second_auth()` controller action before setting the `logged_in` session flag. It closes by suggesting logging login attempts and user actions as the next security step.

Permalink programmingsecuritydevelopmenttutorial

kottke.org

The Christian Science Monitor

Home solar gets $280 million boost from Google - CSMonitor.com

Google is putting $280 million into a fund with installer SolarCity, its biggest clean-energy investment so far, to pay for roughly 10,000 rooftop solar systems that homeowners get with no money down and pay for by buying the power at a fixed rate. Google profits mainly through federal and local tax credits (30 percent federally, about $84 million), accelerated depreciation, and undisclosed interest from SolarCity. An analyst estimates returns of 10 to 20 percent, which helps answer investor doubts about spending on non-core ventures. The piece also explains how this financing model works, why it depends on high power prices, subsidies and sunny roofs, and why SolarCity's CEO hopes Google's move will draw other corporations in to ease the shortage of project financing.

Permalink solarbusinessgoogleclimate

Opera News

An Introduction to Datasets - Dev.Opera

What was saved is a page listing Opera blog posts rather than a single article, so there is no sustained argument, only headlines and teasers from roughly March to September 2026. The newest item says Opera is flipping its Vertical Tabs layout by adding a "New Tab" button at the top. Other posts cover Paste Protect, an Opera GX defense against clipboard attacks, and Opera Neon, which is free to download and can connect to existing AI agents through MCP. There are also Vertical Tabs and an upgraded Google Lens arriving in Opera One, plus Gemini and Google Translate added to the sidebar. If you meant to keep a particular post, such as the Vertical Tabs redesign or Paste Protect, you'll need to save its own page, since this one only shows the index and a newsletter signup.

Permalink developmentdata

Impressive Webs

About Obsolete Features in HTML5

HTML5 drops "deprecated" and sorts old markup into two categories: "obsolete but conforming" features, like the border attribute on img or the name attribute on a, which still validate but trigger a warning, and non-conforming obsolete elements such as applet, acronym, frame, strike, big and blink, which cause outright errors. Some things that failed under XHTML Strict, like iframe and target, are now simply valid. The piece reassures readers that obsolete elements won't break pages, since the HTML5 doctype identifies a web document rather than a specific markup language and browsers are expected to keep rendering the old elements, so switching old pages to the HTML5 doctype is safe even if they no longer validate cleanly.

Permalink programmingdevelopment

www.jquery4u.com

ofps.oreilly.com

MacRuby: The Definitive Guide

This is the O'Reilly enterprise landing page, not an article with an argument. It pitches the platform to organizations as a way to upskill teams, citing 5,000+ enterprise clients, 2.8M+ members, and new academies for managers, soft skills, and data literacy. The main feature is "Expert Intelligence," which connects a company's existing AI tools to O'Reilly's practitioner content through an MCP and job-specific agent skills, returning recommendations with links to the exact supporting passages. The rest is customer stories (Tavant, CARTA, a payments platform), live events, and plans for individuals, teams, government, and higher education.

Permalink booksprogrammingmacos

CBS News

Why Everyone Should Work in Sales — at Least for a While | BNET

What was saved is a CBS News technology page, not a single article: a set of video segment blurbs, most of them about AI. Bill Gates, in New York for the UN General Assembly, likens AI to an alien invasion and tries to prepare world leaders for both its promise and its dangers. Elsewhere, Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei discusses his book "Simplify: Do 50% More with 50% Less," and a California startup, Farm-ng, uses AI robots for seeding, weeding and harvesting on small farms. A new antitrust lawsuit alleges that leading AI companies coordinated a slowdown, and a New York Times data journalist reports that former DraftKings employees say the platform may have targeted addicts.

Permalink workadvicebusinesscareers

www.youtube.com