Programming

Of all of the presenters at art&&code, there was one who perfectly captured the spirit of it all. His name was _why. He wore a blue flower on his lapel, and carried an autoharp around with him. He was and remains a hero and source of inspiration for me, and I was lucky enough to be his student (at least for a few hours).

Today, I officially joined the Gowalla team. I’ll be leaving the Land of the Rising Sun for the Lone Star State; trading ramen for ribs, karaoke for concerts, and utter linguistic befuddlement for…well, maybe I’ll hold onto that one.

Based on a resurgence of interest in Chroma-Hash (hi reddit!), I thought it’d be useful to revisit this oft-misunderstood project.

Yesterday, I posted Chroma-Hash, an experiment in how to visualize the live-input of secure fields, such as a password on a login screen. So far, I’ve received a lot of great feedback, as well as a number of questions that I thought deserved a proper response.

So you’re all gung-ho about preventing the link-rot apocolypse of the internet. Sweet! Now what? Check out this simple way to implement a shortener on your own site.

MTV just released an API for their entire music video collection. How does it stack up against the reigning champion Yahoo! Music? Read on to find out…

The Yahoo! Music API is impressive, but the question remains:
How does it stack up to the reigning champion of music APIs?
How does Yahoo! Music compare to Last.fm?

If you’ve heard of Gears or BrowserPlus, chances are you’ve heard them positioned as competitors in one way or another. Another Google vs. Yahoo! showdown. Truth is, that’s not the case at all, or at least doesn’t have to be. After taking a look at what these technologies actually offer, we can see that they’re actually two distinct approaches to an exciting new direction for the web.

A lot has changed since the first publication of High Performance MySQL in 2004. At some point, the web turned 2.0, startups became cool again, and SQL became a bad word (regardless of how you pronounce it).

As weird as it is, there are a lot of good reasons to actually learn JavaScript, and not just pretend its some other language with C syntax. It takes a great deal of insight into this language to understand its true potential, and Douglas Crockford offers just this in his new book, “Javascript: The Good Parts.”