I actually noticed another new Firefox 3 awesomeness yesterday while writing my post Firefox 3 is Awesome. Three of Deb’s images I used were too big for the width of my blog’s main column, which is 500 pixels. So instead of using HTML like this: <img src=“http://www.flickr.com/bigimage.jpg"> I used HTML like this: <img src=“http://www.flickr.com/bigimage.jpg" width=“500”> This basically tells the browser to try to proportionately resize the image so that it’s 500 pixels wide. ... Read more

Mozilla has just released Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 and the final release is just around the corner. I really think that this is an awesome product, and wanted to mention my two biggest reasons for why that is. Reason 1: The AwesomeBar Yes, it’s actually called the AwesomeBar. This is what the URL bar looks like in Firefox 2: and this is what it looks like in 3: The great thing about this interface is that it requires zero effort to find and take advantage of; everyone uses the URL bar, and will eventually discover the usefulness of this feature when the suggestion list gives them what they want before they’re done asking for it. ... Read more

Back in 2005, I wrote a tentative article for The Game Chair titled Information Complexity and the Downfall of the Adventure Game, but due to some annoying legal issues, it never got published there. A little under a year ago, I contacted my favorite gaming magazine, The Escapist, to see if they’d be interested in publishing it, and they were. It was subsequently featured in issue 116 last September, but I just realized that I never mentioned it here. ... Read more

Breaking the drake's will was the easy part.

The dragon "Emberstrife" faltered before her, his wings flailing in the air, struggling to support his massive and broken frame. Ichor fell from his wounds, sizzling into the water below him in a crimson torrent.

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Last week, I spent a few days on Second Life and read The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide.

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In late 2005, three colleagues and I founded a company called Humanized. A little over a month ago, we released our first two products, Enso Launcher and Enso Words. I’m indebted to my incredible co-workers, Jono DiCarlo, Aza Raskin, and Andrew Wilson, for making this possible. Working at Humanized has certainly been the best job I’ve ever had, not to mention an excellent learning experience. Naz Hamid was also instrumental in providing us with superb graphic design and was very helpful as a business mentor in general. ... Read more

Back in 2005, while I was taking a class taught by the late Jef Raskin at the University of Chicago, I was inspired by his program The Humane Environment to write some Emacs commands that would make software development a little easier for myself. Based on some interest from the Chicago Python User Group, I’ve polished the code a bit and published it here. Read more about pymdev, A Python Emacs Development Module. ... Read more

The following is a summary of stuff I worked on before the new Toolness was created, but after I stopped maintaining any of my old sites. Programming Narrowcaster - During the summer of 2004, I realized how great RSS syndication was and decided to get an aggregator. Unfortunately, all of them were horribly complicated: highly modal interfaces, tons of tabs and controls and buttons to mess around with and what have you. ... Read more

As many of you may already know, Jef Raskin, commonly credited as the creator of the Macintosh computer, died on Saturday, February 26th, 2005.

Jef was both my mentor at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2004, and became my employer the following summer, when I began to work with him on his next-generation computing platform, called Archy.

This isn’t to say that I was particularly close to the man; my relationship with him was strictly professional, and as such, I don’t know how much I can say about him.

But I can say a few things.

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