So I'm working on a small "speech bubble" library, and needed to delay hiding of the bubble. It's not that it was required, but it was a pain in the butt figuring out how to arrange the event handlers on the different elements so that you don't end up with a situation where you get a flickering bubble because you hide the bubble, and that fires a mouseover event that, in turn, displays the bubble again. That fires a mouseout event that causes the bubble to be hidden.

Getting Started with Exploratory Parsing. Describes a system where you can write your parser by analyzing huge bodies of text. In short, a system for writing all the parsers required to analyze the text on the internet. (In English.) (Ward Cunningam invented the idea of the Wiki.)

For the past few months I've been working on web apps. The first was a mobile site based on jQuery Mobile. While it was "cool", it quickly dawned on me that it wouldn't get any significant usership. For one, it was like a clone of 4square and Scvngr - and who really uses that? I'd peer into the lists of checkins, and it wasn't looking too encouraging. People use it when they're bored and alone, and my scenario didn't involve either of those situations.

So I'm mostly clueless about what's popular with health nuts, but have noticed enormous amounts of kale at some expensive markets, and kale is mentioned in a lot of recipes. I got some information for you all: kale and collards are almost the same thing. You trendy people are driving the price of kale up. The stuff used to be less than a dollar a bunch, and now it's almost two. Collards use to be more expensive, but it's the other way around now. The main difference between the two is that kale is crinkly, and collards are flat. The Brazilian style of collards, couve, is to roll them up and slice them thin, like strings, and then cook them in butter, garlic, and onions.

Javascript Module Pattern In Depth at Adequately Good is a very good article about how to make JS modules that don't pollute the global namespace.

It took a while to wrap my mind around PHP namespaces - despite the fact I've needed them for years. It's just one of those features that seems weirder in PHP than in other systems. But that's normal for PHP - quirky. Unfortunately, it's not quirky like Perl, where the quirk eventually makes you feel good. With PHP you just feel kind of odd, maybe a little inferior... like your language is slipping toward becoming the Visual Basic of the web.

I wrote this before I practiced with the module pattern and with adding methods to prototypes. So this article doesn't explain a best practice. Still, it's a pretty good pattern. See also the Javascript Patterns book.

If you had 100 trillion monkeys, sitting at the controls of very simple machines, networked together, and could take input from the real world, they could eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

That network would be called "William Shakespeare." The monkeys would be cells, and the cell walls would be the simple machines; electrochemical signals would be the network. The input from the real world would be light, chemicals, temperature, touch, and sound.

Technologically speaking, the internet is nearly 2 billion people. So we're 1/500th the way toward being like a single human being. The entire population of Earth will have died several times over by the time that moment is realized.

Recipe 1

Recipe 2

Umeboshi is a pickeld apricot that's popular in Japan and increasingly in America. Most people have seen a tiny red thing in their bento-box that's extremely salty. That's umeboshi. However, the kind you make for yourself is different. For one, there's no red food coloring, and it's larger and more fleshy and gooey.

I know the Net Neutrality people on either side don't consider older folks part of the information revolution (despite the fact that all the early inventors of it are now of retirement age), but seniors are directly impacted by high prices for wireless, landlines, and DSL. A bits-is-bits model would help make telecom cheaper for seniors. With these cuts to Medicare and Social Security the Republicans want...

This is one of my favorite parts of Tron, when Ram and Flynn are in jail and talking about their past lives before they were turned into computer-world gladiators.

We got these new computers at work, and for some reason, mine was crashing.

I just read a long ass post about why graphic artists shouldn't stretch type or slant a face. "no duh" as we used to say in school.

Ironic Sans has a fun quiz where you try to identify which font is Arial, and which one is Helvetica.

http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/

Here's a script that helps to export KML files for Google Earth from Access tables. The idea is that you create a query with columns named "Latitude" and "Longitude" and any other columns you need. Open that query, and pass the recordset to this dumper. You also specify a file name, and a list of columns to use for the name and definition fields.