Hacks Blog

Really, bad web design turns people off 13 years ago
Now, I haven't designed web pages professionally since the nineties, having realized that the dotcom crash was coming partway through college. But I still get opinionated about the subject once in a while. The story begins with myself and one of my friends who does do web design professionally. I…

New web content engine, part 11 13 years ago

Saved from hacking my VX6800 13 years ago
Picking a device based on wishful thinking never works out in the end. When I was using my Motorola v710, there were a lot of pissed off folks who bought it under the idea that one day somebody would enable the rest of the Bluetooth functionality. I wasn't nearly as annoyed simply because I accepted…

The VX6800 13 years ago
So, previously, I wrote about my new VX6800 phone mostly based on my experiences with Windows Mobile 6 . That's stuff that's wrong or quirky or positive with my phone that Microsoft can take most of the credit for. But what about the phone itself? Both this one and the Samsung don't have enough RAM…

Dear FriendFeed developers 13 years ago
Dear FriendFeed developers, I love your site very much. I'm starting to understand how much it rocks recently. One suggestion however. Now that you aren't just a cute little site trying to gain an audience but have succeeded in gathering a rabid following that makes supporting your site properly…

The joys of being good at multithreading 13 years ago
So, even though I've never taken any coursework on the subject, it turns out that I'm actually fairly good at writing multithreaded software. I've even managed to avoid a lot of the usual stupid code deadlocks that prompt people to suggest that multithreaded programming is inherently hard. The thing…

Windows Mobile 6 and the VX6800 13 years ago
So, I finally decided upon the VX6800 to replace my old Motorola Q. I played around with both the VX6800 and the SCH-i760, both having the required features of a keyboard, a touch-screen, wifi, a camera, and an OS that will let me install SSH without a jailbreak. There are really two things to talk…

Still working on the narrative 13 years ago
I'm still working a little bit on the narrative of the site and how to make it clear what's what. I've noticed that people didn't quite get the way the interface worked at first and once I added the more intelligent paginated index pages and tag searching of an area, it didn't get any better. I…

New web content engine, part 10 13 years ago
So I've been running two major sites... this one, and Wirehead Arts . And both of them had weird hacked up largely static-content text based engines to them. First, I rebuilt this site to use Rm, but recently I rebuilt Wirehead Arts to use Rm. Now, this caused a number of changes to need to be made…

New web content engine, part 9 14 years ago
I notice that an essential part of every coding session is refactoring. I got rid of some really ancient code that only made sense for the version of Rm that was XSLT-driven this time around and has been sitting there ever since. I realized that I was getting ticked off about not having a good way…