Viewing profile — ajlburke

I saw the name and thought it might be some kind of retro throwback to the 1996 version of Netscape Communicator. I was sort of looking forward to the integrated but awkward built-…

Hacker News still uses tables - for layout ! But it always loads super fast, and it just works. We figured out how to display text on a web page decades ago. It's a shame more peop…

I liked his point near the end of the article comparing blockchains to XML - overcomplicated and oversold and added to too many things due to marketing and consultant hype. The obv…

I gather it was used to regulate the temperature of the liquid coolant - but instead of just some pipes or whatever, the designers turned it into a nice "waterfall" feature. I thin…

It should be noted that anybody coming into Canada now from a foreign country, no matter their citizenship, is being told to self-quarantine for 14 days. This isn't mandatory or en…

Thanks for the beorg link - I've been trying to find a way to make my org-mode files mobile-accessible.

JustifyContents and AlignItems are like inserting an old USB key: I always get it backwards the first time and have to switch it over.

Take a look at FlexBox - if you've been around the CSS layout block a few times you might find yourself going "finally - they figured it out!"

I like to think of Sisyphus a bit like someone waiting in line for a rollercoaster or a ski lift. The pushing is a slog, but then you reach the top and WOW BOOOM the rock cascades …

I loved EMACS when I first tried it. Granted, that was in around 2001 and my day job had required using a terrible bloated version of IBM WebSphere Application Developer which woul…

Between this and the infamous hacker group called "The Shadow Brokers" I think it's time someone did a study on the influence of Mass Effect on tech culture. Not me, though - I'm i…

My local airport (Halifax YHZ) has notoriously bad landing conditions, and around a year ago I was in a 767 that aborted its landing and went back around. Turns out (at least as fa…

That's very cool - thanks for sharing!

I've done some work in "parallel worlds" overlaid on top of the real one by latitude/longitude, using the cool "ARCL" library - and the biggest headache I've found for location-bas…

One of the reasons I loved the Mass Effect games was that their design team had clearly been looking at these same pictures, especially when they built the Presidium. As a kid, I w…

Freshbooks and Wave both offer repeatable invoices - I'm sure other invoicing/bookkeeping services do as well. I "Flintstoned" my small SAAS with automated monthly Freshbooks invoi…

Skara Brae also features in some of the Ultima games. Supposedly both companies hired the same consultant who provided some of the same naming ideas to both customers - oops!

I cannot recommend this highly enough. It's a real slice of history. If you're lucky they'll actually let you play the game - which is still a fun challenge. When I went there a fe…

You're right - my mistake!

It was pretty awesome for enterprise software in the mid-90s, but the world caught up with it soon after.

I used to be a Lotus Notes specialist, and one interesting thing I noticed is that from the earliest versions it was designed specifically to be a "step up" from a spreadsheet (Lot…

I usually use one large monitor with my MacBook as a smaller sidecar for little things like music, billing timer, notes, etc. but there's one time when I've found two monitors come…

You can still see clocks in the UK from the late 19th century which have two minute hands: one for the local time and the other for the official Greenwich time. The Bristol Exchang…

They're called "Gregorian Chants" because they were compiled by the much earlier Pope Gregory I ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_chant )

My apologies