h3h.net

I do a lot of developing for the web, which makes sense seeing as though I’m a web developer. If I were developing with my ideal set of tools, the following things would be in that set:
Serving

FreeBSD 6 or Mac OS X Server
lighttpd — serving static files and running a reverse proxy
Apache 2
mod_python
Python 2.5
Django

Authoring

HTML 5
CSS [...]

A Mac software company, Panic, just released their newest product: Coda. I am thoroughly impressed by the extreme attention to detail and quality paid by those developers on both the website and the product itself — it’s nothing short of a work of art.
That said, I don’t think I’d use Coda myself because I already [...]

There’s a simple coding (logical, not syntactic) style difference found when writing code with conditionals. The first form prefers positive checks to screen for error conditions which are handled later in else clauses. The second form prefers negative checks at the beginning of a routine to throw error codes and escape before the body of [...]

Bank of America’s new ATMs are a step forward. First, they’re lit up better. Second, they don’t require envelopes for deposits anymore: you can slide your checks directly into the ATM and it will automatically scan and attempt OCR on the check. This means when you deposit a check that was printed in a machine-readable [...]

Well I know Eventful was trying to connect more with its customers and extend itself across other media, but moving to a Twitter-only interface is surprising. I guess they’re taking “keep it simple” to heart.

One of the most frustrating aspects of driving in the US is the utter lack of understanding and attention paid to the simple rule: “Slower traffic keep right.”
It’s not a difficult rule to follow and many drivers in many other countries seem to live quite successfully by this rule. The left lane is not your [...]

I recently signed up for a Highrise account because I already use Backpack and Basecamp on a daily basis and I find them quite useful.
It’s worth noting that Highrise is brand new from 37signals, so there’s some expectation of “not quite polished” going in. I manually added two contacts to Highrise a few days ago [...]

I’ve joined the HTML Working Group at the W3C as an Invited Expert. I contributed to the WHAT WG and its Web Applications 1.0 (AKA “HTML 5”) spec, so hopefully I’ll be able to help out with the W3C’s renewed effort to update the HTML spec.
Going in, my fears lie mostly in bureaucracy or FUD [...]

I’ve set up my site feed to redirect to FeedBurner, so excuse any feed wonkiness if you please. We’ll see if it’s worth it.
That didn’t last long. FeedBurner apparently forgot how to get updates from my site, so fell apart. I wasn’t too hopeful anyway — I like to keep things in house and under [...]

…if you call yourself a “web developer” you have absolutely no excuse for not knowing JavaScript. And if you don’t know JavaScript, you have absolutely no right to call yourself a “web developer”. [sic]James Bennett
I came across a post from James Bennett written last year that is absolutely brilliant. His points are right on the [...]