In my nobler thoughts most base.

Few of the hackers in training hid their location and did little to conceal what they did to the fake. According to mi2g the Brazilian hackers appeared to have been.
-poetic spam

RSS in Plain English

link: YouTube–Video: RSS in Plain English

Here’s one for your parents. Well, ok, maybe your parents don’t read blogs, then pass it along to your less tech-savy friends.

via I love typography

Debugging IE6 CSS using Firebug

Once you’ve grown accustomed to using Firebug to debug your CSS, patching your styles for IE feels like fumbling around in the dark (and not in the good way, in the I don’t know what the hell’s going on here way). Which selectors are taking precedence, and from which style sheet? This is invaluable information that IE can’t reveal.

Here’s the fix: turn off your conditional comments and let Firefox see your IE6 style sheet. Sure, it’ll look screwed up, but now you’ll be able to Inspect and see what’s going on.

AskTog: A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts

link: AskTog: A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts

Wish we had this level control in web design. Can still use the ideas, just harder to take advantage of those infinite edges. Also, we can use them in setting up our own work environments (although hard to beat the speed of bypassing the mouse altogether with Quicksilver).

via Visualizing Fitts’s Law

Seven JavaScript Techniques You Should Be Using Today

link: Digital Web Magazine–Seven JavaScript Techniques You Should Be Using Today

Ramping up my JS, having been in Photoshop mode for the last couple months, here are some techniques I wish I could say that I’ve been using:

1. Branch when possible – by provide an early return for common cases.
2. Make Flags – rather than testing for basic browser functionality in each and every function.
3. Make bridges – to decouple your library functions from browser implementation quirks.
4. Try Event Delegation – instead of attaching an event to each item in an unordered list, attach one event to the list itself.
5. Include methods with your getElementsByWhatever – because it’s not often that you get a collection of elements and don’t want to do something to each one. If your getElementsBy… method is already looping through each element, why not do the work then, rather than loop through twice?
6. Encapsulate your code – to avoid namespace collisions. I’ve started doing this, but look how simple it is to create a closure around your code, even for (especially for?) quick one-off functions.
7. Reinvent the wheel – even if somebody else has already written a similar widget, maybe you can do better. I’ll add that you’ll certainly learn more writing something from scratch than just hacking somebody else’s code.

Diegogarcity

I’ve been looking for this word for a long time now. It is the word that describes that phenomenon where something that you just learned about starts appearing everywhere. The word came to me via a new podcast that I’m listening to, A Way with Words. They had some coverage of the open mic session at the Dictionary Society of North America where the concept came up. Here’s the description of its origin:

For those of you who are wondering, diegogarcity is a term coined by Aldiboronti on the Wordorigins discussion forum for the coincidence of just learning something new, such as a new word, and then seeing it in several places immediately afterwords. It is a play on serendipity, as Serendip is an old name for Sri Lanka. For this concept, Aldi chose another Indian Ocean island as the namesake.

Source: Wordorigins.org (last paragraph)

Cybil still believes that her high school English teacher had another term for it. I’d love to here what it was, if all these etymology nerds haven’t encountered it (which is perfectly possible if it’s some esoteric psychology theory).

Dvorak Keyboard Covers for Apple Computers

link: Dvorak Keyboard Covers for Apple Computers

I’ll be making “the switch” at my new job. One of these ultra-thin silicone covers will let me adapt my laptop without causing permanent damage to company property. Still might be time to break down and buy a Kenisis Keyboard, one of those keyboards with the keys all sunk in. They have a Qwerty/Dvorak Switchable model that supports Mac & PC.