Me and my browsers

February 17, 2010 by Eric Richardson

On December 27, 1998,, I decided to check out "Gecko" as a replacement to Netscape Communicator. I liked it.

A touch over 11 years later, my browser situation is less clear. I'm using -- and liking -- Google Chrome as my day-to-day browser, but am stuck with different situations that mean I'm required to use Chrome, Firefox and Safari in any given day. That's less than optimal. — Continue Reading...

Making Life with Facebook Connect Easier

February 11, 2010 by Eric Richardson

I implemented Facebook Connect on blogdowntown in December of 2008 and have pretty much had a love-hate relationship with it ever since. The functionality is great, but the facebook Javascript has consistently been the slowest loading piece of the site.

Today I deployed a code update that moves the site over to Facebook's new open-source connect-js library. It's alpha, it's incomplete, but boy does it feel better to use. — Continue Reading...

Untangling that stylish mess

February 09, 2010 by Eric Richardson

It's amazing how crufty a CSS file can get over time.

I went through blogdowntown main CSS file this evening looking for code that was no longer used on the site. I ended up cutting the file down roughly 250 lines, or 14%.

At the same time I ported the stylesheet over to LESS, a CSS processor that allows you to use fun things like variables and nesting that really should be in the CSS spec itself. — Continue Reading...

pretending to still be a geek

January 03, 2010 by Eric Richardson

Server Guts Eric Richardson

If you look back through the archives here, you'll find a lot of intense geekery. I ran Linux as a desktop OS for nearly a decade, administered servers, etc. I enjoyed it.

These days, though, I just tend to do less of it. Needs and situations change, and I don't end up doing as much geeky stuff as I once did.

Today, though, was an exception. Today I had to rebuild a home Linux server, migrating 350gb of data over to new drives before adding those same old drives into a logical volume. — Continue Reading...

Back in the Cold

December 28, 2009 by Eric Richardson

Looking Across Bear Lake Eric Richardson

Kathy and I are back in Michigan for the holidays, which means we're getting our annual dose of cold and snowy weather. Christmas Eve brought freezing rain, which turned the roads into sheets of ice. Saturday and yesterday it was snow, and today's weather is characterized by 40 mile per hour wind gusts that are whistling around the house.

People complain about not having seasons in Los Angeles, but I just don't get it. I'm perfectly happy with 70 and sunny.