There were a ton of comments here telling me that the Facebook bookmarklet that I made broke, and this happened because Facebook changed the name of the file they were using. I’ve updated the post, so the bookmarklet there should work now. Continue reading Facebook Friends Ranking Bookmarklet Works Again
I wrote recently about how everything in computers is stored as 0s and 1s, and the language of computers is binary. You can read about that here. However, one bit or a few bits doesn’t really contain that much information. In general you will be dealing with thousands, or millions, or billions, or even more … Continue reading How the Internet Works 8: Bytes, Megabytes, and More
I’ve used this setup so many times now that I wanted to write up a list post explaining how I do it. This method is something I found on this site, but I just wanted to add my own commentary. The idea is that you are developing a website locally using git, and you want … Continue reading Lightweight Deployment With Git
Hobson’s choice: the choice of taking either that which is offered or nothing; the absence of a real alternative. Origin: 1640–50; after Thomas Hobson (1544–1631), of Cambridge, England, who rented horses and gave his customer only one choice, that of the horse nearest the stable door, from dictionary.com. I just joined another site yesterday. Or … Continue reading Terms and Conditions: A Hobson’s Choice
We made a juggling video this past month. Lots of cool angles, fun patterns, and really nice video editing by Charlie Dunn. Check it out! Continue reading Down With Gravity: Juggling Revolution
Part of my goal with this series of posts it to demystify a lot of the jargon that you find when people talk about the internet. Each of these topics has a whole literature and special part of the internet dedicated to it, but just knowing what the general idea is a step in the … Continue reading How the Internet Works 7 – Clients and Servers
This is going to be an extremely brief and high level overview of what a programming language is. My goal here is that if you don’t know what a programming language is before reading this, you have an idea of what it is after. A programming language is just the way that you tell a … Continue reading How the Internet Works 6 – Programming Languages
Theres a lot more to how the internet works, but for a few posts I want to talk about a few side topics which sort of underly everything about computers and the internet. The topic for this post is binary and bits. So the first question is, what is binary? Binary is a base 2 … Continue reading How the Internet Works 5: Bits and Binary
My last few posts have been about names on the internet. I talked about domain names and urls, and today I’m going to talk about IP addresses.. IP Addresses continue the very interesting series of names that we find on the internet. For us, they are sort of the end of the line when it … Continue reading How the Internet Works 4: IP Addresses
What is a URL? It’s just the start of a whole bunch of jargon-y acronyms that you’ll find here on the internet. The quick explanation is that a url is just a full name for something on the internet. Last post I talked about domain names, and domain names are just a part of the … Continue reading How the Internet Works 3: URLs