General
Monday, April 14th, 2008
Ha! Take that Eric.
I know most of you want ladies at conferences. Most of you are delighted when we show up. No more excuses conference organizers! There are loads of geeky women speakers, who would be delighted to share their technical expertise with your audience.
Posted in Geek, General | 1 Comment »
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
Anyone that has lived abroad for more than a few years, understands fundamentally not fitting. When I moved to Paris, I expected it to be a culture shock, to really change my ideas. It’s natural, I had to learn the language, and more than that, figure out how to make my way in a culture with vastly different values and customs than my own. To my surprise then, the biggest not-fitting had nothing to do with my adopted culture, but rather the first time I returned home after truly becoming French somewhere deep in my core. It’s only then that you realize your instincts are off, you find odd those who share the culture you once considered as natural as water to a fish.
Posted in An American in California, France, General, Navel Gazing, Travel | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
The Exceptional Performance team at Yahoo! added 20 new performance rules and refined some of the original rules. I’m really excited about this; this performance goodness is just what developers need to accelerate the user experience even further.
- Flush the buffer early
- Use GET for AJAX requests
- Post-load components
- Preload components
- Reduce the number of DOM elements
- Split components across domains
- Minimize the number of iframes
- No 404s
- Reduce cookie size
- Use cookie-free domains for components
- Minimize DOM access
- Develop smart event handlers
- Choose <link> over @import
- Avoid filters
- Optimize images
- Optimize CSS sprites
- Don’t scale images in HTML
- Make favicon.ico small and cacheable
- Keep components under 25K [mobile]
- Pack components into a multipart document
Stay tuned, we’ve got more tricks up our sleeve.
Posted in CSS, Content, Cookie, Geek, General, Image, JavaScript, Mobile, Performance, Server, XHTML / HTML | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
It’s official, Nick La nominated the best of CSS designs of 2007, but his site is the clear winner and crowd favorite for “most likely to tattoo on my arm”. I hope he doesn’t mind, I’ve done a mock-up.

Posted in General | No Comments »
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
Stoyan sent me a link to Color Lovers, a site for choosing color pallets. I had fun playing with it, putting together the colors in my living room.
Beware, if you like color, you could spend hours on this site.
Posted in Art, General | 3 Comments »
Friday, February 8th, 2008
I like paradigms, the way they encourage new ideas and reflection, but also how they are inherently flawed, as any simplification or generalization is, by nature, flawed. They are interesting because of the diversity they are capable and not capable of encompassing.
This test was very simple, and a little biased perhaps, because it was too easy to see how the responses related to the outcome.
Share your results:
98/100 - Visual
56/100 - Auditory
63/100 - Kinaesthetic
Posted in Navel Gazing | No Comments »
Friday, February 8th, 2008
How do I learn? It seems six in one half dozen in the other. Split almost down the middle between theoretic, reflective, pragmatic, and active. Results like these are only really interesting if you are more skewed one way or the other. Perhaps this means I’m balanced in some kind of zen of learning.
Share with others:
I am: 8/20 theoretic, 12/20 reflective, 8/20 pragmatic and 10/20 active! How about you?
Posted in Navel Gazing | 2 Comments »
Monday, February 4th, 2008
Perhaps you have always wondered, what is Hillary Clintons YSlow score? Who is the master of image optimization, and who has so much image-bloat that it weighed more than Mike Huckabees entire page? Check out the article I wrote on YDN.
Happy voting.
Posted in An American in California, Geek, Performance, XHTML / HTML | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, December 25th, 2007
In fact it is in California, not so far from my house. En fait il se situe en Californie, pres de chez moi.
Somerville, pres de Boston, ou j’ai fait mes etudes est connu pour leurs fetes de lumiere de fin d’année. La maison avec les palmiers en lumiere est celle de mes amis Phi et Rachel.
En Californie ils ont tout a fait autant lumieres mais leurs maisons sont plus petite donc ca brille encore plus. You can visit the neighborhood using the Tour the Crazy Christmas Lights Map.
Posted in An American in California, General | No Comments »
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007
Julien Lecomte presented his research into High Performance Ajax Applications. If you prefer there is also a video on YDN.
Posted in Geek, Performance | No Comments »
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007
The emergence of CSS Frameworks doesn’t prove the necessity of a major overhaul of the CSS Spec. Rather it is indicative of the maturity of the medium. Java programmers don’t rewrite the math class every time they code a new application. If you are reinventing the wheel each time you write CSS, you’re doing it wrong.
Posted in CSS, Geek, General | No Comments »
Monday, December 10th, 2007
Steve wrote an article about semantics. He does a good job of explaining his process.
We need to teach newbies to take a slightly broader view. Imagine, for example, an action list, which allows you to execute a certain number of actions relative to the context in which it is found. Think; “print”, [...]
Posted in CSS, Geek, XHTML / HTML | No Comments »
Saturday, December 8th, 2007
It is hard to remember not to make any mention of pants, even if I know what it means in British English. Beyond telling Murray Rowen that I liked his underwear in front of a crowd of people, I recently went to London to speak at the Front-end Summit being held there. I gave two talks. The first was High Performance Websites in particular the impact of choices made by front-end engineers. The second talk was about Architecting High Performance CSS.
Posted in CSS, Geek, Latest Happenings | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
Today was my first day at Yahoo. I spent most of the day in orientation but I am already impressed with the culture. People seem genuinely happy and able to make working hard a part of living well. And damn they’re smart! Fabulous well-rounded geeks. I know, I know, it sounds like I’ve been drinking the kool-aide.
Posted in An American in California, Geek, General, Latest Happenings, Performance | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
I’ve finally given in and tried it; it feels kind of dirty in a public sort of way. I haven’t started writing about every detail of my private life yet (did anyone else have Cheerios this morning?) and I’ve not yet purchased any ringtones but I feel certain that I’m on the path to internet righteousness; full disclosure, no-holds-barred – all the time. It gives me serious privacy concerns (basically there isn’t any). However, it did allow me to discover a great French rock band. So what the hell, I’ll trade privacy for good music. Well, I wouldn’t twitter even for Noad. That stream of consciousness stuff is what you are supposed to filter out, but I’m now officially on facebook, and I’ve even looked at few myspace pages.
Anyway, I won’t go into some detailed review of their music beyond just saying I like it. I find that French is a better language than English for writing really carefully crafted phrases. More precise when you want to say exactly what you mean like Noad. Of course the sound is what I really like; loud kick ass rock music with moments of calm. After nearly a decade playing together their music is tight enough to allow them to combine opposites. I particularly liked Columbarium, though it is challenging. Enjoy.
Posted in Art, France | No Comments »
Sunday, July 29th, 2007

I’ve wanted to try one for years, and i finally got the opportunity today. It rocked every bit as much as I thought it might. Hugo noticed that the “turtle” speed was indicated. I found that it was pretty zippy, which makes me wonder what it would be like on the normal setting.
Posted in General, Latest Happenings | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
Posted in CSS, Geek, General, Performance | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
Yahoo has released the much awaited (by me at least!) YSlow firebug extension which tests download speed and gives recommendations based on the famous 14 rules for fast web pages.
Posted in CSS, Geek, General, Performance | 1 Comment »
Saturday, July 21st, 2007
Half of my resume was missing. It was there on the screen, but in print preview and on the printed page reams of experience disappeared. Not ideal.
I discovered that when you use the formatting context to clear floats, firefox treats each printed page as a “box” with the overflow hidden. Elements with overflow: hidden applied will be printed partially or not at all.
Posted in CSS, Geek, General | No Comments »
Friday, June 1st, 2007
Most companies either don’t have the resources or aren’t willing to invest in assistive technologies so that they can actively test their web products, so their employees are forced to simply follow the rules (WAI) as best they can and hope that their final product is at least somewhat accessible. Victor Tsaran’s video introduction to screen readers is very useful as it allows a peek into real life screen reader usage. I wonder how many people will be surprised by the last couple minutes of the video?
Posted in Accessibility, Geek | No Comments »