usa job typing

  "We're going to get lynched, aren't we?" — Phouchg And you thought I'd given up on controversial blogs. Hah! Preamble This must be said: Jamie Zawinski is a hero. A living legend. A major powerhouse programmer who, among his many other accomplishments, wrote the original Netscape Navigator and the original XEmacs . A guy who can use the term " downward funargs " and then glare at you just daring you to ask him to explain it, you cretin. A dude with arguably the best cat-picture blog ever created. I've never met him, but I've been in awe of his work since 1993-ish, a time when I was still wearing programming diapers and needing them changed about every 3 hours. Let's see... that would be 15 years ago. I've been slaving away to become a better programmer for fifteen years, and I'm still not as good — nowhere near as good, mind you — as he was then. I still marvel at his work, and his shocking writing style, when I'm grubb...

I recently switched to using OS X full-time for all my client-side computing. Still using Linux on the backends, of course, at home and at work, but I now use Macs for my client machines. I'm not a Mac fanboy. I'm sort of a wannabe Mac fanboy, but I'm not familiar enough with the OS yet (either as a user or as a programmer) to really rave about it. I will say this: it was kinda fun turning off that last Windows box for the last time. My main reason for switching was that I'm getting old and the fonts look nicer. Pretty stupid reason, isn't it? I thought so too. But getting old kinda sneaks up on you. I've gone from preferring six-point font when I was twelve to 20-point font now that I'm 40. So at least for me, my ideal font point size appears to be (age/2) . That sucks. One day I noticed that I could actually read the screen when I was browsing in the Apple store, and I did some experimentation and found that yes, I can actually read normal-person...

I've written a new JavaScript editing mode for GNU Emacs, and released it on code.google.com . This is part of a larger project, in progress, to permit writing Emacs extensions in JavaScript instead of Emacs-Lisp. Lest ye judge: hey, some people swing that way. The larger project is well underway, but probably won't be out until late summer or early fall. My new editing mode is called js2-mode , because eventually I plan to support JavaScript 2, also known as ECMAScript Edition 4 . Currently, however, it only supports up through JavaScript 1.7 , so the name is something of a misnomer for now. It's almost ten thousand lines of elisp (just for the editing mode), which is more than I'd expected. So I figured I'd tell you a little about what it does, why I made certain choices, and what's coming up next. Even if you're not a JavaScript user, you might find the technical discussion mildly interesting. Features In no particular order, here's what js2-mod...

I only play a handful of games a year, so I haven't written a game review since my post on Oblivion a year ago. But since then I've played a few unusually good games, including one awesome PS/3 title last weekend, so I figured it's time for another review. First, here's my gamer profile, so you can decide now whether reading any further is worth your time. I'm a console guy. I don't play games on a PC because I want the whole big-screen, comfy-couch immersion experience. Some of my favorite games in the past include Final Fantasy X, the Zelda franchise, the Mario franchise, Morrowind and Oblivion, Fable , Doom and Doom II (but not Quake or Unreal), and Donkey Kong 64. So there ya go. That's the kind of game I like. Adventure and RPG games, mostly, and FPS types only if they have sufficient atmosphere. Here's the memorable stuff I've played lately. Portal Everyone's been buzzing about this Xbox-360 game: they all say you've gotta play ...