Two new entries in the Developer Books archive. MacDonald’s HTML5 intro is well-suited for people who already know HTML 4, and Horstmann’s Java SE 8 overview should remain useful even after Core Java has been updated. I recommend both books. HTML5: The Missing Manual — Matthew MacDonald, O’Reilly 2013 (2nd ed.) This is not a […]
Rome’s messy transition from republic to principate has been well-documented by ancient authors and often revisited by modern ones. Since 1990 there has been a veritable explosion of historical fiction set in this era. I’ve devoured a good part of it, so here are some recommendations for your reading pleasure. The authors generally keep to […]
Once again and probably for the last time, I’ve updated my .NET Struct Performance article with results for the latest batch of compilers and runtimes. Microsoft’s and Mono’s current CLRs are unchanged as expected, and so is the excellent MinGW gcc. Visual C++ 2013 gave a nasty shock with massive optimizer failures for user-defined types […]
I had enabled Google Analytics last September but, until recently, kept WordPress Statistics running as well. One reason was its terribly addictive up-to-the-minute stats view, but more importantly WP tracks outbound clicks and GA doesn’t. Until you write some code, that is. Google Analytics can record hyperlink clicks (and all kinds of other stuff) using […]
Typography Links: Keith Houston’s Shady Characters explores “the secret life of punctuation” in meticulous detail. His fascinating 2011 series The Pilcrow (¶) (part 2, part 3) traces the history of this ancient paragraph sign in the context of evolving European typography. Font Squirrel catalogs a huge number of decent text fonts that are always free […]
Jetpack’s “Publicize” feature automatically adds a set of OpenGraph and Twitter Card tags to WordPress posts. (You don’t need to connect any publicize channels to get these tags, but you do need to activate the module itself in the Jetpack control panel.) Generally this works quite well, except for one situation: when you publish posts […]
Just finished a major redesign of the original Kynosarges website. I might claim its extremely basic old layout was the pinnacle of suave hipster minimalism, except it was actually because I’m clueless about web design. Seeing the pretty weblog here I wanted to have the same look for the static pages on the old website. […]
In December 2012 I had removed all social network sharing buttons from my website and weblog, due to lack of use. During these last fourteen months, visitor counts have been growing briskly and referrer activity shows that some people actually occasionally come to this obscure domain from Twitter or Facebook. Part of my decision to […]
Following his observations on Napoleon, sociologist Randall Collins has posted another insightful article on one of history’s greatest warlords: What Made Alexander Great? Once again, I recommend you take an hour or two to read the whole thing. Below follows a summary with noteworthy excerpts. Philip’s Groundwork Alexander’s father Philip laid the groundwork to his […]
The Oppo BDP-105D is one of the biggest, heaviest, most expensive Blu-ray players you can buy, but with a quality and feature list to match – including audiophile stereo reproduction. I recently got one of those to replace my PS3 and assorted other players, so here’s a mostly enthusiastic review with a brief description of […]