Myth Busting: CSS Animations vs. JavaScript:

As someone who’s fascinated (bordering on obsessed, actually) with animation and performance, I eagerly jumped on the CSS bandwagon. I didn’t get far, though, before I started uncovering a bunch of major problems that nobody was talking about. I was shocked.

This article is meant to raise awareness about some of the more significant shortcomings of CSS-based animation so that you can avoid the headaches I encountered, and make a more informed decision about when to use JS and when to use CSS for animation.

The Guardian: Are iPads and tablets bad for young children?

Kaufman strongly believes it is wrong to presume the same evils of tablets as televisions. “When scientists and paediatrician advocacy groups have talked about the danger of screen time for kids, they are lumping together all types of screen use. But most of the research is on TV. It seems misguided to assume that iPad apps are going to have the same effect. It all depends what you are using it for.”

If you’ve gotten used to your trackpad scrolling the same way as on iOS and (by default) OS X but you’re using Linux you’ll want to go to the “Mouse & Touchpad” settings panel and tick “Content sticks to fingers”.

Yeah I know,shockingly simple but for whatever reason I had assumed “Content sticks to fingers” related to some weird drag and drop system…

This is mostly a note to myself, but often when I setup a new Linux install, I find that JUnit tests run significantly slower than usual. The CPU is nearly entirely idle and there’s almost no IO-wait making it hard to work out what’s going on.

The problem is that JUnit (or something in our tests or test runner) is doing a DNS lookup on the machine’s hostname. That lookup should be really fast, but if you’re connected to a VPN it may search the remote DNS server which takes time and makes the tests take much longer than they should.

Chris Poole – Small things add up:

By migrating to the new domain, end users now save roughly 100 KB upstream per page load, which at 500 million pageviews per month adds up to 46 terabytes per month in savings for our users. I find this unreal. Just by moving images to a domain that doesn’t have cookies. Impressive, especially given that users upload data significantly slower than they download it and HTTP 1.1 headers are sent uncompressed. Important to note however:

Ron Qartel: Developing First Class Software with the Developers that Google Rejects

Focus on building a great team and a great way to develop, not on hiring individual hotshots. I would caution however that XP isn’t necessarily the “great way to develop” that will work best for your team and your circumstances, but its certainly a good starting point. Just remember that the one key Agile principal is to continuously improve the way you work. So don’t just follow “the rules”.

There’s lots of projects these days moving from one language to the next. Whether that’s a good idea or not varies but let’s accept that it was the right choice and the world is a better place for it. One thing really bugs me: inevitably justifications of how successful that move has been includes a claim that the number of lines of code were so significantly reduced.

We rewrote 1.5 million lines of Java in just 6,000 lines of haskell!

Out of the box, Fedora 19 doesn’t have support for the broadcom wifi chip in the MacBook Pro 15″ Retina. There are quite a few complex instructions for adjusting firmware and compiling bits and bobs etc, but the easiest way to get it up and running on Fedora is using rpmfusion.

You can do it by downloading a bunch of rpms and stuffing around with USB drives, but its way easier if you setup network access first via either a thunderbolt ethernet adapter (make sure its plugged in before starting up as hotplugging thunderbolt doesn’t work under Linux), or via bluetooth.  The bluetooth connection can either be to a mobile phone sharing its data connection or if you have another Mac around, it can share its wifi network over bluetooth (turn on Internet Sharing in the Sharing settings panel).

Password managers are like exercise, some people are really into and and you know its good for you but it always seems like too much effort.

A few times I’ve actually gotten around to trying out password managers and I went pretty far down the rabbit hole with LastPass at one point, but its never stuck with me before. LastPass was ok, but just seemed clunky and instead of making life easier always seemed to make things take just a little bit more effort.

If you ever copy or rsync your home directory to another drive on Linux (especially Fedora 19), you may find that Google Chrome starts to crash whenever you type punctuation, including space characters, into HTML form fields like input or textarea.

You may also find that ‘useradd’ complains that it can’t create home directory.

It turns out that this is because of SELinux having incorrectly file labels for the files in the new home directory. Simply run:

Transitioning to a new Mac has always been a very smooth experience – the first run setup offers to migrate everything for you and generally it gets everything right so your new Mac comes up looking just like your old one.

Recently I’ve acquired a new MacBook Pro with Retina display and decided that after all these years of migrating everything over I’d set up from scratch. Mostly just to make me consciously choose to reinstall things instead of a heap of cruft coming across automatically which I don’t actually use anymore.

Couple of very interesting articles today on architecture of CSS. Firstly Thierry Koblentz questions the benefits of separation of concerns – advocating a coding style where most style rules map a single classname to a single CSS property.

In complete contrast Ben Darlow argues the importance of semantic meaning, pushing back against techniques like OOCSS and BEM which move away from semantic class names in the name of modularity – generally resulting in long strings of class names on elements.