This post is a basically random list of things that have happened over the years; it will grow over time. My freshman year of college, we had three bins in the halls of our dorm—“Trash”, “Recycle” and “Styrofoam”. I diligently sorted everything for disposal and fumed that my dorm mates were constantly throwing out theirContinue reading “Anecdotal Ephemera”
Author Archives: ericlaw
The Edge Team
Microsoft publicly revealed the IE/Edge team’s size: ~300 people in an article with some fun profiles of a few of them: http://microsoftjobsblog.com/team-shapes-the-future-of-internet-browsing-with-microsoft-edge/. Of course, my favorite profile story remains Zeke’s.
Optimize PNGs using PngDistill
Unfortunately, many PNG image generators opt for minimum compression time, failing to achieve maximum compression. Even worse, the most popular PNG generation tools often include huge amounts of unnecessary metadata that can bloat images by thousands of percent! Fiddler now includes PngDistill, a simple tool that removes unnecessary metadata chunks and recompresses PNG image dataContinue reading “Optimize PNGs using PngDistill”
Meaningless Legalese
The folks @Wired would like to remind you that viewing their website in any browser violates of their terms-of-use. All web browsers cache content, by-design. And I’m pretty sure that “reading” is one just one of many ways that the material might be “otherwise used.” For an otherwise forward-looking publication, seeing this garbage on theContinue reading “Meaningless Legalese”
Reactions to Collateral Damage
Last night, I wrote up a quick post on the importance of iOS9’s introduction of a content-filtering API. Naturally, there have been a variety of reactions to this post, so I’d like to address some of those and provide some additional context. Background First, I’d like to point out that while there are many importantContinue reading “Reactions to Collateral Damage”
Collateral Damage
Most web users tolerate ads; many web users hate advertising with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. There are many good reasons that users dislike ads (they’re bad for performance, security, and privacy) as well as less universal, more arguable, grievances (e.g. annoyance factor, disagreement about the value exchange for ad-funded services, etc). Apple,Continue reading “Collateral Damage”
Medical Bills
In April, Noah (22 months) fell on the playground. It wasn’t an especially bad fall, but he bumped his head pretty hard. He cried, but mostly because he dropped the ball he was carrying– he quickly stopped when it was returned to him. No big deal. He had a nasty bruise and some swelling, butContinue reading “Medical Bills”
The Muse
There’s a writer living in my head, and he’s a genius. Or so he tries to convince me, as his prose flows freely day in and out, filling most idle moments– while I’m showering, driving, dining, taking out the trash, or performing any of the other mundane tasks of daily life. His prose is brilliant–Continue reading “The Muse”
Unsecure Content
Chrome has landed their change that allows you to mark unsecure (HTTP) content as insecure or dubious. Visit chrome://flags/#mark-non-secure-as to set the toggle. You can choose to mark as Dubious: …or as Non-Secure: The expectation is that eventually one of these modes will be the default for sites that are transferred over insecure protocols likeContinue reading “Unsecure Content”
HTTP Caching Public Service Announcement
There are many interesting thing to say about HTTP caching. I’ve blogged about them a lot in the past. Today’s public service announcement to clear up two extremely common misconceptions: 1. The no-cache directive does not mean “do not cache” (even though IE versions prior to IE10 implemented it that way). What it really meansContinue reading “HTTP Caching Public Service Announcement”
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