ericlaw

Anecdotal Ephemera

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”

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”