Jobs are great and all, they keep you busy, keep your wife happy and pay the bills, but at what cost brother, at what cost? The cost, of course, is that at these so-called jobs we often cannot download and execute programs, namely PuTTY, without friggin’ admin rights! And even if you’re IT and have … Read more
Hey, you hear about this bad Woody Allen stuff today? Well buddy you can google that on your own time because I want to get into that right now because I’m all exited and fired up about some Python/Bash script, if you don’t mind: While I was fiddling with Python the other day and cruising … Read more
To save some milliseconds I’ve been sparing my visitors a DNS lookup by fetching the ga.js file, on which Google Analytics is dependent. I host and serve the file locally, and I run a daily cron job to execute a script that downloads the latest ga.js file from Google so that if they update it … Read more
I run an experimental site on the side currently made up of several WebP images per page (with no JPEG fallback), oftentimes extremely high res. Don’t ask what the pictures are of, that’s not important. Now, WebPs are terrific in that they do all sorts of magic including displaying the same quality images at only … Read more
Quite possibly with much help from Adobe’s leaked text file containing email addresses and password hints of 153,004,874 customers (download link), Github users are seeing far more failed login attempts than usual from IPs of the usual suspects. Github has advised using fail2ban and users are advocating two-factor authentication as well as closely monitoring account … Read more
Using the web anonymously by means of Tor and VPNs to get around an oppressive country’s surveillance and restrictive filters (EG Iran and China’s “Great Firewall”), to blow whistles, to go to humanitarian websites and left-wing news outfits, to have the peace of mind that comes with privacy in light of the mountain of Snowden … Read more
I’m attending a full-day conference put together by Google in their downtown New York office today, the topic being things that make web faster, which I hold near and dear to me. Speakers include Ilya Grigorik, Guy Podjarny and the great Mister Colt “Gzip Alternative” McAnlis. I may be too busy drinking the Google kool-aid, trying … Read more
In 2010 a Firefox user submitted a bug to the Mozilla developers requesting that they implement WebP (the most powerful image format in the world) into Firefox. Now in its fourth year, even though Mozilla identified this as an “important, high-profile subject” on which they have “image codec specialists“ on the case who have been … Read more
Hey! You know how when you click on a link for something you just googled your browser first connects to Google to let Google hack your webcam and know what you clicked, and then Google finally bounces you along your way to your destination? That’s always been an irritant to me – not the privacy … Read more
Netflix has joined the ranks of marquee heavyhitter names that include Facebook and Wikipedia which, in a bid to save massive amounts of bandwidth and money and to improve user experience, is lobbying Mozilla to add native support in Firefox for WebP, the most powerful image format in the world, developed by Google. A prominent and … Read more
When our server generates a webpage to send to your browser, among other tricks, using a piece of software called gzip, it compresses the text associated with each page – the HTML, the CSS, the javascript files and beams it over along with the images. Your browser then decompresses this data and constructs the page. … Read more
If your website takes more than a second to load, your bounce rate, engagement and overall traffic suffers. By not doing everything you can to break the 1000ms-to-glass barrier, you are shooting yourself in the foot. The good news is that you are very likely not, by a longshot, doing everything you can to speed … Read more