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Half-Time Contest

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 13:07:01 -0400

"Put a blindfold on an overweight woman and make her run on a field in front of thousands of fans. The comedy writes itself."

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September 3, 2007

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 20:00:00 -0400

YUI Theater — Joseph Smarr: “High-Performance JavaScript: Why Everything You’ve Been Taught is Wrong”

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 04:11:31 -0400

Joseph Smarr is the Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, Inc., where he’s led the engineering of Plaxo’s address-book integration application. In the course of building Plaxo 3.0, which involved an ambitious foray into rich internet application design, Joseph and learned a host of lessons about the importance of performance and the means by which it can be achieved. Many of those lessons (”premature optimization is the root of all evil”) will be familiar. But some run contrary to what are commonly thought of as best practice in frontend engineering — for example, the Plaxo team found that in some cases they could achieve substantial gains by attaching event handlers inline using DOM level 0 syntax (e.g.

) rather than attaching them via DOM level 2’s favored addListener.

In sum, Joseph argues for a four-point approach to achieving maximum performance in your web-app:

Be lazy: Don’t load or do things before you need to; maybe you won’t need to load or do them at all.
Be responsive: Make things happen quickly. If you can shave 100ms off of an interaction by responding to a mousedown event instead of a click event, do it.
Be pragmatic: Frontend engineering is hard enough. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be.
Be vigilant: Blank web pages are fast. Web pages become slow because you put stuff in them; slowness is your resonsibility. Vigilance is required to prevent slowness.

Joseph visited Yahoo! this week to reprise his recent talk from OSCON in which he enumerates these lessons and fleshes them out with practical detail and the wisdom of experience. Our thanks to Joseph for the visit and for allowing us to share his presentation publicly on YUI Theater.

This video is available in Flash format on Yahoo! Video and as an MPEG-4, iPod-compatible (and iPhone-compatible!) download (change the extension from .m4v to .mp4 if your video software doesn’t recognize the extension).

Joseph also features in a video this week from the ScobleShow on PodTech (iPod compatible download), where he discusses some upcoming Plaxo features including an online identity aggregator based on microformats.

August 28, 2007

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 20:00:00 -0400

Transformers: Letter from Optimus Prime's Geico Insurance Agent

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 19:30:26 -0400

Did you ever wonder who covered the damage when Optimus and Megatron face off? McSweeney's intercepted this letter from Optimus Prime's insurance agent notifying him of his policy increase to $235,567.50.

Since becoming a GEICO customer in January of this year, you have reported 131 accidents, requesting reimbursement for repairs necessitated by each one. You have claimed not to be responsible in any of them, usually listing the cause of the accident as either "Sneak attack by Decepticons" or "Unavoidable damage caused by protecting freedom for all sentient beings."

[McSweeney's via Danny D.]

Emergency Stool

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 12:30:13 -0400

The Emergency Stool is a laser cut panel of Baltic Birch plywood and can be quickly assembled by simply breaking the panel into its individual parts without the use of tools or fasteners. Although it looks a little too complicated for me. If I tried putting it together I'm pretty sure I'd end up with a pile of broken wood. Source

Golden Eagle vs Deer

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 13:00:30 -0400

Golden Eagle vs Deer. Who ya got?