http://zahnster.com my name's jade. i'm a child of the internet. Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:17:03 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This week marked a monumental event for Ruby programmers. The enigma which was _why, the hacker/artist who was instrumental in shaping the Ruby community, simply vanished without a trace. All of his websites were removed, his social media accounts cancelled, and he left without so much as a goodbye note ... http://zahnster.com/industry-talk/your-work-is-bigger-than-yourself Being a hosting reseller has been a pretty uneventful experience so far. I've been dabbling in the field since my college days, nothing ever too serious, but I do offer some of my MediaTemple DV space to a small number of clients to help offset the cost of dedicated server ... http://zahnster.com/software/how-to-make-enemies-and-intimidate-customers-a-vbulletin-story The move to Mexico has opened my eyes to a whole new world. And I don't mean because I'm in another country (although that's also true, Puerto Vallarta is a stark contrast to NYC in just about every way possible). What I'm talking about is how the Internet treats people ... http://zahnster.com/industry-talk/you-are-not-your-ip-address It's been a few days now since the relaunch of the Skittles.com website, and it's been getting a huge amount of buzz for it's groundbreaking use of social media in an official setting. The only problem is, they're doing it wrong, and they made a damn mess of it. When I first ... http://zahnster.com/social-networking/skittles-fail With my recent announcement that I'll soon be leaving Zenbe and the comforts of New York City for a dream job with Apple (and warmer climates), I kick off what I know will be a truly exciting year. In celebration of this, and in light of many others' posts about their ... http://zahnster.com/personal/five-goals-for-an-exciting-year I've been a fan of the Slickspeed Selectors test for a while - in all honesty it's probably the coolest thing Mootools has released (and this isn't a knock on their js framework). The Slickspeed selectors test does everything right - easy, friendly open-source code which is stupid easy to ... http://zahnster.com/javascript/a-dose-of-reality-with-slickspeed This post is going to be a bit of a rant, so bear with me and feel free to bitch me out in the comments, but I've been getting really annoyed with people's attitudes towards startups. In general, people seem to have short tempers with performance issues with startups - ... http://zahnster.com/rant/please-back-off-the-startups Anyone who follows me on Twitter is probably aware that for the last few months, I've been getting my feet wet with Canvas drawing. For those who aren't familiar, Canvas is an HTML5 element which enables you to do script-based drawing, specifically Javascript. While not natively supported by the IE's, the ... http://zahnster.com/javascript/a-case-for-canvas A common problem that web apps face over time is CSS bloat. Especially with new sites, any rapidly-evolving app is going to be subject to some serious front-end abuse in today's extreme programming world. As features are added, removed, and modified on a whim, it's all too easy for ... http://zahnster.com/css/test-driven-css Ever since transitioning over from PCland in early 2004, my Mac affiliation hasn't been questioned much, due to the fact that most of the industry professionals around me also use them. It's kind of like being a liberal in NY, nobody's going to question your motives. This is all good ... http://zahnster.com/applemac/why-im-a-mac-and-proud-of-it