Archive for the ‘Work’ Category

Firefox on Mac OSX, fixed!

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

My biggest gripe I’ve ever had with my Mac experience has been with my favorite of applications: Firefox.

My place of employment, Natcoll, uses an internal proxy to ‘measure and protect’ bandwidth usage. Because I take my MacBook to and from work, I have to tell my mac to switch to my Natcoll network location, so that everything that needs to get online knows to use Natcoll’s proxy.

Doing that manually was a hassle, but now with Marco Polo 2.0.1 automatically changing my network locations better than ever, that’s been solved. I tried Marco Polo when it was 1.0 but it didn’t have all the evidence sources that I needed, but it’s all good now :)

Even with Marco Polo to reconfigure my network settings for me, it wouldn’t affect Firefox — Firefox doesn’t look at the operating system’s settings, and just uses it’s own damn settings. This is true on all platforms. Camino for OS X watches Network Location, but Camino doesn’t have all the neat plugins that Firefox does.

Turns out my solution for this was… yet another Firefox plugin! Specifically, System Proxy, which gets Firefox to inspect OS X’s Network Location for proxy settings! Hooray! Firefox plugins, is there anything you can’t do?

So with Marco Polo and System Proxy, I can just pop my computer open at home and at the office and have it just connect, without me having to worry about it, which is the way these things are supposed to work, right?

WDANZ Wellington Conference

Monday, June 18th, 2007

At WDANZ‘s Wellington Conference last week, I had the privilege of talking to a group of my peers about how easy JavaScript has become since the DOM — there is still a lot of people in this industry out there who think JavaScript is in the too-hard basket, but if you think about it the right way, it really isn’t.

My slides for the talk I did (PDF, 180kb)

Creative Commons License My slides are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.  You are free to share and remix my work without limitation as long as you credit me, Brett Taylor, with a link to this blog post.

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I had a really good time at the WDANZ Conference. While there wasn’t a spectacular turn out, the quality of the speakers was second-to-none. I learned an absolutely epic amount of stuff about the business hemisphere of this industry, and met some of the most highly respected developers in New Zealand. I won’t be missing the next WDANZ conference in my city!

Parallax Backgrounds

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

I got thinking about how I could build a parallax background system for web pages, powered with JavaScript, so I did:

Parallax Backgrounds

Done using simple CSS and a nice bit of JavaScript, but nothing too advanced, and without any libraries!

Enjoy it!

A Better, More Productive, Short URL

Monday, March 19th, 2007

After talking with Chris Pirillo over Twitter, hearing him say how most short URL services don’t do good pretty semantic URLs, and thinking I could build a better solution, I did.

urlTea

A Web 2.0 look at the Short URL services.  Light, simple interactivity. Intuitive design. And even an API! I’ll probably GPL it soon too…
Your thoughts?

Talking at a seminar on New Media

Wednesday, February 28th, 2007

Hello to all those who saw me talk at CID’s seminar today. Here’s the slides and my notes for the talk I made:

“The New Internet: Communicating on Today’s Web” Slides

I had a great time sharing about the exciting new ways to get your audience involved, and the feedback I got from you all was really great — feel free to ask questions in the comments here — cheers!

People, you don’t need to play to Big Media’s rules anymore — the rules are changing, and if your audience is discerning, they’ll follow you as long as you’ve got the goods.  But with great power comes great responsibility: use the tools wisely :)