I can’t speak highly enough about the work of Paul Burton. He’s the man who created our fantastic monsters. He’s starting a new illustration company called Vile Inc. which will be doing illustrations for clients among other things. Paul has proven himself a talented, diligent and friendly person to work with. You should sign up to get notified when his new venture launches and hire the crap out of him. Scroll down on his page for the signup form. You can also follow him on Twitter: Follow @16toads Or Dribbble. Seriously, people: LOVE HIM!

I can’t speak highly enough about the work of Paul Burton. He’s the man who created our fantastic monsters. He’s starting a new illustration company called Vile Inc. which will be doing illustrations for clients among other things.

Paul has proven himself a talented, diligent and friendly person to work with. You should sign up to get notified when his new venture launches and hire the crap out of him. Scroll down on his page for the signup form.

You can also follow him on Twitter:

Or Dribbble.

Seriously, people: LOVE HIM!

Django Podcast: Task Queues

I’m a huge fan of Django. I believe it is one of the best modern frameworks for building web applications.

There has been a lack of frequently updated Django podcasts (or news sites for that matter) in the community. Rails has everyone beat on that front.

My buddy Greg and his partner Bryan Helmig aim to fix all that. Greg is a very knowledgable guy with some great insight and a stellar radio voice. Check out this new show and subscribe to it on iTunes.

Responsive Images

Everyone’s talking about responsive images so I took a pass at what type of syntax I would love to see. A few notes:

  • I tried to ignore current limitations. In current browsers this may load four images, I don’t care, it’s on browsers to fix that.
  • I tried to keep structure and presentation separate. Too many solutions go and mix presentational elements right into the HTML. I like that this keeps the presentation in CSS, where it belongs.
  • Keeping the presentation in CSS also means that you aren’t setting your breakpoints in multiple places. CSS is the only place they would be set.
  • The IMGS tag could be anything really, an OBJECT tag or a FIGURE tag…
  • There are a lot of calls to display:none in the style sheet this way. However, I like the flexibility and control that gives developers.

I don’t actually expect this to come to pass because I’m sure there are hundreds of backward incompatible issues with it. But, it was a fun experiment.

To view my best thinking see: http://jsfiddle.net/markhuot/chKRM/

Ethics

Re: Google’s problem is that it now believes itself above others – even governments.

I don’t know how to respond to Google’s actions here. Call me naive but if they’re capturing data while driving on a public street why are they at fault?

I know a lot of people jump to the postal mail analogy saying that it’d be wrong of Google to look at your physical mail as the post man drops it off. And to that I agree. In that situation Google would have to either open your mailbox (wrong) or pose as you and accept mail on your behalf (also wrong).

But if your home network is unencrypted how is that Google’s fault? Personally I’m more upset with the NetGear and Lynksys of the world. They’re the ones who have been shipping routers with unusable admin interfaces for years.

(Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. I’m still making up my mind here and don’t know that I even agree with myself yet, but so far this is where I stand.)