Gate gas stations, at least in the Concord, NC area, insist on using the bank billing zip code for a debit card transaction at the pump, rather than the card holder’s PIN number. I do not see how this is beneficial to card holders, as it seems to be a much less secure number to [...]

I recently purchased The Maw and Splosion Man and have to say that I thoroughly respect the development team at Twisted Pixel. I had never heard of this company before stumbling upon these two games and I am very impressed with the level of quality — unique gameplay, very responsive controls, and just a level [...]

Driving along I-85 in Charlotte a few days ago, I saw this billboard for the first time: (image courtesy of Chris Devers from flickr.com) And I had the same thought that Jed Hartman had on his blog: “a bare-knuckled bucket of…deer?” So I felt I had to quickly sketch what came to mind: Maybe next [...]

Using CSS2′s :after notation, we can preload images without unnecessary markup or JavaScript. Example: #wrapper:after { content:url(/images/black-dropdown-bottom.png); display:none; } This will preload the image set as the “content” after the element, and using display:none we don’t have to worry about it being rendered. Just a nifty trick to preload images without JavaScript or duplicating image [...]

I should have posted this right after Firefox 3.5 was released, but I guess it’s better late than never. I am posting so people will have one more resource for solving a UI issue that I considered a problem: in FF 3.5, the last tab no longer shows the close button, so you can no [...]

So, after the announcement that the XHTML 2 working group will not be renewed, and more resources will be put into HTML 5 development, I have tried to do some research into HTML 5 in consideration of jumping on the bandwagon. I was not very familiar with the HTML 5 spec, as most of my [...]

I wanted to write a short tutorial on how to utilize jQuery to create an animated AJAX page load. I hope to show off a few modern web development trends: Unobtrusive JavaScript JavaScript that fails gracefully AJAX A quick note: what I’m about to write would make a lot more sense inside a web framework, [...]

As search engines are usually the doors through which users enter the world wide web, it would be prudent of these sites to promote good web development practices — supporting web standards, accessibility, and so forth. It is really disappointing to see the search engine pages of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft not validate: W3 Markup [...]

I just had to post something to comment on the Mac OS X Leopard Time Machine user interface. I mostly use Windows, or Linux some times, but a coworker has a Mac laptop on which I was able to see the Time Machine program running. My first reaction was “Wow” and the reason being is [...]