Author Archives: Scott Blomquist

Awesome referer hack

I was talking to Roy Leban the other day about how a particular domain registrar of his makes it check-box trivial to redirect from a naked domain (say example.com) to www.example.com, but doesn’t do anything whatsoever to redirect from example.com/someurl to www.example.com/someurl. I was teasing him about needing to get a real domain registrar, but [...]

A new kind of Browser compatibility pain?

It’s a pain in the butt to ship a web app that works in all of the relevant web browsers today. It seems that crafting stylesheets that works in all of them at once requires as much specialized knowledge today as writing a compiler did a decade ago. As the rate that browser vendors are [...]

Stale blog is stale

Hey, everybody. Been too busy between new kid, move to California, lots of fun work with Cooliris, move back to Seattle, and getting our house cleaned up to make time to get any blogging done. Well, I’m motivated to change that. I’ll have something interesting up by July 1. If not, please hassle me.

We’re headed home

Everything’s looking good for both Jennifer and Nicholas, and we’re convinced we’ll get twice as much sleep at home as at the hospital (where doctors, nurses, foodservice folks, and even birth certificate clerks are waking us up even if Niko is not). So we’re headed out. Here are the two who are doing all the [...]

Happy zeroth birthday!

View Full Album Around 6:30 last night, Jennifer was experiencing what seemed to be increasingly serious contractions and suggested that we begin to make our way to the hospital. We wrapped up dinner (turned out she didn’t have much of an appetite by the time food was ready), and then headed up the hill to [...]

Favorite t-shirt series: Windows Genuine Advantage

As it often goes, I managed to get really busy with things other than my blog, and I began to neglect my favorite t-shirt series. The good news is that I had my wife help me take a bunch of t-shirt photos this morning, so I’ll be able to queue up enough to hold us [...]

Favorite t-shirt series: “the blibbet”

Microsoft is a really old company as tech companies go, and they’re on the third revision of their logo. Much earlier, the logo had a crazy capital-O that was, for some reason, called “the blibbet”. I scored a $7 clearance t-shirt that has the old Microsoft logo on it, complete with blibbet. The 1s and [...]

Killer robot star-collecting puzzle-game!

If you’re a fan of “transport puzzles” like Sokoban or Atomix, or possibly even some of the robot puzzles in Sierra’s classic Dr. Brain series, you might love one of my recent online discoveries: RoboZZle. (You may be prompted to install Silverlight in order to play, but it’s safe, easy, and well worth the download.) [...]

An antidote to lock-in in the cloud?

I’ve mentioned before that one thing that moderates my natural inclination to go gaga over cloud-based hosting for web applications is that there is, so far, no clean way exists to switch providers. Both Google and Amazon[1] argue that there are theoretical ways to abandon them for a competitor today, but for most business decision [...]

Shizzow featured on ProgrammableWeb

My Portland-area friends at Shizzow just got written up on ProgrammableWeb. They’ve just completed their big public launch, and will be lurking about at SXSW. If you’re going to be there, look up their whereabouts on their app, wander by, and say hello.