Brian Pane

I work at a company of ~200 people. We have an informal email list to which nearly everyone in the company subscribes. The list carries all manner of discussion, but perhaps the most common use of it is to sell things. I tried that today, listing miscellaneous gadgets that I’d otherwise have [...]

Version 0.9 of Assetbarista is now finished.  One feature that has been in Assetbarista for a long time is the removal of a mousemove event callback from all the avatar icons in the Assetbar discussion page. The removal of a callback counts as a feature because it fixes a race condition in Assetbar’s Ajax [...]

Assetbarista 0.8 is now available.  My ongoing exercise in GreaseMonkey-based development has gained one new feature in this release: when you post a new comment to Assetbar, Assetbarista applies Unicode formatting fixups so that you needn’t reload the page.

To make this feature work, I put wrappers around the JavaScript callback functions that Assetbar uses to [...]

I’ve just finished version 0.6 of Assetbarista, my Greasemonkey script that improves the usability of the Assetbar discussion forum for the Achewood online comic.

This release contains one new feature: Assetbarista now works even when you are not logged in to Assetbar.  In addition, this version does its scanning and modification of the Assetbar pages a [...]

Wii Fit: Don’t forget to brush your teeth before you go to bed.

brianp: Why, thank you for the reminder, kind anthropomorphic plastic rectangle!  Of all my consumer electronics, you’re the only one who cares about my dental well-being.

Wii Fit: Looks like the Basic Balance Test isn’t your forte.

brianp: Point taken; I [...]

I normally don’t get terribly excited about political campaigns, but Barack Obama’s election victory this evening brought a smile to my face.  While the President-elect faces a formidable economic challenge upon taking office, his victory seems like just cause for optimism.  The young contender, campaigning on a platform of change, triumphed over the respected political [...]

Bad: I lost my work-supplied Blackberry a few days ago.

Good: I alerted the IS/IT folks, and they were able to remotely disable and reset it.

Unseemly: This remote reset, I learned today, didn’t clear emails or calendar entries already on the device.

Good: A good samaritan found the Blackberry and attempted to track down its owner.

Good (from [...]

Recently, needing a break from spreadsheets at work, I did some performance testing of lighttpd.  Using an HTTP load generator client without keep-alive connections, I soon ran out of ephemeral port numbers on the Mac that ran the client.  Once the connections in TIME_WAIT cleared up, I could resume load testing for a very short [...]

The Web Riddle Two, a web-based puzzle exercise being released episodically, is shaping up to be a fun mental challenge.  It is thematically similar to other online puzzles like P4X; the object is to find clues in and around a webpage to determine the next webpage in the puzzle.  Having just finished the first set [...]

After shrinking my site to a few informational pages and letting it sit dormant for several months, I’ve finally found a bit of time to redesign the pages and begin a blog.

I still need to refine the formatting of posts, but my table-free, CSS-based layout is working overall.