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A Farewell to CSS3 Gradients » HTML & CSS, Layout » Design Festival

In 2011, SVG is actually well-​​supported by all the current mainstream browsers — even on mobile. What if we started with SVG and patched around the edges? Looking back over the 15 year evolution of CSS, it’s been a slow, often tortured development. At that development rate, it’s hard to imagine CSS ever developing into a truly powerful, flexible, visual design tool.But with SVG, arguably we have that fully-​​featured, visual language today.

via A Farewell to CSS3 Gradients » HTML & CSS, Layout » Design Festival.

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How to Write a Book in Three Days: Lessons from Michael Moorcock | Wet Asphalt

How to Write a Book in Three Days: Lessons from Michael Moorcock

This article is the first part of a series about one of my favorite writers, Michael Moorcock, which will culminate in an interview with the man himself.

In the early days of Michael Moorcocks 50-plus-years career, when he was living paycheck-to-paycheck, he wrote a whole slew of action-adventure sword-and-sorcery novels very, very quickly, including his most famous books about the tortured anti-hero Elric. In 1992, he published a collection of interviews conducted by Colin Greenwood called Michael Moorcock: Death is No Obstacle, in which he discusses his writing method. In the first chapter, “Six Days to Save the World”, he says those early novels were written in about “three to ten days” each, and outlines exactly how one accomplishes such fast writing.

via How to Write a Book in Three Days: Lessons from Michael Moorcock | Wet Asphalt.

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from the penguin

Linux 2.6.39-rc3.

Why don't we write code that just works?

Or absent a "just works" set of patches, why don't we revert to code
that has years of testing?

This kind of "I broke things, so now I will jiggle things randomly
until they unbreak" is not acceptable.

Either explain why that fixes a real BUG (and why the magic constants
need to be what they are), or just revert the patch that caused the
problem, and go back to the allocation patters that have years of
experience.

Guys, we've had this discussion before, in PCI allocation. We don't do
this. We tried switching the PCI region allocations to top-down, and
IT WAS A FAILURE. We reverted it to what we had years of testing with.

Don't just make random changes. There really are only two acceptable
models of development: "think and analyze" or "years and years of
testing on thousands of machines". Those two really do work.

                   Linus

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How To Safely Store A Password | codahale.com

A modern server can calculate the MD5 hash of about 330MB every second. If your users have passwords which are lowercase, alphanumeric, and 6 characters long, you can try every single possible password of that size in around 40 seconds.

And that’s without investing anything.

If you’re willing to spend about 2,000 USD and a week or two picking up CUDA, you can put together your own little supercomputer cluster which will let you try around 700,000,000 passwords a second. And that rate you’ll be cracking those passwords at the rate of more than one per second.

…

Use bcrypt.

via How To Safely Store A Password | codahale.com.