Disqus - Latest Comments for alwillis

Re: The Ether Review #34 - Vinay Gupta on Rethinking Blockchain Use Cases

Albert Willis — Sun, 17 Jul 2016 11:31:44 -0000

Vinay is like kryptonite to the libertarian crypto vision—and to a larger view, the world view of the demographic group that is 80% of libertarians: white men.

Every podcast that Vinay is on, he talks about how the world really is and not what people think it is. He doesn't do the happy talk thing so many people want to hear that aligns with their world view. If I have the time, I'll create a point-by-point blog post documenting this.

It's so refreshing to hear real talk on these podcasts!

Re: Using CSS’s object-fit and object-position Properties

Albert Willis — Tue, 24 May 2016 04:47:02 -0000

Quick update: object-position is supported in Safari Technology Preview, which means it’ll likely be in the next major release of Safari on the Mac and iOS.

Re: Blind Camera Shootout – the winner is…

Albert Willis — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 22:38:16 -0000

Another reason why some less affluent customers buy iPhones: they can’t afford to make a mistake when choosing a smartphone. Like it or not, the iPhone is the most respected and admired smartphone brand in the world.

For many people, it’s a no-brainer and they don’t have to worry quality or capabilities. It just works.

Depending on who you are and what you do, there are trade-offs of course; however, for many people around the world, buying an iPhone is like buying any other respected brand (BMW, Nike, Burberry, etc.)—unless there’s clearly some partisan thing going on, nobody is going to say you made the wrong choice.

Re: How to Update OpenSSH on Mac OS X

Albert Willis — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 03:18:38 -0000

This article has the most current (as of Yosemite) on how to upgrade SSH on OS X and get support for the Keychain and notifications.

Re: Create Rich Web Typography With OpenType: Discretionary Ligatures & True Small Caps

Albert Willis — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 20:24:20 -0000

Just a quick heads-up: font-feature-settings just dropped in WebKit, so it’ll be supported in Safari fairly soon: https://twitter.com/webkit/.... You can download the latest WebKit Nightly build to test.

Re: Safari is Not the New IE, But…

Albert Willis — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 01:16:31 -0000

Font-feature-settings, will-change, backdrop filters have landed in WebKit over the last few weeks.
And WebKit is leading in CSS4 selector implementation (53%; the next highest is Chrome Canary at 32%)—you can run the test at http://css4-selectors.com/b.... All of this from following @WebKit and various WebKit/Safari engineers and volunteers on Twitter. It’s not a secret what Apple is doing…

Re: 50 incredible freebies for web designers, July 2015

Albert Willis — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 21:35:29 -0000

I read tons of blogs and get the various email newsletters, but there was lots of stuff here I haven’t seen or read about anywhere else. Great job!

Re: PostCSS – Sass Killer or Preprocessing Pretender? - AshleyNolan.co.uk - Blog and Portfolio for Ashley Nolan

Albert Willis — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 21:00:34 -0000

Sure, since a post processor runs after a preprocessor, it can (like some of the PostCSS plugins do) transform specific non-standard selectors to standard CSS.

I would argue that’s still quite different than having an entire language (like Less or Sass) and transforming that into CSS prior to another tool handles the CSS.

Re: PostCSS – Sass Killer or Preprocessing Pretender? - AshleyNolan.co.uk - Blog and Portfolio for Ashley Nolan

Albert Willis — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 13:43:27 -0000

I disagree with your definition of a preprocessor vs. a postprocessor.

A preprocessor like Less or Sass takes a custom syntax and turns it into CSS. A postprocessor actually only works on the CSS files themselves, which explains why they can co-exist with preprocessors. They can process the CSS after a preprocessor generates it.

Re: Black Power

Albert Willis — Fri, 29 May 2015 08:04:25 -0000

Regarding the "lost generation" hypothesis: that's my generation and I had many friends leave Boston during the 80s. At the end of the day, most of them didn't see toiling away in Boston as worthwhile.

Having grownup in Boston, many of them wanted to be in places like Washington D.C. or Atlanta that felt more welcoming to young black professionals.

And there's the ever present pressure from friends and family to leave Boston, because of the mostly negative reputation it has among black people in the rest of the country. Because the cost of living (especially housing) is much less in other places, you can literally buy a nice house or condo in the D.C. suburbs of Maryland or Virginia versus living with 2 or 3 roommates in Boston in addition to all of the other drama of being black in Boston.

So yeah, lots of black people who would be those political and corporate leaders just aren't here and they're not coming back.

The most popular Boston politician (having topped the ticket two elections in a row) and who graces the cover of the power issue—Ayanna Pressley—is from Chicago, like former governor Patrick.

This is where Boston's tribalism and infighting among the black community works against any sustainable black power base. People like Ayanna Pressley weren't affected by black Boston's reality distortion field, which enables them to be much more effective.

Re: Black Power

Albert Willis — Fri, 29 May 2015 07:28:54 -0000

Who would you suggest? Other than Sonia Chang-Díaz (our first Latina state senator who's father was America's first Latino astronaut), not a lot of other names come to mind.

Re: Black Power

Albert Willis — Fri, 29 May 2015 07:18:01 -0000

The article is actually about the lack of black power in Boston, not about the lack of black elected officials. Being an elected official (black or otherwise) doesn't necessarily mean that person is a leader or uses whatever power they do have in ways that are seen as beneficial.

Tompkins is in a position to enact reforms that would be welcomed by Boston's black community; lets see what happens.

Re: DUDLEY DISPATCH: PUTTING THE ‘OVERSIGHT’ IN ROXBURY STRATEGIC MASTER PLAN OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE

Albert Willis — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 16:34:07 -0000

Norman, as someone who attended the April Roxbury Strategic Master Plan Oversight Committee meeting, I must respectfully disagree.

Apparently it is complicated; otherwise, why would something as routine as taking a vote get so out of control? Why were multiple votes required until you got the vote you apparently wanted?

If it is as you wrote in your comment—City Hall, local politicians and others want to stop Roxbury from realizing a strategic vision—you seem to be playing right into their hands by ensuring that no meaningful work actually takes place by the RSMPOC and by not protecting Roxbury residents as they fight to be paid living wages.

Re: Class Typography Effects: Hyphenation

Albert Willis — Thu, 26 Mar 2015 03:48:14 -0000

Unlike Safari, Chrome doesn’t ship with a hyphenation dictionary, which is why, even though it supports hyphens, it doesn’t actually insert the hyphens.

Also some browsers support hyphenate-limit-lines to control the number of consecutive lines to hyphenate. In general, you shouldn’t have two consecutive lines hyphenated. Reference:

Re: Make Your Web Pages More Legible With Ligatures and Kerning Pairs

Albert Willis — Thu, 26 Mar 2015 03:37:07 -0000

According to

Re: Explain like I'm five: Jekyll collections

Albert Willis — Sat, 14 Mar 2015 02:29:16 -0000

This is the best description of Collections I’ve seen. Thanks for writing it.

Re: Clinton ran homebrew computer system for official emails

Albert Willis — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 14:28:14 -0000

Just for the record, no other cabinet level official has ever run their own email server out of their home as Hillary apparently did.

Re: Beyond Bitcoin - 27th And Final - An Architecture For The Internet Of Money

Albert Willis — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 07:49:12 -0000

I find it ironic that Meher proposes some (in my opinion) weak arguments as to why Ripple can't scale and then describes what's essentially a reimplementation of Ripple with some potentially problematic changes.

BTW, I have no affiliation with Ripple Labs; I’m just a cryptocurrency enthusiast and entrepreneur.

Meher suggests there are doubts about Ripple’s consensus protocol and then goes on to talk about Stellar, while based on a fork of Ripple, uses a modified consensus algorithm. Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer addressed this in a blog post Why the Stellar Forking Issue Does Not Affect Ripple. Until we hear something definitive from Prof. David Mazières, the suggestion that there’s something wrong with Ripple’s consensus algorithm is just FUD--fear, uncertainty and doubt.

The scalability of trust issue that Meher suggests also seems FUD-related, especially since anyone who’s read Ripple’s documentation and white papers knows the Ripple protocol doesn’t rely on trust of any particular server or set of servers; Ripple works by assuming that a majority of the servers your node communicates with won’t collude against it. More info at Unique Node List.

When Meher asks why would a bank in China run a Ripple gateway, implying the bank would have to either trust Ripple Labs or the other servers, that’s incorrect: gatewayd (the software a bank would run to connect to the Ripple network) is open source; it’s already been forked 91 times, so anybody anywhere can download, audit and modify it if they wish.

It’s true that China forbids trading CNY for other fiat currencies, there are at least two gateways in China (RippleCN and RippleChina) that allow trading between the yuan and various cryptocurrencies such as XRP and bitcoin, so it’s just another jump to convert to a different fiat currency. There are Ripple gateways in China, the US, Europe, Japan and Australia: https://coinist.co/ripple/gateways.

I could go on; I think Meher should explain how an open source protocol that’s designed to transfer any kind of value (from silver dimes to airline miles) between users, that’s currency agnostic, that supports micro-payments, has a path finding algorithm that gets the lowest available price for a transaction, etc. that somehow isn’t in the running for creating the internet of money. Ripple Labs is participating in the W3C’s Web Payment Interest Group, so they might influence a potential future standard.

The Ripple protocol (or something similar to it) has the best chance to address the 2.5 billion people on the planet with no access to financial services by giving them access to the global financial market. Anyone using the Ripple Trade client can create a simple gateway or become a market maker and make a profit doing so.

Re: Future Boston Alliance

Albert Willis — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 21:29:46 -0000

Malia, I couldn’t agree more—shocker, I know. ;-) If anything, the membership and structure seem to be created to allow for the least amount of true innovation possible.

I also agree that innovation isn't something brought to the so-called masses to be bestowed upon them. The ability to be innovative is something innate in our communities and in our residents; it’s something that has to be supported to grow and prosper.

It's already there in our neighborhoods; it just has to be allowed to come to the surface.

Re: Fun Times with CSS Counters

Albert Willis — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 01:55:05 -0000

Support for accessible generated content is coming in CSS Pseudo-Elements Module Level 4.

Re: iOS First. Android Much, Much Later

Albert Willis — Mon, 25 Aug 2014 21:06:21 -0000

I couldn't agree more. I've been involved with smartphones since the Treo in 2005, 2006 and I can't think of single app that was a huge hit on Android that users begged to have ported to iOS. 99.99% of the time, it’s the other way around, Instagram is a good example. In fact, Instagram had over 100 million users before the Android version was released and that was after it was acquired by Facebook,

Re: Ford Plans IPhones for Global Employees, Job Posting Says

Albert Willis — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 03:40:02 -0000

The choice by Ford to go with iPhones looks pretty smart, given the latest news on Android security—"New Android 'Fake ID' flaw empowers stealthy new class of super-malware”: http://appleinsider.com/art...

Re: Ford Plans IPhones for Global Employees, Job Posting Says

Albert Willis — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 03:37:38 -0000

Since Ford operates all over the world and Blackberry does make feature phones, I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of the “flip phones” were indeed Blackberry devices, which are still quite popular outside the United States.

Re: Ford Plans IPhones for Global Employees, Job Posting Says

Albert Willis — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 03:36:21 -0000

Out of all of the viable, mainstream choices, iOS is pretty secure:

Re: Ford Plans IPhones for Global Employees, Job Posting Says

Albert Willis — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 03:25:56 -0000

Do you have any facts to support such a claim? Don’t confuse the techniques used by the jailbreak community with what happens in corporate environments. Since