Mike West works and plays on the internet. Currently working as a software engineer on Google's Chrome team in Munich, he tries to make the web platform marginally less insecure than it generally is. Drop him an email at follow him on or circle him on Google+

December 2007

  1. DNS Made Easy is actually pretty easy

    In a spontaneous burst of productivity, spawned mostly by my complete and utter failure as a sysadmin, I moved my parent’s email account off my server. DNS Made Easy made this a trivial task.

  2. Solving strange text wrapping problems in `bash`

    I started having strange text wrapping problems after implementing implementing the beautifully colored bash prompt I discussed on Monday. After fidgeting around a bit, I think I’ve come up with a solution.

  3. Now I have a colourful `bash` prompt

    My jealousy of Adriano’s pretty bash prompt has been assuaged by the construction of my own, prettier and more functional prompt. So there!

  4. Presentation: Love the Terminal

    When Murray and Norm solicited talks earlier in the year for the Yahoo! Frontend Summit, they somehow neglected to mention that the presentations would end up being hour-long blocks. :)

November 2007

  1. Photoset: @media Ajax

    I still haven’t written anything useful about the @media Ajax conference, but here are some lovely pictures. Should be worth about 64,000 words, right?

  2. Just back from London

    I’m back from London after @media Ajax with some security papers for you to read, and not much else yet.

August 2007

July 2007

June 2007

  1. Escaping Curly Braces in XSLT Attributes

    Curly braces in the attributes of XSLT document’s elements are interpreted as XPATH expressions to be evaluated. This sometimes causes problems…

  2. Short-form Link Blogging

    Blogging is hard for me, mostly because I have an irrational desire to make each of my posts “important” and “interesting”. I’m working out ways to solve that problem for myself…

May 2007

  1. Stupid i18n Mistake.

    Italian (and other languages) are full of single-quotes. Maybe I should escape them…

  2. How do I unit test a website?

    Unit testing seems like an unqualified good, I’m just not sure how to apply the concepts to my work.

  3. Words Escape Me

    I’m bored, and even though I should be overflowing with things to write about, I’m not.

  4. My bookmarks are amazingly out of date.

    I’m removing the bookmarks from this site on a temporary basis. That should drive me insane enough to actually do something about the fact that they haven’t changed since last year.

  5. Domain Transfer

    I’m (finally) hopping off GoDaddy and onto Gandi. Hopefully nothing explodes…

  6. ¡Es vivo!

    We launched the Yahoo! News site in Spain today. Finally!

  7. Stopgap Solution

    I bought a Treo 600 on Ebay. And it’s huge. HUGE! But also very powerful and nice.

April 2007

  1. Fun Apple Remote Tricks

    Funny, funny coworkers can be stymied by pairing your Apple Remote with your mac.

  2. Just the stats

    A List Apart is running a survey to gather demographic info from web professionals; I think it could be a worthwhile enterprise.

  3. It's live.

    Today, we relaunched Yahoo! News in the UK. Finally.

February 2007

  1. DataRequestor - Version 1.6

    After a brief (ha!) hiatus, DataRequestor’s 1.6 release fixes many outstanding bugs. Grab it now!

January 2007

  1. Signs of Life

    It’s great to see that SSHKeychain isn’t dead.

  2. Benchmarking Your Site with `http_load`

    http_load is a great benchmarking utility that gives you a quick overview of your web server’s performance. This article describes how to install and use it.

  3. Locking Your Mac

    My coworkers love playing pranks on poor, unlocked computers. This is the method I’ve decided on to quickly and securely walk away from my Mac.

  4. iWant.

    I want an iPhone. Just like everyone else.

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