I’ve been doing web development on and off for more than a decade. During college, I was the webmaster of the University of Minnesota’s computer science department, where I developed a variety of web applications and gave our department website a fresh new look (recently replaced by an even fresher, newer look). I got lots of practice with Apache, Perl, JavaScript, MySQL, and the usual alphabet soup of three- and four-letter acronyms. More recently, I’ve gotten into web development using Python and the Django framework.

After college, I worked as a journalist, blogger, and policy analyst, writing for Ars Technica, the New York Times, Slate, the Cato Institute, and various other places. Writing prose is fun, but after a few years I started to miss writing code and decided to go back to grad school.

For years, PJ has provided web design and hosting services to a number of my favorite blogs (including one I contribute to), magazines, and non-profits and I’ve always been impressed by his minimalist design sense and bulletproof hosting methodology. So I was excited when he invited me to join the team for the summer. I’m expecting to learn a lot about web development while helping clients solve their problems.

• PHP 5 (OOP skills a requirement)
• MySQL 5
• XHTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• JQuery
• Python experience a plus.

The right candidate will fit right in with our fast-paced virtual office environment and be able to hit the ground running with our varied base of clients and growing stable of in-house initiatives. We’re preferential to applicants in or around Chicago, Washington D.C., or Reston, VA but will consider other areas for the right person. Starting salary will be commensurate with experience, talent, and knowledge of the movie Xanadu.

Interested? Feel compelled to make your mark? We’d like to hear from you! Send your resume to careers@dancingmammoth.com.

For reference, here is a screencap of Apple’s site:

Which brings me to two points:

1. When you have your own iconic brand, you really shouldn’t need to steal so shamelessly.
2. It’s 2009, Gibson. Did you really think table-based layout was still a good idea?

With the money that you save by purchasing from Amazon you can increase your RAM, purchase peripherals, or hold onto that money for a rainy day. The choice is rather easy if you look at the prices below. I have added a 5% sales tax to all Apple prices. Your particular sales tax may be higher or lower depending on where you live.

I eventually came across the following bar chart, which is accessible as a pop-up from this page. It compares my current notebook (coincidentally) with the one I intend to purchase.

At first glance, it was obvious that something wasn’t quite right. The percentages listed inside the blue bars don’t even remotely correspond to the visual length of those bars relative to the baseline bar at the bottom. It isn’t even close.

I took a screenshot and did some measuring in Photoshop with the ruler tool. The baseline bar is 216 pixels wide. The bars above it are 357, 362, 382, and 417 pixels wide, respectively. That would yield rounded percentages of 65%, 68%, 77%, and 93%.

I assume the numbers are correct and Apple is just being deceptive to make the performance gains look more impressive. In any case, it’s definitely not cool.