The details for this year's EECI were posted just yesterday and I can't even begin to explain how excited I am to be speaking. Well, excited and terrified as there are a ton of really great speakers and, if last year in Brooklyn was any indication, one of the sharpest groups of attendees I've met at any conference.

For my part, I'll be speaking about writing custom plugins for your projects. Everything from how to get started and the basics of plugin authoring to more advanced features and how to leverage some of ExpressionEngine's CodeIgniter backbone to accomplish even more custom work without overburdening your templates with inline PHP.

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage - we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action.

He may have never known my name but he undoubtedly helped shape my career and my passion. Thank you, Steve, for everything you've given me and the world.

By allowing for a more flexible work schedule, you create an atmosphere where employees can be excited about their work. Ultimately it should lead to more hours of work, with those hours being even more productive. Working weekends blur into working nights into working weekdays, since none of the work feels like work.

A great post from Zach Holman on operating hours at GitHub. For me, I know that even though I'm in the office at 8:30 or 9 in the morning, on most days I don't actually start being truly productive until after lunch.

AnandTech just posted a review of Apple's new Thunderbolt display. All in all it sounds like a great deal for Apple laptop owners. But then there's this:

That's right, the only way to get video to the Thunderbolt Display is by using a Thunderbolt enabled Mac (or theoretically a Thunderbolt enabled PC). For Mac users that means only 2011 MacBook Pro, Air, iMac or Mac mini models will work with the Thunderbolt Display.

Which means that if I were to buy a Mac Pro from the apple store right now, I'd have to go somewhere else to buy a display. That's the most un-Apple-like thing I've seen Apple do in a long time.

A wonderful post over at Threat Level on why Netflix integration into Facebook is blocked by federal law. Though mostly about consumer privacy laws, one remark stood out as especially poignant:

…that would make Facebook users even bigger advertising pawns than they already are…

Advertising pawns, indeed.

New post on Angus Croll's JavaScript, JavaScript blog on the crazy intricacies of how JavaScript handles equality and truth with examples like:

if([0]) {
  console.log([0] == true); //false
  console.log(!![0]); //true
}

A wonderful post by Andy Baio indexing meta-video-games for just about every gaming platform ever.

I've read and enjoyed this review dozens of times in the many years I've been reading Daring Fireball but came across it today thanks to Shawn Blanc. It stands as a benchmark for amazing reviews as well as being great snapshot of a company that very clearly understands product design better than anyone.

Viewed through today’s eyes, a site that calls excessive attention to its creators’ skills is like an oversized, gold-plated vanity press book of rhyming couplets. Or maybe it’s more like a penis extension in a men’s prison. Either way, although it may be impressive, it’s something nobody needs.

I especially love what Daniel Jalkut had to say about it

Google's two major assets were awesome search results and likability. They seem to be systematically eroding both with no help from others.

Flash is never going to decrease in popularity so long as all web browsers support it. Flash might decrease in popularity because of iOS. If you believe that Flash’s current position as a de facto standard technology is harmful to the web, then users — not just iOS users but everyone using the web — would benefit if that happens.

Exactly why I have had flash blocked in all of my browsers for years

A command-line utility I use daily in place of grep. Written entirely in Perl, it can take advantage of Perl's regular expressions to make searching through files from a terminal a snap.

A handy reference for the new delegate() and undelegate() methods added to jQuery 1.4.2

Dan Benjamin has an interview with one of my favorite developer/designers, Shaun Inman, on his podcast The Pipeline.

I've been using MediaTemple for hosting all of my domains for a number of years now and while I've been generally satisfied with their Grid Service I've found it a bit lacking lately. I don't have the traffic or any financial need to necessitate spending money on a high availability server but I do completely depend on email for most of my communication so when it's down or can't authenticate I feel almost completely cut off.

With that in mind I started looking for alternate hosting solutions but I couldn't find any that matched MediaTemple's feature set or phenomenal customer service (availability issues aside). Ultimately, I ended up finding Google apps mail service. The "Premier" version is essentially an third-party-hosted MS Exchange replacement that seems extremely robust. On digging a bit deeper, though, I found that they offer the Google Apps Standard Edition - a feature-lite version offering up mail, calendaring and chat all through your personal domain.

For those unfamiliar with DNS records, set up might not be as easy as signing up for a Gmail account, but other than that mail was flowing only a few minutes after making the switch.

And now I'm happy to report that a week in things are great. Being able to take advantage of all of gmail's advanced features from my own domains is pretty amazing. If you're looking for an alternative to you hosting providers email solution or interested in a cheaper alternative to Exchange, Google apps is a great choice.

An interesting solve for those of us wanting to make the jump into SSD but have too much data to make the choice cost-effective

Smashing Magazine has a great write-up on what not to do when enhancing your sites with JavaScript

My good friend Clint posts what can only be considered as the intellectual peak of most of our online conversation

456bereastreet on the now seldom used, and hopefully shortly banished, practice of adding 'reset' buttons to web forms.

Cameron Moll on how Twitter got to where it is and why it's so important.

An important refresher on semantic markup. Yes, it even needs to apply to WYSIWG editors.

The discussion rages on as to how to properly pronounce everyones hate to love (or is it love to hate?) Flash based font replacer.

Ethan Marcotte, Senior Designer for Airbag Industries, has a write-up over at A List Apart on Fluid Grids, taking the industry standard approach of fixed width grids one step further to accommodate fluid layouts.

A handy guide cross referencing currently used CSS selectors against more than 15 of the most used browsers (Google's Chrome being the column with all the green check marks and IE6 being the column mostly filled with red x's).

Twitter's Alex Payne shares his outline for technological bliss. I fully agree with every point but if I could add just one it would be this: "Don't update just because something is newer. For hardware, software or firmware only update to fix bugs you've run into or for new features you must have".

A wonderfully built Javascript preprocessor that takes the pain and guesswork out of concatenating JS source by hand. Combine with jsmin and deploy script or post-commit hook for hassle free optimization.