At Cozi.com, we use the jQuery JavaScript library to do all kinds of complex and wonderful DHTML and Ajax tricks in our web client. Extremely powerful, very elegant: I commend it to your attention.

John Resig is the lead developer on the jQuery team. This book is not about jQuery, though if you work your way through it, you’ll be well equipped to understand the jQuery source code.

This book covers modern JavaScript techniques, in particular, object-oriented JavaScript, un­ob­tru­sive DOM ma­nip­u­la­tion, Ajax, and cross-browser warts. It covers a lot of ground …continue.

My little brother, Mark Reilly aka the Alien Resident, suc­cess­ful­ly defended his doctoral dis­ser­ta­tion on Tuesday and may now be addressed as "Dr. Reilly."

He studied part-time at the European Graduate School in New York City, while juggling several jobs. His doctorate is in Media and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and the topic was Propaganda of the Dead: Terrorism and Revolution, which he picked before 9/11.

He is only the second PhD in the family. My uncle Pat Deasy was the first.

Con­grat­u­la­tions, Mark!

About a year ago, I posted a link to some silly cat pictures. I just found the motherlode.

Smiley’s People is the last book in le Carré’s Karla Trilogy, begun in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and continued in The Honourable Schoolboy.

George Smiley is called back from retirement when one of his former contacts, a Russian general turned emigré, is found murdered. Working alone and exercising his con­sid­er­able tradecraft, Smiley discovers a fatal chink in the armor of his old adversary, Karla, the Russian spymaster. He gets the go-ahead to execute a sting, which will ultimately lead to Karla’s defection.

Once again, le Carré crafts a subtle and compelling …continue.

I was just watching the Colbert Report and Sam Waterston was on, touting Unity08. Except that both he and Colbert kept pro­nounc­ing it as Unity-oh-Eight dot com, not Unity-zero-Eight dot com. I knew what they meant of course, but I decided to see what was at Unityo8. Naturally, they don’t own the domain, despite having existed for more than a year. Such in­com­pe­tence.

As for their third-way platform, I expect that they would act as a spoiler, most likely splitting the Democratic vote, as Nader (cursed be his name) did in 2000. Their list of sponsors is quite suspect too. Irregular Times lists a number of problems with Unity08.

Tom Janeway lives in Seattle with his wife Beth and their four-year-old son, Finn. Tom is a middle-aged Englishman who teaches writing at the University of Wash­ing­ton; Beth, somewhat younger, is an editor at GetAShack.com. It’s 1999 and the DotCom boom is raging. Chick is an illegal immigrant from China, with a raging en­tre­pre­neur­ial streak, who ends up wandering in and out of Tom’s life.

Tom is perceptive enough to be an occasional com­men­ta­tor on NPR’s All Things Considered, yet oblivious to the problems in his marriage, and he’s flab­ber­gast­ed when Beth leaves him. Worse …continue.

Cozi is hiring. We have positions for Developers and Web Developers.

We’re a small Web 2.0 startup, based in the Smith Tower in downtown Seattle. Our Cozi Central product is groupware for families: it helps parents manage their own and their kids’ schedules, shopping lists, and reminders, from computers, PDAs, and mobile phones.

If you’re interested, let me know.

Update: we have some non-developer positions too.

Days before graduation, a shooting takes place in the girls’ bathroom at a suburban Maryland high school. The popular, pretty Kat is dead; the athletic Josie was shot in the foot; and the drama star and shooter, Perri, is comatose after shooting herself in the head. The three girls had been in­sep­a­ra­ble since third grade, though Perri and Kat had fallen out the previous summer. What happened? What led Perri to such an act?

Lippman builds a compelling story, weaving together the aftermath and the events leading up to the …continue.

This year is the 21st an­niver­sary of the Northwest AIDS Walk. A whole generation has passed. Twenty years ago, AIDS was a gay man’s disease and a death sentence. The Reagan ad­min­is­tra­tion was just beginning to ac­knowl­edge the existence of AIDS, half a decade after it had first been recognized and thousands had died.

AIDS is still a serious problem, but the de­vel­op­ment of an­ti­retro­vi­ral drugs a decade ago means that people with HIV are living longer, healthier lives than before. More than 1 million Americans are now living with HIV/AIDS: 9,000 of them in King County. 40,000 people are infected every year, and most new infections are among African-Americans. The U.S. is getting off …continue.

More than two thousand years ago, the balance of power shifted, Africa became the dominant continent, and Europe stayed a barbarian backwater. Muslim Africans sailed west and conquered America, using white slaves as a workforce.

Aidan O’Dere was kidnapped as a boy from an Irish fishing village, and sold to the Wakil, the governor of what would otherwise be Galveston. The Wakil’s younger son, Kai, is the same age as Aidan. The Wakil and Kai are sensitive men, warriors with poets’ souls, with misgivings about the in­sti­tu­tion of slavery. Their respective brothers, …continue.