David Calhoun's blog

I’ve seen Casablanca more than a few times, and it’s become one of my favorite films.

Schindler's List title card with candles This is a film that is best experienced, not explained in a post like this.

IKIRU, 生きる, TO LIVE This is an existentialist story about a man who learns he has stomach cancer, leading to his reconsidering of life, which he realizes has been utterly wasted up until this point.

It’s the beginning of January, which means the beginning of a new year.

GPS track log See the interactive GPS track log here.

(In case you didn’t guess, this is a parody.

Haleakala sunset Andre: OK.

I’d been looking for a night like tonight for a long time, when the new moon fell squarely on the weekend.

Milky Way over the trees, seem from Yosemite Valley around 3am Last night I attended an impromptu star party in Yosemite attended by only one person total.

Front view of the Sugar Pine Railroad On my last trip to Yosemite, I tagged along with my friends Kevin and Mari.

These damn existential nights are the worst.

Inside Cafe Rhinebeck in Kyoto, Japan (Photo copyright David Calhoun) (I originally wrote this while sitting in Cafe Rhinebeck in Kyoto, Japan) I’m visiting Japan again, when part of me is constantly thinking I should instead be spending the time and money

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

It’s well into the new year, and I didn’t exactly start the new year off like everyone else, who I imagine all rushed daily into the gym in the first week or two, then apparently gave the habit up soon after.

In the previous two photo posts I wanted to avoid this sort of heavy reflection New Year post.

I was just putting together this article and these photos on New Year’s Eve when I glanced and the clock and noticed I was already four minutes into 2015.

It’s nearing the year’s end, so of course this means a somewhat sentimental blog post from me.

Vendors along Kamogawa River for the Tanabata (七夕) star festival in Kyoto (Photo by David Calhoun, 2011) I had always heard of Marshall McCluhan’s famous “the medium is the message”, but really only had a surface level understanding of it until recently,…

⚠️ Warning: this is an old article and may include information that’s out of date. ⚠️ A while back I had a need for a general timeout option for async.parallel and was surprised I couldn’t find much information about how to do it.

Milky Way galaxyrise from Maui (at the Mauian hotel) I was lucky enough to finally visit Hawaii with my parents.

⚠️ Warning: this is an old article and may include information that’s out of date. ⚠️ Intro Over the years there’s been a steadily increasing ecosystem of JavaScript components to choose from.

The mobile web is dead.

⚠️ Warning: this is an old article and may include information that’s out of date. ⚠️ (2016: in retrospect, this is kind of gratuitous and doesn’t appear to be fully working anymore…) Demo Just for fun, I wanted to reproduce a cool but completely superflu…

A friend posted a link to this fun little quiz - You Can’t JavaScript Under Pressure.

When I came back from Japan and accepted an offer to work at a startup in Silicon Valley, I knew one of the biggest challenges would be to find a decent and affordable apartment in Mountain View, close to where I’d be working.

(this is a copy of a letter which I’ve sent to various representatives in government) As a concerned citizen, I know you understand that I must occasionally voice my concern through letters such as this.

The real shame about NSA/PRISM is that everyone will forget about it next week or next month.

⚠️ Warning: this is an old article and may include information that’s out of date. ⚠️ The other day I glanced at a classmate using Baidu to perform an image search and was impressed with their presentation: Note the nice big images and the lack of margins…

Cherry blossoms in Kyoto, Japan 2013 Check out my cherry blossoms 2013 set on Flickr.

Your browser does not support the HTML5 video tag.

EDIT: big thanks to my classmate Robin from Switzerland who showed me the key steps to getting this figured out!

Japanese riding a miniature railroad, brought by Perry to Japan.

I’ve been thinking lately that the fates of so many are motivated by, in a word, escapism.

This is finally the end of my first week in Japanese language school here in Kyoto.

Rene Descartes Years ago I read Descartes’s Discourse on Method for what I found to be some of the more interesting philosophy courses of my college career: those of the history of modern philosophy.

Several times I’ve heard the phrase “the religion of your parents’ choosing”, used to scoff at adherents to various religions, as if they had no intelligent choice in the matter of their own beliefs.

Stratfor CEO George Friedman "…but the hackers will not find intelligence of corporations and governments, or signs of a vast conspiracy…" -Stratfor CEO George Friedman, January 2012 …eight months later… “WIKILEAKS: Surveillance Cameras Around The Country…

⚠️ Warning: this is an old article and may include information that’s out of date. ⚠️ Introduction UPDATE 2016: this appears to have even less support than before, and it’s not recommended to be used on a production site.

After work today, I stopped by the old bustling Apple Store in Palo Alto.

(2016 note: this was a terrible idea because I’m neither a native speaker nor a good speaker in general.. but I’m leaving this up for posterity…) I have been learning bits and pieces of Japanese throughout the years, and picking up more and more on each of

There’s been a flurry of response to this article, entitled “What’s next for mobile now that adaptive design has failed?”.

This was posted on reddit recently, so I thought I’d copy my response here.

Lately I’ve come to terms with the fact I need to try something new in my life - a true change in direction.

⚠️ Warning: this is an old article and may include information that’s out of date. ⚠️ UPDATE 2/25/2013 As of Facebook’s update last year, it appears that many of the old Facebook URL schemes are no longer working….

(if you didn’t read the title - warning: rant…) As far as web development goes, I guess I could rant on and on about the generalities.

More photos likely to come.. this is just after I unboxed my new 4S.

Result table (SunSpider 0.9.1, all devices running iOS 5) <td> iPhone 4S </td> <td> iPhone 4 </td> <td> iPhone 3GS </td> <td class="positive"> 2270ms </td> <td> 3483ms </td> <td> 4903ms </td> <td class="positive"> 281ms </td> <td> 486ms </t…

⚠️ Warning: this is an old article and may include information that’s out of date. ⚠️ Earlier this year I gave a talk (slides) outlining the latest and greatest in mobile performance, including a bit of my own unscientific research into carrier latency and

⚠️ Warning: this is an old article and may include information that’s out of date. ⚠️ Introduction Ever since Steve Souders started evangelizing web performance, it’s been pounded into our heads that extra HTTP requests add a lot of additional overhead, a…

⚠️ Warning: this is an old article and may include information that’s out of date. ⚠️ Note: updated in July 2016 with ES6 arrow functions.