rc3.org

I’m particularly interested in performance metrics and statistics and how they are used and manipulated. One of my favorite terms from The Wire was “juking the stats” — manipulating the crime statistics for political reasons, usually be reclassifying felonies as lesser crimes to make the felony rate appear lower. Any quantitative system for measuring [...]

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A friend sent me a link to Snopes article and noted that JavaScript is used to prevent people from selecting text on their pages. It looks like they’re using a pretty dumb trick:

document.onmousedown=disableselect

You can still select all and copy. You just can’t select portions of the text unless you disable JavaScript.

I also noticed that [...]

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Six Apart has acquired uber-Movable Type consulting firm Apperceptive, creating a new professional services branch, and has also launched a new ad network for bloggers. For what it’s worth, I think that Six Apart’s moves lately to reach out to people who aren’t using their tools for publishing are sound strategy.

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Last week I made a flip remark about 10k forms in linking to Tim O’Reilly’s comments on Amazon.com competing with publishers. I wanted to link to his post again and urge you to skip down and read Tim’s responses to commenters to get a better idea of exactly what he’s talking about.

Tim points out that [...]

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It looks like the increasing unwillingness of ISPs to just return a “host not found” response to the browser is starting to cause problems. ISPs have figured out that it’s easy to make money by intercepting DNS errors and redirecting browsers to ads. The ISPs justify this by saying that the DNS errors aren’t helpful [...]

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Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? Darned interesting article on the impact mobile phones have on society. It’s a feature on Jan Chipchase, a researcher at Nokia who publishes an incredible blog that I’ve subscribed to for awhile. Position Is Everything. Yet another site documenting browser CSS limitations. Daring Fireball: The Unsatisfying State of Twitter Web [...]

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This morning my wife and I attended the Democratic county convention. The main purposes of the convention are to nominate delegates to the district and state conventions, and to adopt a platform to be submitted for inclusion in the state party platform. It’s also a place for candidates and activists to show up and meet [...]

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Apple has backed off on pushing Safari for Windows out to iTunes users as a software update and now more accurately lists it as “new software“. What I find interesting about Apple’s sudden eagerness to get Windows users to install Safari is that it shows they’re significantly more committed to it as a product than [...]

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I’ve started collecting screen shots that illustrate the problem of performance issues affecting the usability of Web sites. I saw this one in a shopping cart from an online store (I don’t remember which one, and they probably wouldn’t want to be identified anyway).

As you can see, this text was added to the Web page [...]

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Michael Coté: Getting “Love” (and Attention) for Your Whizbang 2.0 Application - Fast, Frequent Features. Thoughtful musings on development models, community-related features, and social marketing. O’Reilly Radar: Publishers Beware: Amazon has you in their sights. I think you have to take what you see in 10K filings with a grain of salt. Financial Times: Google faces loss [...]

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