rc3.org Strong opinions weakly held

Posts Tagged ‘links’

Links from July 9th

In Commentary on 12 July 2009 tagged browsers, civil rights, health care, JavaScript, learning, links, science, torture, Web development with no comments

• Discover Magazine: The Brain: Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State. Neuroscientists explain my usual state of mind.
• FireQuery. jQuery-specific enhancements for Firebug.
• The Zinn-Segaran Experiential Greatness Scale. You never know when this is going to come in handy.
• Bruce Schneier: The Pros and Cons of Password Masking. I think it all depends on the environment in which the password will be entered.
• Threat Level: Judge Acquits Lori Drew in Cyberbullying Case, Overrules Jury. This lady is a hateful loser, but making it a crime to violate a site's terms of service is awfully bad law.
• Shared Equity Mortgages. An interesting idea for people who don’t have enough money to make a down payment on their house.
• Vanity Fair: Todd S. Purdum on Sarah Palin. An awesome article that ran on Sarah Palin just before she resigned.
• Glenn Greenwald: The suppressed fact: Deaths by U.S. torture. In the discussions of torture, the number of people who were waterboarded is discussed frequently, the number of people in US custody who have died almost never is.
• O’Reilly Radar: Radical Transparency: The New Federal IT Dashboard. Pretty amazing application of Drupal.
• O’Reilly Radar: Want A Job? Learn SharePoint, Says Gary Blatt. There’s a whole other world out there I barely know exists.
• Firefox 3.5 for developers. The stuff you need to know.
• Scott Rosenberg: Salon.com IPO: It was ten years ago today. I thought it was a bad idea back then.
• Robert Reich: Why the Critics of a Public Option for Health Care Are Wrong. I’m not giving up on real health care reform.
• FiveThirtyEight: George F. Will Admits Public Option Will Cut Costs. At least half the stuff people are saying about health insurance isn’t true.
• Slate: Why do Iranian police uniforms say "police" in English? I was wondering.

Links from June 17th

In Commentary on 18 June 2009 tagged browsers, cities, community, fonts, health care, language, links, politics, Ruby on Rails, The Media with 1 comment

• Telegraph (UK): US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive. I appreciate the realistic approach to dealing with the massive shrinkage some cities have undergone.
• IE6 denial message for Momentile.com on Flickr. Brilliant.
• Atul Gawande: University of Chicago Medical School Commencement Address. This is the argument that naturally flows from his important article on health care costs. Look for a separate blog post on positive deviants.
• Economix Blog: What Is ‘Socialized Medicine’?: A Taxonomy of Health Care Systems. Single payer, nationalized health care, and a public health insurance provider are all very, very different things.
• Financial Times: First Person: Frank Ahearn. Former skip tracer advises people on how to disappear.
• Smashing Magazine: Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts For Your Designs. Who doesn’t love fonts?
• James Fallows: Belatedly, on the Cairo speech & Obama rhetoric in general. A short explanation of how Obama differs from other politicians.
• Anil Dash: The End of Fail. Anil Dash really is the conscience of the blogosphere. The comments on this piece are really telling.
• Roger Ebert: The O’Reilly Procedure. A damning critique of Bill O’Reilly.
• Matthew Bass: Auto timeout sessions in Rails. I hate this feature but some applications demand it.

Links from June 12th

In Commentary on 14 June 2009 tagged architecture, Barack Obama, cars, censorship, China, life, links, poverty, Ruby, torture with no comments

• Change.org: Why I Choose Streets Over Shelter. A homeless person explains why one might rationally choose sleeping on the street over going to a homeless shelter.
• Ken Kuhl: My Weekend with the Electric Mini Cooper (Mini-e). Mini has provided a few prototypes to regular people in New York and Los Angeles to get their feedback.
• Matthew Yglesias: China to Require All PCs Include Internet-Censoring Software. Really smart comments. China’s market power is such that they can demand concessions to authoritarian censorship that other countries cannot. However, those other countries can then take advantage of the anti-liberty “features” that were created for China’s government.
• Jake Tapper: Ex-Gitmo Detainee Lakhdar Boumediene Details Tortures. While in Paris covering President Obama, Jake Tapper took time to do this interview.
• New York Times: How the U.S. Surplus Became a Deficit. Everybody already linked to this article, but it’s a must read.
• Alex Moskalyuk: Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. Who doesn’t want to be more persuasive?
• Ruby Best Practices: Quack Attack: Making Your Code More Rubyish. It’s my goal to speak every programming language I use like a native.
• Language Log: Obama’s Imperial ‘I’: spreading the meme. The recent claims that Obama says “I” more than other Presidents is wrong.
• GitHub: whenever. A Ruby wrapper for cron.
• Tim Bray: On Carving Your Initials. More engineers should be invited to give commencement speeches.
• James Fallows: Departing questions. A comparison of the rendering of Beijing’s CCTV tower and what was actually built. The concept is much more impressive than the execution.

Links from June 8th

In Commentary on 8 June 2009 tagged economics, fraud, games, Google, HTML, human rights, links, music, mysql, performance, politics, Raleigh, Ruby, software development, war with no comments

• Salon: The Learjet repo man. Just an entertaining article.
• Dahlia Lithwick: Guantanamo is the least of America’s prison problem. “The United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, houses nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.”
• Marginal Revolution: Why U.S. health care policy is especially egalitarian. Guaranteed to undermine at least one thing you believe to be true.
• crontab2english. Stop trying to wrap your brain around cron configuration.
• McClatchy: Why’d Obama switch on detainee photos? Maliki went ballistic. Make of this what you will.
• MySQL Performance Blog: A rule of thumb for choosing column order in indexes. Helpful.
• Ruby Best Practices: Reading Ruby’s Standard Library for Fun and Profit. Solid article on reading code.
• WoW Insider: Beware of Blood Elves selling mounts. A complex phishing and identity theft scam in World of Warcraft. They used to say that all Web innovations begin on porn sites. I think you can look to World of Warcraft to see tomorrow’s fraud today.
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Introducing Page Speed. Google’s version of YSlow.
• O’Reilly Radar: TOSBack: EFF’s Much-Needed Terms of Service Tracker. Tracking changes to the terms of service from popular sites.
• Elder Game: Yes, the MMO Industry Really is That Bad. Cautionary tale on working in the MMO industry.
• Monica Youn: Why Sonia Sotomayor was talking about race in the first place. Useful context for the "wise Latina" speech.
• YouTube: R.E.M. 10/10/82 The Pier, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. Old footage someone dug up. For more information on the Village Subway, see this excellent post from Goodnight, Raleigh.
• High Performance Web Sites: Using Iframes Sparingly. The performance of iframes is really bad.
• O’Reilly Radar: Google Squared is an Exponential Improvement in Search. Particularly interesting in light of the recent release of Wolfram Alpha.

Links from June 3rd

In Commentary on 3 June 2009 tagged Apple, business, cars, css, Google, iPhone, links, politics, religion, The Media, Web development, wine with 5 comments

• Edmunds.com: “Confessions of a Car Salesman” Updated for 2009. The original series was a classic on the shady business practices of car dealerships. Turns out the same basic practices are still being applied.
• Bloomberg: Ballmer Says Tax Would Move Microsoft Jobs Offshore. Microsoft exec threatens to move more jobs offshore if the government closes some unrelated tax loopholes that the company takes advantage of.
• Dan Froomkin: Celebrity Journalism at the White House. A strong critique of NBC’s silly news special this week on the Obama White House.
• slacktivist: Killing in the name of. An important blog post on the history of the anti-abortion movement.
• Carrer Blog: 1 line CSS Grid Framework. Everything good and bad about CSS in a single line.
• Daring Fireball: Why Palm’s WebOS ‘Media Sync’ iTunes Integration Can’t Be Legit. Don’t miss the followup on the legality of the Palm Pre impersonating an iPod.
• Hivelogic: Deploying ExpressionEngine from GitHub with Capistrano. This approach should work for any PHP app.
• Andrew Leonard: GM: Into bankruptcy, out of the Dow. Companies that file for bankruptcy are automatically delisted.
• Joe Gregorio: Wave Protocol Thoughts. On the plumbing.
• Trader Joe’s Wine Compendium. A blog that reviews only wines sold at Trader Joe’s.
• The Atlantic: Do CEOs Matter? What do chief executives add? One thing’s for sure, a bad CEO can certainly be a disaster for a company.

Links from May 31st

In Commentary on 31 May 2009 tagged ajax, blogs, drupal, firefox, Google, JavaScript, links, Microsoft, search, security, The Media with no comments

• Security Fix: Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension. This is why nobody trusts Microsoft. Pulling this sort of stunt as an OS vendor is really irresponsible.
• Scott Rosenberg: Rosen and Sotomayor: Blame it on the blog. After writing a really irresponsible hit piece, Jeffrey Rosen tries to blame his own crappy reporting on the fact that he was writing a blog post. Even though he wasn’t.
• drupal.org: Apache Solr Search Integration. How to use Solr for site search with Drupal.
• drupal.org: Zappos.com and Drupal. A case study.
• Ajaxian: GWT team Wave’s goodbye to annoying question; It’s the API stupid. How Google Wave makes use of Google Web Toolkit.

Links from May 28th

In Commentary on 28 May 2009 tagged email, fonts, Google, government, healthcare, HTML, links, Web development with no comments

• O’Reilly Radar: Google Bets Big on HTML 5. The big takeaway from this is that current browsers already support a big chunk of HTML 5.
• Webmonkey: Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5. More coverage.
• O’Reilly Radar: Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today? Really interesting new project from Google.
• Introducing Typekit. Third party hosting for embeddable fonts. This could be huge.
• The New Yorker: Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum. Convincing argument that capitalism is driving rising medical costs, delivering inferior care to patients and lining the pockets of doctors and the health care industry. This is a must-read for anyone who cares about health insurance.

Links from May 26th

In Commentary on 28 May 2009 tagged css, design, JavaScript, law, links, politics, Ruby on Rails with no comments

I have a number of Sonya Sotomayor links today.

• SCOTUSblog: Judge Sotomayor’s Appellate Opinions in Civil Cases. A review of her actual work. This is the important stuff when evaluating judges.
• Daytime Running Lights: Simple Wins. Case study of a realtime chat server built using CouchDB.
• The Quine Page (self-reproducing code). A quine is a program that produces its own source as its output.
• Tim Bray: The Web vs. the Fallacies. How the Web makes many of the fallacies of distributed computing less fallacious.
• SCOTUSblog: The Dynamic of the Nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. She’s as qualified as any other recent nominee, she doesn’t seem like she’ll expand the ideological boundaries of the Supreme Court, and she’s going to be confirmed.
• Maintainable Software: Minifying Your Rails Javascript. Rake task to minify JavaScript as part of the build process.
• Glenn Greenwald: Justice Sam Alito on empathy and judging. The fixation on Obama’s empathy criteria for Supreme Court justices is a canard.
• Shhhaw! On Redesigning the Front Page of Talking Points Memo.

Links from May 25th

In Commentary on 26 May 2009 tagged Add new tag, art, business, economics, history, links, policy, poverty, war with no comments

• The Big Picture: Memorial Day, 2009. Moving collection of photos.
• James Fallows: On Memorial Day. On the Map of the Fallen project, an overlay for Google Maps with information on the American soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Michael Lewis: The Master of Money. A review of Alice Schroeder’s biography of Warren Buffett.
• Wall Street Journal: Obama Is Changing the Art on the White House Walls. An interesting look at the impact of Presidential taste in art.
• Financial Times: Argentina: The superpower that never was. Speculation as to why the fortunes of America and Argentina diverged so greatly over the course of the twentieth century.
• PSD Blog: The verdict is in on microfinance. The headline is provocative and I think overstates the case. However, it appears that material gains from microfinance are not leading directly to gains in other aspects of human development.
• National Journal Online: Chopra Wants To ‘Productize’ Innovations. What the federal CTO is working on.

Links from May 22nd

In Commentary on 23 May 2009 tagged design, JavaScript, links, politics, privacy, security, transparency with 2 comments

Today’s batch of links:

• Alan Clarke. Saw a link to these brilliantly designed posters for the 2012 Olympic games on Twitter. I absolutely love the diving poster.
• Transformation in the Federal Sector: Data.gov Arrives!. Announcement from the consulting firm that built it.
• Sunlight Labs: Everything We Know About Data.gov. It’s a LAMP site.
• Jake Brewer: Data.Gov Launches: Why You Should Care and What You Should Do.
• Schneier on Security: On the Anonymity of Home/Work Location Pairs. Sort of like my post about the uniqueness of various phrases this week. Generally speaking, the amount of data required to uniquely identify something is smaller than we think.
• Anil Dash: Flags, Windows, Lucky Numbers and Hidden Mickeys. How the new Windows logo builds on the old Windows logo.
• Schillmania: Javascript Malware Analysis: A Case Study.