Posts

Here’s the difference between what a company like Google can do and what most can do. Google Wave was the big news yesterday, but it’s not exactly a new effort. It’s been in the works since 2007: Lars had already moved to Sydney, and made the case that Wave could best be created there, where the team could operate as a kind of independent startup. Jens moved over, and they built the first prototype over nine months with a team of five, during 2007. Since then, the team has grown to about 100. ...

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.

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.

On why you should never leave out the space between ‘‘if’’ and the expression that follows in JavaScript: The Good Parts: I placed a space between ‘‘if’’ and ‘’(’’ so that the ‘‘if’’ didn’t look like a function invocation. I’m just quoting this because it’s one of those little things that drives me nuts when people are sloppy about it.

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.

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.

In a discussion of Maureen Dowd’s plagiarism of Josh Marshall, he mentions that each sentence is a little snowflake: An eminent technologist once explained to me that any specific ordering of a relatively brief sequence of words — I forget the exact number, but it was certainly no more than nine — is distinct enough that (unless it is some boilerplate phrase that gets repeated over and over in some type of document) it can be used as a unique fingerprint for the entire document. He demonstrated this for me with Google searches. (Try it yourself, using the “exact phrase” setting — search string in quote marks.) It’s a pretty nifty idea with all sorts of implications. ...

This is a great definition of a microframework: Microframeworks let you build an entire web application in a single file, usually with only one import statement.

Ta-Nahesi Coates on writing: Writing is really hard work–mostly because thinking is really hard work. When you don’t want to do that work, but you want the meager payment it offers, the fleeting fame it brings, then you resort to thinking on the cheap. You go for shock. And you do it that way because you have nothing to offer except your rep as contrarian, and a provocateur. You do it because you are lazy. ...

Long delayed roundup of links: Dan Benjamin: Top 10 Programming Fonts. I’m currently giving Inconsolata a whirl. Jasmin Blanchette: The Little Manual of API Design. A very interesting looking PDF that I intend to read. John Quiggin: Austrian Business Cycle Theory. A very well written critique. Advanced NFL Stats: Draft Success by Team. Not enough attention is paid to the long term results of the draft. James Carr: TDD Anti-Patterns. I’m a sucker for lists like this. Firediff. A diff plugin for Firebug. Continuing Intermittent Incoherency: Ending The ga.js Wait.Using Dojo to address some of the problems with ga.js, the JavaScript file used by Google Analytics. Eliot Spitzer: If Judge Posner believes this, the world really has changed - One of the most prominent free market intellectuals thinks the market is incapable of setting CEO pay. Judge Posner has gone on to say many even more provocative things lately. This week he’s guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan. AisleOne: 8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Design. Very good article on improving your use of type. James Duncan Davidson: Dear Speakers. Tips for conference speakers. Ajaxian: FirePHP: Tying together Firebug and PHP. A means of packaging debug information for Firebug to consume with AJAX responses. LearnHub: How to Compare Hosted DNS Providers (with Data!). DNS performance is an underrated piece of the overall site performance picture. Seed Magazine: Getting Past the Pie Chart. On the state of data visualization. USA Today: Announcing baseball’s all-stars in the broadcast booth. Ranking the baseball broadcasters. A.V. Club: Turn off the shuffle: 25 great albums that work best when listened to from start to finish. Findings from the A LIST APART Survey, 2008. The results are interesting, but what I really like is the CSS used to create the charts. Web Style Guide 3. Filing this away for later. Chad Fowler: 20 Rails Development No-No’s. Compiled from responses to a request for feedback on Twitter. Last.fm Blog: Mapreduce Bash Script. Very elegant hack. Migrating from svn to a distributed VCS. This is specific to the Python code base, but it is a great general resource. Digg the Blog: Introducing Digg’s IDDB Infrastructure. Something I need to digest. Patrick Peak and Paul Barry: Presentation on BrowserCMS. It’s an up and coming CMS built using Ruby on Rails. Rogers Cadenhead: Bit.ly Builds Business on Libya Domain. On the risks of relying on the technical governance of an authoritarian dictatorship. dotfiles.org: .zshrc. A collection of zsh init scripts. UXmatters: Refining Data Tables. Tips on creating usable reports. Z-Shell Frequently-Asked Questions. From my recent zsh obsession. Fried CPU: zsh: The last shell you’ll ever need!. zsh advocacy. 2009 Rubyist’s guide to a Mac OS X development environment. This is where I got the idea to try zsh in the first place. Time: Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline . An amazing set of photos. James Dumay: Mac OS X Tip: Preventing accidently launching FrontRow when cycling windows. This happens to me all the time. Ms. Glaze: Make It Nice or Make it Twice. Very much applicable to software development. Michael Ruhlman: Duck Confit: It’s What’s For Lunch. Who doesn’t want to confit their own duck?