Posts

Today I stumbled across the Twitter feed for the Los Angeles Fire Department. I thought it was sort of a silly novelty until I clicked on the Twitter feed for the only person LAFD is following, Brian Humphrey, a public spokesperson for the department. Humphrey’s use of social sites to create a lightweight process for disseminating news from the department is clever and effective. LAFD also publishes alerts to a Google Group, LAFD_ALERT, which contains the same information as the Twitter feed, and a blog that publishes longer articles. The home page for the Google Group explains what the alerts are for and how they’re used. ...

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 progress toward a goal provides the opportunity for juking the stats, and the challenge for creators of such systems is to be aware of these methods and account for them. ...

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 Snopes has eliminated the bylines for the article writers. I find that a bit odd, not only because they used to be there, but also because some care was taken to make the bylines clever and pithy. I tried to find some examples of the old bylines, but I see that Snopes.com blocks archive.org as well. ...

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.

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 right now, there are only three wholesale buyers of computer books, and two of them are ceding a large part of the market to the third. Here’s his example: ...

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 and that they’re adding value, but it’s a transparent money grab. As is so often the case with these kinds of schemes, the people who implemented it did an awful job, and opened a huge exploitable hole that enabled malicious sites to hijack real domains and impersonate their owners. I can’t help but wonder if the reason so many of these boneheaded money making schemes are rife with security holes is that the companies can’t find any decent programmers who are willing to build them. ...

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 Clients for the iPhone. Useful for anyone who’s developing Web sites that target the iPhone. Stephen O’Grady: The State of MySQL. I wonder what percentage of MySQL users don’t know the first thing about MySQL? To them, it’s just something they install to make WordPress, MediaWiki, or PHPbb work. Waxy.org: Milliways: Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Some insider gave Andy Baio access to a hard drive containing Infocom’s unreleased games, along with lots of other archived information from the company before its fall. Wonderful stuff.

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 the party faithful. Any elected official or candidate who bothers to show up (or send someone to speak for them) is introduced to the full convention from the podium. ...

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 I would have originally guessed. My original speculation when Safari for Windows released was that Apple was making it available so that Web developers who use Windows would have no excuse for not testing their sites in Safari, and more importantly, Mobile Safari. Now it looks like Apple feels like Safari has legs and that they want to get into the browser fight on Windows. ...

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 because the “add to cart” request takes a long time to process. To prevent users from adding duplicate items to their cart, the Web site warns the user to keep waiting rather than pressing the button again. ...