Posts

The Quick and the Ed. How class (or income bracket) affects college admissions. Usually it’s better to be a rich idiot than smart and poor. O’Reilly Radar: Review Board is good software. Software for managing code reviews. David Pogue: Can Blogger-Bashers Predict the Success of a Product? Unlikely. I find the gadget blogs to be nearly useless. FP Passport: Jihadi sympathizers lambast al Qaeda. al-Qaeda second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri is answering questions posed by viewers of his Web videos. Alex King: jQuery vs. Other Libraries. I think that jQuery is going to win because its learning curve is so gentle.

Paul Kedrosky on what he looks for in the blogs he reads: I don’t want volume or comprehensiveness; I want surprise and interestingness. And to be even more clear, I don’t want surprise or interestingness in a Digg sense of the word, with naked nonagenarians or raccoons with their tongues stuck to metal poles, etc. I don’t want an information freak-show. I want things that I would have normally read, but wouldn’t have found, nor would have most people that I read. Something that changes the way I think. ...

Almost a year ago, I wrote a post complaining about inconsistencies in keyboard shortcuts for navigating tabs. My complaint then was that not all applications use Command-# to navigate among tabs (or Control-# to navigate among tabs in Windows). As I mentioned in passing in that post, Safari uses Command-# to select bookmarks in the bookmarks toolbar. To move between tabs in Safari, the keyboard shortcut is Command-Shift-Arrow (left and right). Since that post, Leopard was released with new versions of iChat and Terminal with tab support, and they both use the Command-Shift-Arrow convention. ...

Washington Post: Memo: Laws Didn’t Apply to Interrogators. The White House has finally released the John Yoo memo that dismantled the rule of law to Congress. Philadelphia Daily News: NFL Films is taking shots. It’s sad but not surprising that NFL Films is falling out of favor with the NFL. This is one of those decisions that everyone will look back on a decade from now and marvel at its stupidity. Making Light: The photograph that terrorized London. Did I ever tell you about the time that I thought that it would be a good idea to take pictures of the border crossing facility between China and Hong Kong? FP Passport: Saudi father shoots daughter after catching her on Facebook. So sad and pointless. The Register: Get your German interior minister’s fingerprint here. I couldn’t agree more that if we’re going to collect biometric information on everyone, we should start with the people who propose these laws. Andrew Leonard: Paulson’s bogus plan to regulate the markets. Wired Compiler: Watch Your Database Threads. Cool tool for monitoring MySQL performance. Wired Compiler: Microsoft’s Office Doc Format Wins ISO Approval. Ask Andrew Shebanow why making this format the standard is a bad idea. Jessamyn West’s new blog template is hilarious. Datawocky: More data usually beats better algorithms. He’s giving away the keys to the castle here.

Jason Kottke: Our collective recent history, online. A collection of magazine archives available online. Putting archives online is cheap, and you can put ads on old stuff just like you can jwz: Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!. Everybody is linking to this, but who cares? jwz has put the original Mozilla Communications home page online. I didn’t know that the old Netscape style of making the first letter in every word really big went back to day one. Josh Marshall: Stickin’. This is a brilliant piece of political analysis. As the Democratic nominating process has proceeded, Hillary’s chances of being the nominee have decreased. As her chances decrease, she must necessarily make increasingly extreme claims to justify remaining in the race. Now her argument is that Obama cannot beat McCain in November. What Josh doesn’t say is that the surest way for that to be true is for the Clinton campaign to make it true. Expect things to continue to get uglier. Chris Blattman: Holy evaluation. I love everything about this blog post.

This weekend I rented a car that had a push button starter. The first time I heard about push button starters, I thought they were some kind of gimmick, but after driving a car with one for a few days I figured out which problem they were designed to solve. Back in the day, you had your car key. (Or if you drove a General Motors car, you had at least two car keys. One for the doors and one for the ignition. How dumb is that?) Eventually, though, pretty much every car came with both a key and a key fob used to turn off the car alarm, unlock the doors, and so forth. The push button starter was created to remove one item from your pocket. Since you can’t get rid of the fob, car makers have started getting rid of the ignition key. As long as you have the fob, you can start the car with a button push. ...

I’m going to be traveling for the next few days, so there probably won’t be any blog posts. Stay out of trouble in my absence.

Scott Rosenberg: Give us each day our daily campaign call. The Presidential campaigns hold daily conference calls with reporters to try to manage the news cycle. Dave Winer is working to post the audio of those calls so we can all listen in. Great project. Bzip2 mini-HOWTO: Using bzip with grep. Extremely useful shell script if your log rotation software compresses your logs using Bzip2. Scott Jennings: Design Progression in World of Warcraft, An Illustrated Guide. Analysis of an interesting game design challenge. Building content for games is lots of work, so you want it to see lots of use. The hardcore players play mainly so they can achieve things most people can’t. How do you keep the hardcore players happy and still make the content accessible so more players get to enjoy it?

Over the past year or so I’ve come to realize that getting the markup right is the most difficult part of building Web applications. Had you asked me back a year ago, I’d have guessed that working with JavaScript was the most difficult, but now I know better. Server side development is in many ways the easiest. For one thing, the tools are great. These days it’s easy to set up a full server environment on your laptop, and the tools for working with code are incredible. Whether you’re a Ruby developer working in Textmate or a Java developer working in Eclipse, NetBeans, or IDEA, the tools are out there to amplify your productivity. The pace of innovation in the server space is incredible as well. Good ideas are being transported from one platform to another at an incredible pace. (Ruby on Rails stole just about everything good from the Java stack, and now the Java folks are stealing all the good ideas they can from Ruby on Rails. PHP is benefitting from both as well.) ...

Los Angeles Times: The Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Blog. One of your more erudite former athletes. Bruce Schneier: The Security Mindset. I envy it, but it’s not how my mind works. The American Prospect: The Obama Doctrine. An attempt to discern Barack Obama’s general philosophy on foreign policy. Jim Henley: Henley Everywhere 2008alt. When you were as right as he was, you get to gloat a little. O’Reilly Radar: Paging systems and Conference Bridges for startups & small teamsr. Useful strategy for responding to outages.