Posts

Sports metaphors for Clinton vs. Obama. - Excellent top to bottom. I still contend that the rules of Quidditch prove that JK Rowling was never a sports fan. jQuery creator John Resig demonstrates some cool JavaScript programming tricks in Search and Don’t Replace. Fred Clark explains how rising land prices can put mobile home owners in a horrible position. They own depreciating mobile homes and rent appreciating land to put them on. The fundamental problem here is that mobile homes aren’t really mobile. Andrew Leonard reports on home equity loan defaults. Homeowners who are behind on their loans have figured out that they can’t take your house away for not paying your HELOC. The Great Daylight Saving Time Conspiracy - Lobbyists are busy people. Anil Dash creates embeddable versions of his blog posts. Step aside, blockquote. I’m still trying to puzzle out the implications. John Gruber analyzes why Apple’s iPhone SDK allows only one app to run at a time. He later posted the counter-argument. The Obama campaign circulated a point-by-point takedown of talking points that the Clinton campaign circulated to journalists. Life imitates blogging. kottke.org is ten years old today - An incredible milestone and an interesting design retrospective. The rc3.org ten year anniversary celebration arrives latter this year.

Robert Weintraub in Slate: How have the Houston Rockets won 20 games in a row? - He's wrong about the absence of Yao helping the Rockets. The Rockets won 12 in a row with Yao before winning 8 in a row without him. I think the secret has been adding Rick Adelman's offense to the defensive tenacity that Jeff Van Gundy instilled in the team over the past few seasons. Taliban shutting down cellular service in Afghanistan - The Taliban is forcing cellular networks to shut down at night because they think coalition forces track their fighters through their phones. Easier to extort the telephone companies than to get guerilla fighters to just turn off their phones, I guess. 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe The Eliot Spitzer affair and the business of sex - Kottke links to lots of sex worker reactions to Eliot Spitzer's prostitution scandal. Incredibly interesting.

Jon Udell interviews Ward Cunningham about how the Eclipse portal exposes its innter workings by way of reports on test results, and the advantages the resulting transparency provides. Really, really interesting stuff. Bruce Schneier discusses a report on the lack of security in implantable medical devices that provide remote access. Wired Compiler links to Prism, a Firefox add-on that makes it easy to treat Web sites like standalone desktop applications. It provides a lightweight approach to creating apps like Mailplane. The Morning News: Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW MP3s by Paul Ford. This is insane, and I mean that in the best possible way. Postalicious is the WordPress plugin I used to produce this post.

Duke professor Vivek Wadhwa has research that shows that there’s no shortage of IT skills on the job market, in spite of the assertions of executives and analysts. Some other researchers agree: “No one who has come to the question with an open mind has been able to find any objective data suggesting general ‘shortages’ of scientists and engineers,” said Dr. Michael Teitelbaum, vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in testimony to Congress last fall. “The RAND Corporation has conducted several studies of this subject; its conclusions go further than my summary above, saying that not only could they not find any evidence of shortages, but that instead the evidence is more suggestive of surpluses.” ...

For the past few weeks, I’ve been completely obsessed with jQuery, one of the many fine JavaScript UI libraries that are competing for your attention these days. I can’t really tell you whether jQuery is better than any of the other libraries, but I can say that it’s infinitely better than writing your own JavaScript by hand, and that it’s very approachable. You can start doing really powerful things with jQuery with a very small time investment, especially if you already know a little JavaScript and you understand CSS selectors. ...

Here’s an astounding statistic: 10% of homeowners have no equity at all in their homes. Click on the link to read about some of the implications of that number. In related news, aggregate home debt exceeds home equity for the first time since 1945.

Tyler Cowen posts about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the same themes that I was trying to hit last night. His post has the advantage of being both shorter and more erudite. He argues that the differences between the two are aesthetic, which I think is exactly right: The two candidates represent two diametrically opposed portraits of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Should we expect beauty, grace and universality, or should we derive our feel-good sentiments about politics from righteousness, confrontation, and sheer dogged persistence and feelings of ultimate desert? ...

When Apple announced the iPhone, there were no provisions whatsoever for third party applications. If you wanted to use the iPhone, you used Apple’s applications. People (myself included) went nuts over it, and Apple responded by telling developers to write Web apps. Many people strongly suspected that Apple had plans for more than that from the beginning, but nobody really knew what those plans were or when they would be announced. Last October, Apple promised to announce support iPhone-native applications in February, and yesterday we saw what the landscape for those applications would look like. ...

Preface this by noting that I’m no political analyst and some would say that my abilities as an analyst of human nature are lacking as well. In spite of those insufficiencies, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s kept Barack Obama from breaking through with a wider swathe of Democratic voters. Needless to say, given a formidable, well-funded opponent who started with the support of the party establishment and massive name recognition, he has done remarkably well. In spite of a suboptimal result on Tuesday, he’s still got the inside track on the nomination, and he has raised a ridiculous amount of money so far. The people who support Obama really, really support Obama. He does well among independents, but never seems to be able to get more than half of the self-identified Democrats to support him, and I have a theory of why that’s the case. ...

Matt Raible (now a full time employee of LinkedIn) posts about how he came to work there as a result of a consulting project where he helped them evaluate open source web frameworks against a framework that they had built in-house. In the end, he recommended enhancing their internal framework to include some of the best attributes of the open source frameworks, and he was hired to build a team to do just that. Anyway, the post contains a lot of wisdom about making these kinds of technology decisions. ...