It’s been about a week since irritation with various JavaScript-based advertising systems drove me to install the NoScript addon for Firefox. The nice thing about it is that you can whitelist any Web site temporarily or permanently, so it’s really easy to decide which sites to allow to use JavaScript. It has rapidly made me much more conscious of some bad Web development practices, and of just how much third party JavaScript you find on Web pages. ...
Love Bourdain. Watch more Food Network than I’d care to admit (seems he suffers from the same condition). Agree with 95% of what he writes in this review.
Here’s how he rationalizes the claim that DRM is necessary and the fact that a huge majority of music is sold without it: The notion that music does not deserve the same protections as software, television, films, video games, or other intellectual property, simply because there is an unprotected legacy product available in the physical world is completely without logic or merit.
Your exercise may be more effective if you believe it is effective. The mind is a powerful and mysterious thing.
I was all excited to try out Yahoo Pipes, which Tim O’Reilly calls “a milestone in the history of the internet” (not bad for zero day software), but of course it was down. Judging from the screenshots I’ve seen, the concept is similar to smart playlists for iTunes. It allows you to filter the content from individual feeds based on a set of feed properties, and then combine those feeds in interesting ways. For example, now you can screen out posts from all of the authors you dislike on group blogs. ...
What does cost in terms of resources to bottle one liter of Fiji water and get it to consumers in the United States? Pablo Päster digs in and finds the answer to be 6.74 kilograms of water and 0.25 kilograms of greenhouse gases. Enjoy!
If Steve Jobs is really serious about wanting to get rid of DRM and not just hoping to sway European regulators to blame someone other than Apple for the vertical integration of music downloads, he should take Larry Lessig’s suggestion: But then here’s a simple next step: There are artists on iTunes whose creative work is Creative Commons licensed. Colin Mutchler is one. When his stuff first went into iTunes, he requested the DRM be turned off. The request was refused. But if no-DRM is Apple’s preferred policy, then let them begin here. ...
IntelliJ (makers of the Java IDE everyone loves) have released a Ruby on Rails plugin for IDEA. TextMate is a great editor, but there is lots of room for growth in the Ruby on Rails tools market. I’d love to be able to run my Rails applications in a visual debugger, and better profiling tools would be nice as well. I’d also also love to edit my Ruby on Rails code in an editor with real refactoring support as well. ...
Rogers Cadenhead prevailed in his domain name dispute with entertainment giant MGM. MGM attempted to wrest control of wargames.com from him, but the arbitration panel ruled in his favor.
Apple has posted an open letter from Steve Jobs explaining why the iTunes Music Store DRM works the way it does, and encouraging people to complain about the music industry requirement for DRM rather than Apple’s implementation of it. The whole thing is interesting, but here are a few snippets. On lock-in: Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music. ...