Posts

Could anyone who’s seen Sploid doubt that Ken Layne (of tabloid.net fame) is involved? The font choices alone are a dead giveaway.

My midyear resolution is to at least skim the local paper every day. I found a Web page that lists all of the stories in the paper and what pages they appear on. (Unfortunately, it changes every day, here’s the one for today.) Last Friday I was in a waiting room, leafing through a physical copy of the paper and noticed that there was a big front page article about something going on in my neighborhood. I’ve decided that I should be engaged in local affairs, and that reading the paper is a good way to start. So far so good this week. ...

I just bookmarked a link to Firefox on Steroids, which offers a few settings you can tweak to speed up your Web browsing. After making the changes, I had to post a link here because the performance improvements the changes yielded blew me away. If you use Firefox, go forth and make these changes right now. Update: the link above no longer works for some reason. Here’s what it said, more or less. ...

Looks like some of those dire predictions made by Jim Kunstler are looking accurate.

Princeton grad student Alex Halderman attended the oral arguments for the Grokster case at the Supreme Court and summarizes.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life project, if I download my first Podcast today, I’ll be no less than the 6 millionth person to do so. Does that sound right to you? Via Dan Gillmor.

Dave Winer celebrates 8 years of blogging at Scripting News today, and writes: On this day in 1997 I did my first weblog post at www.scripting.com. 8 years is a long run for a weblog. Scripting News was the inspiration for many of the mainstays of the blogging world, and they in turn inspired others, and on and on. This has been the template for growth, and it's a good one. Every new blog begets more new blogs. That mine was the root for so many is the accomplishment I'm most proud of. There’s no question that Scripting News was the inspiration for this site, and I think Dave should be proud of the good thing he did when he started posting his thoughts in reverse chronilogical order on the front page of his site. ...

Last year Google sort of announced Gmail on April Fool’s Day, and nobody was sure whether or not it was a joke of some kind. (Turns out it wasn’t, obviously.) This year, they’ve put up a real joke, and they’ve announced that they are doubling everyone’s storage to 2GB. My account actually says I have 1386 GB available right now – 10 times the storage that I’m actually using. Update: they’ve also created a clever April Fool’s search. (Check out the results for this site.) ...

Is it just me, or is JavaScript now a core language most developers who do anything Web related should know? I know enough JavaScript to hack around, but I feel like I really should be improving my skills in that area. Between AJAX, Greasemonkey, and just an increasing use of DHTML everywhere, it seems like just not bothering with JavaScript is no longer an option. What a shame.

The United States is about to advanced fighter planes capable of carrying a nuclear payload to Pakistan. It’s OK, though, because the plan is to sell something even better to India. Sleep well.