Posts

In the software world, when we improve the way something works on the inside without changing the way it looks from the outside, we call it refactoring. Markup can also be refactored to turn it from a morass of nested tables, FONT tags, and hackish markup into a clean, CSS-based design that works in any current browser, performs better, and downloads more quickly. The nice thing about all Web sites being open source from a markup perspective is that anybody can come along and refactor someone else’s Web site. For example, not long after the new, worse allmusic.com debuted, Monkey Do whipped up a new version in just a few days that fixed most of the problems people had with it. I think I’d probably refer to this phenomenon as the ultimate constructive criticism, I’ve seen Amazon.com and Yahoo given the treatment, among many other sites. Anyway, Jeffrey Zeldman has an interesting piece about what he refers to as good samaritan redesigns, and why businesses tend to react negatively to them. ...

Wired News reports that Slate, which has been published by Microsoft from day one, is up for sale. Slate has a great stable of writers and I hope that they don’t go down the tubes if they’re bought. Jacob Weisberg, Fred Kaplan, Eric Umansky, Dahlia Lithwick, William Saletan, Timothy Noah, Robert Wright, Chris Suellentrop, Daniel Gross and many others that I’m forgetting make Slate the best online political magazine going right now. Without the Today’s Papers feature, I’m not sure I could go on. ...

One thing that really stood out in my mind when I read Anne Jacobsen’s original story about the Syrian Terrorist Orchestra was her claim that a flight attendant told her that there were several air marshalls on the plane. If she were a normal human being and not a hysterical person siezed with irrational fear, that would have immediately set her mind at ease. If there were several air marshalls on the plane, it meant that the security folks knew there was something fishy on the flight and made sure that they had officers on the plane to keep things under control. The government can’t afford to put multiple officers on every flight, or even a single officer on most flights. If there were several such officers on the plane, it indicates that the government was suspicious of something and took extra precautions. So what’s the problem? It sounds like our security apparatus worked pretty darned well, at least in this case. Anyway, this post from Kevin Drum should be the last word, as it says that there were air marshals on the flight and that they even checked the lavatory for signs of bomb assembly during the flight. I await an interview with the musician. ...

So, there’s a Presidential campaign going on these days, right? I haven’t been talking much about the elections, or the candidates, or Bush administration malfeasance lately mainly due to fatigue. Everybody already knows how I feel about George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, and everything else, and I just don’t feel much like talking about it any more, at least not no here, anyway. (I still talk about politics constantly with my wife and family.) I’ve also been very much into technical stuff lately, learning new things, working on my blogging software (if I feel ambitious I’ll set up a Wiki for it this weekend), and generally focusing on stuff that’s more under my control than who wins the Presidential election. Update: As usual, The Onion knows exactly what’s going on. ...

One nice thing about big wigs at companies publishing their own weblogs is that you get to see them throw down on their competitors in their own words. Jonathan Schwartz collides head on with Red Hat today, and sideswipes IBM along the way. Fun!

Patrick Smith at Salon published a vicious debunking of the Anne Jacobsen “terror in the skies” story today that’s suitable for emailing to the credulous.

Jeff McManus has a long post about how eBay’s developer relations department is reaching out to the open source community.

So yesterday I blasted the first person account of a woman who encountered suspicious Arab men on a flight from Women’s Wall Street magazine with both barrels. Today I read this, from Bruce Schneier: Read it through; it's worth the time. To me, this is exactly the sort of suspicious behavior that should be questioned. It’s not blindly correlating databases and profiling; it’s suspicious behavior on an airplane by a group of people. How do we build a security system where investigating this sort of thing is okay, while also protecting civil liberties? ...

With the exception of getting rid of popups, I generally prefer not to block advertising on Web sites. If a site is funded via advertising, then I think the ethical thing to do is download the ads if I’m getting value from the content. (Except for popups because, you know, they really suck.) Well, I have an ongoing problem with BlogAds that I’ve mentioned before. When I open a page that publishes BlogAds in Firefox, I’m often forwarded to a page that contains only the contents of the BlogAds frame from the page I actually wanted to see. Usually I can see the content I actually wanted after I hit the back button, but sometimes that won’t work and I just get repeatedly forwarded to the page containing only ads. I’m tired of putting up with that, so I installed the AdBlock extension for Firefox and blocked all content from BlogAds. It’s unfortunate that it came to this, because I would generally prefer to support the types of sites that rely on BlogAds for some of their revenue. Update: I’m finding out that BlogAds is providing advertising for a lot more sites than I originally had thought, judging by the lack of ads I’m seeing on sites I frequent. ...

Adrian Holovaty has written a Mozilla extension that fixes some of the problems with allmusic.com. Jeff Veen also mentions that mp3.com is an AllMusic licensee and provides access to their content. (I can’t get to mp3.com from work because it’s blocked by our filter.)