Posts

As I was watching last night’s No Reservations episode on the last days of El Bulli, the world’s greatest restaurant, I wondered a bit about the future of Ferran Adria and the foundation that he is working on to continue the groundbreaking work he did at the restaurant. For those who are a bit in the dark, El Bulli was a restaurant in rural Spain where chef Ferran Adria created and popularized many of the molecular gastronomy techniques that make up the foundation of modern cooking. ...

I just wanted to point you to a post I really enjoyed, under the innocuous name Safari Keychain Woes. In it, developer Daniel Jalkut explains how he used OS X development tools to figure out why Safari 5.1 wasn’t filling in passwords properly from his Keychain. Interesting from beginning to end and a great illustration of what you can do when you understand how things really work.

Here’s a paragraph written by Patrick Pexton, the ombudsman for the Washington Post: Liberals and conservatives don’t talk to each other much anymore; they exist in parallel online universes, only crossing over to grab some explosive anti-matter from the other side to stoke the rage in their own blogosphere. I am repeating it only because I am sick of seeing this assertion made repeatedly without challenge. The idea that conservatives and liberals don’t talk to one another any more is false. I am obviously liberal, but my blog has conservative readers and commenters. I see liberal bloggers debating conservative bloggers all the time. And I have plenty of conservative friends who I correspond with on Twitter, via email, and in real life who I argue about politics with. ...

After the horrific shootings in Norway, James Fallows demanded an apology from the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, who in the immediate aftermath of the attacks blamed al Qaeda and went on to argue that the attacks were proof that people who are argue that the war in Afghanistan should end or that we should cut defense spending are wrong based on the attacks. As we now know, the attacks were perpetrated by a lone madman who justified them based on his Christian nationalist ideology. ...

Kellan Elliott-McCrea has a great post about the high cost of false positives when it comes to building software that detects fraud, spam, abuse, or whatever. The cost of false positives is explained by the base rate fallacy. The BBC explains the base rate fallacy very well. Here’s a snippet: If 3,000 people are tested, and the test is 90% accurate, it is also 10% wrong. So it will probably identify 301 terrorists - about 300 by mistake and 1 correctly. You won’t know from the test which is the real terrorist. So the chance that our man in the mac is the real thing is 1 in 301. ...

I haven’t upgraded to OS X Lion yet, but when I do, I’m curious to try out the new version of the Mail application. I have been a dedicated user of Gmail for years, but I’m wondering if I might find using a desktop application more productive. A couple of months ago, I switched from Google Reader to the latest version of NetNewsWire Lite. For years I was having trouble keeping up with my feeds, but since switching to the desktop application, I’ve had no problem staying on top of them, even though I have just as many subscriptions. I’m still not sure why. The desktop interface is snappier, but the keyboard shortcuts in NetNewsWire aren’t any easier to deal with than the ones provided by Google Reader. ...

Anil Dash has written up what he’s learned about virtual communities in the past 12 years in a post titled, If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault. The larger point is that there’s no reason to accept as a given that people act like jerks on the Internet. People act like jerks in online spaces where they’re given free rein to act like jerks. He has a lot of good advice on policing communities for companies running large sites. I want to weigh in with just one piece of advice for people running smaller sites. If you are an individual blogger and you want to raise the quality of the comments on your site, the most important thing you can do is be present in the comments. And I don’t just mean reading them, you need to post as well. ...

It’s always interesting to observe when a piece of technology suddenly becomes obsolete. As of this morning, we can add the laptop dock to that list. One of the pains of laptop ownership is dealing with cables. When I sit down in the morning, I connect my laptop to the power outlet, an external monitor, and my keyboard. Many laptop makers address this problem with a peripheral like the one above. All of your cables plug into a dock. To use them, you just slide your laptop onto the dock. Some have custom proprietary dock connectors, in other cases, the dock actually connects to all of the individual ports on the laptop. ...

Here’s the clearest explanation I’ve seen of why Netflix is splitting up the DVD and online parts of your subscription, courtesy of Felix Salmon: Up until now, it seems, Netflix has paid the studios a flat monthly fee, linked to the number of subscribers it has with access to their content. And when that got too expensive, it wound up cutting off streaming from its DVD subscribers to save on its own library-subscription costs. ...

Zimran Ahmed points out the most important feature of the growing tech bubble: The defining characteristics of bubbles is that some chump is left holding the bag at the end. In this bubble, the chumps are VCs unless they can trigger a big stock market boom.