Posts

Howard J Bashman blogs an appellate court ruling stating that clicking through on a link does not necessarily constitute accepting terms of a contract, particularly in the case where the link is above the terms of the agreement in question. The specific case involves a class action suit against Netscape SmartDownload where Netscape asserted that users agreed to resolve disputes by arbitration when they clicked through to get the product. Not so, said the court. I’ll be looking for news articles on this topic. ...

Sometimes, the truth is never exposed more clearly than through satire.

James Duncan Davidson: Presenting Mac OS X. It really does seem to be the case that more and more alpha geeks are making Mac OS X their desktop OS of choice. I’m still stuck in Windows-land at home, and at work I use Windows with my right hand and Linux with my left hand, but I find myself yearning more and more for a Mac every day. The thing is, I don’t know if I can ever justify buying one for myself (if my employer wants to buy me a Mac, I’m right there), because Apple hardware is just a crapload more expensive than standard PC hardware. At some point, I may have to cough up the extra bucks though, just for the coolness factor. ...

What a coincidence. Just as I write about URL aesthetics, I get a pointer to JJG’s article on URL usability. The two are closely related. As a Web hacker, I get more of a thrill out of unusual URL that seem to hint at cleverness on the part of the site’s designer. As a Web user, I just like URLs that make sense when you look at them. (Another thing I like is CGI scripts with clever names – that’s why I named my permalink URL less.cgi. I graciously admit that I stole that idea from O’Reilly, who named the program that renders their printer friendly pages lpr. ...

URL aesthetics are a source of constant fascination to me. I absolutely love trying to figure out how the code works behind sites that use interesting URLs. Generally, everything before the file and query string aren’t very exciting – they’re just domain names and protocols. The action occurs in the filename. Some of the things I’m particularly fond of are URLs that include a query string immediately after a slash, without a filename. For example, a URL like /stuff/?do_something is always interesting. Only slightly less interesting are pages that include query strings after what look like static files, like index.html?id=100. Obviously we’re not really dealing with a static file, so what’s out there processing that request? Only the author knows … I also admire URLs that use extra path information, like /index.cgi/path/to/file instead of a query string to pass information in to the request. Generally I hate URLs that have many, many parameters. Only rarely is it necessary to do things that way, and if it is, why aren’t you using the post method instead of get? I think the bottom line is that I like sites that were obviously constructed by people who care about how URLs look. The path of least resistance is boring. ...

Today, I’m investigating Pingback and Trackback, because people seem to be talking about them. I read a number of weblogs with Trackback enabled, and honestly I have never used it. Should I be using it? If you think the answer is yes, please let me know.

Jay Bookman’s analysis of the foreign policy goals of the Bush administration is a must read (I found the link at Camworld). Basically, Bookman’s argument is that the current Bush foreign policy is the outgrowth of a philosophy adopted by the decision makers in the Bush administration (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, for starters) that envisions America as the world’s preeminent power, imposing its will on all others. Bookman does a good job of deducing what connects the dots that we’ve seen since 9/11. Why Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the axis of evil? As it turns out, they were on the list before George W Bush even became President. As made clear in the National Security Strategy document published on September 20, the administration sees America’s role as a power that overshadows all others and imposes its will on everyone else in the world. And, more importantly, that maintains a massive military presence that no other nation can compete with. The most disturbing part states blatantly not only will we address threats, but that we will preemptively attack countries that we fear might be threats. ...

Did you know that I’m supposed to be pinging blo.gs to let it know when my site is updated? I didn’t. Anyway, it should be notified when I add a new item now.

My favorite new feature in Windows XP over Windows 2000 is the grouping of buttons on your task bar by application, and the way that it stacks up like buttons and turns them into the menu when your task bar fills up instead of just making a long row of ever-smaller buttons. Frankly, I was shocked that Microsoft would come up with an idea so useful and so simple. The other day, I read somewhere that the BeOS grouped buttons in its task bar (which had a different name, of course, perhaps the Fetcher) in exactly this way. Knowing that Microsoft hadn’t come up with this feature quickly restored the world to its proper state, and I feel much better. ...

John Gruber is going through the RSS conversion. First, you start using a news aggregator that you like, then you feel dumb for not providing an RSS feed for your Web site, and then you kind of stop reading all those sites that don’t have RSS feeds. There are some sites that don’t support RSS that I still follow, but the truth is that I read them sporadically at best, regardless of how good they are. That’s still a better situation than when I didn’t use a news aggregator at all and I simply stopped reading all personal sites for weeks at a time because I didn’t make time to stroll through my bookmark list to see who was writing what. ...