I wish the media would take Rogers Cadenhead’s advice when it comes to dealing with Reverend Fred Phelps and simply ignore him. If you’re not familiar with him, he’s the pastor whose tiny congregation pickets military funerals and other events with placards bearing hateful messages. His church has announced it’s going to picket the funerals of victims of the shooting in Tucson, and he recently made the news by showing up at the Elizabeth Edwards’ funeral. ...
I’ve set upon the idea of picking up a new skill this year. Over the past couple of years I’ve let my Ruby on Rails skills atrophy as I haven’t been working on any Rails applications professionally, and the Rails world changes too quickly to keep up with if you aren’t immersed in it every day. Instead I’ve been using a lot of Java, PHP, HTML, CSS, and SQL, with a dash of client-side JavaScript when needed. In 2011, it’s time to pick up something new or take a new look at something old. Here are the options I considered. ...
Marco Arment lists the ways people use search engines and talks about how spam has taken over each of them. I think his categories of search types are pretty accurate and agree completely that spammers are systematically taking over each of them. I find that going to Amazon or other trusted retailers and looking for reviews is much more useful than looking for product information on Google these days. I also find that I use site: searches more than I ever have before. Trusting Google to return results for the whole Web just isn’t very effective any more. ...
A year ago I wrote a long post about the Line Diet that turned out to be one of the most popular of the year. Not only did a lot of people respond to it, but several people gave it a try, and found that it worked for them. I actually heard from four different people who all lost over 30 pounds in 2010 after they read the post, so that’s kind of cool. I’ve been Line Dieting for about 16 months, and I’ve lost 55 pounds or so. ...
Here’s a must read, or at least must forward, article on climate change from the New York Times: A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning. Basically it’s a long review of what we know about climate change, how long we’ve known it, and what we can do about it at this point. It also covers the way that climate change deniers work to undermine things that are generally accepted basic scientific facts. The thing that really stood out to me is that the basic mechanism of climate change and the expected results have been well known since the 1960s. Deniers like to say that in the 70’s alarmists worried about global cooling, but the truth is that climate scientists have understood climate change perfectly well. ...
RSS and content syndication have never seen the kind of uptake that I would have predicted once upon a time, but syndication is essential to the people who do use it. So it alarms me when I read that syndication may be on the way out. I hadn’t realized that Google Chrome doesn’t support RSS in any official way, and that Firefox 4 is de-emphasizing RSS as well. Here’s the crux of the argument: ...
National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry posts a tribute to Kodachrome: Today is the day that Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas, the last lab on the planet to process Kodachrome, stops developing the iconic film forever. When Kodak stopped producing the film last year, they gave me the last roll. When I finished shooting the final frames, I hand-delivered it to Parsons. Here are a few of those last 36 frames. I don’t think it’s fair for a photographer to create that many great shots on a single roll of film. ...
John Borland at the Wired Threat reports on a talk by Bruce Dang, the engineer at Microsoft whose job it was to break down the Stuxnet worm. It’s an interesting look at exactly which vulnerabilities Stuxnet exploits, and how Microsoft’s security team broke down the problem. A video of the talk will eventually be posted at the Chaos Computer Congress Web site. I’m going to try to remember to go back and watch it. ...
Here are the recipes of the year for 2010 – the best things we cooked this year and that we’ll certainly be cooking again next year. The first is this carnitas recipe, courtesy of Rick Bayless. I love carnitas at Mexican restaurants, and had always thought of them as deep fried chunks of pork. This simple recipe takes the fryer completely out of the equation. You need pork, salt, water, and an oven, and the results are sublime. Use the cooking times as a rough guide rather than an absolute rule. It is important to cook both covered and uncovered because it uncovered the whole time would dry out the pork. Once you’re out of the covered phase, the trick is just to be sure to cook it until all the water evaporates. He recommends using pork shoulder roast, but we found that it works just as well with country style spare ribs, which you can get at any grocery store here and don’t require as much carving. Needless to say, the results are great on a fresh corn tortilla, but they’re also great alone, or on white bread. ...
I’m debuting the “good read” tag today, for long articles of general interest that I think you’d enjoy. There are a couple of sites who are great for this sort of thing – Long Reads and The Browser. The best long articles that are published every day seem to pop up everywhere, including both of those blogs and on Twitter, so I usually don’t bother to link to them, but I’m going to start, simply as an endorsement, if nothing else. ...