Posts

Ricardo “Mr.doob” Cabello headed up the programming behind the amazing Arcade Fire interactive video The Wilderness Downtown, which was built using HTML5 and JavaScript. He’s documented how the video was made on his blog, and it’s worth reading for JavaScript hackers. A few years ago, I worked on a project that replaced a Flash-based promotional application for a health insurance company with a version built using JavaScript and HTML. The end result wound up being pretty decent, but my main impression at the end was that it was a ton of work for results that fell short of the original Flash application in terms of dynamic impact. I attribute their more impressive results to the fact that they didn’t have to deal with Internet Explorer 6. Hat tip, Webmonkey. ...

Anil Dash writes about the culture of forking in the open source world, and how the introduction of Git changed that culture. Before Git, forking could just as well have been called secession. After Git, forking is seen as a healthy form of participation. What I find interesting about this is that Linus Torvalds didn’t set out to change the culture of open source software when he created Git. He was trying to efficiently manage the work being done on the Linux kernel. ...

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells assess the various explanations for what caused the financial crisis and come to their own conclusions in a piece for the New York Review of Books. They also take a stab at explaining why the recovery has been so lackluster. It won’t surprise you to learn that they see the poor recovery as being caused by a lack of demand driven by people paying off debt at every level of the economy, and that continued deficit spending by the government is the only thing that will see us through. Despite other explanations, it seems pretty obvious at this point that lack of demand is what’s slowing recovery, and that the real debate is over whether it’s preferable for governments to spend more money and risk inflation down the road, or to let more people suffer because they don’t have jobs right now. ...

Ezra Klein on the future of food production: But for now, I think of the preference for farmers markets and small producers as being mainly important in sending certain signals about production methods and branding preferences to Big Ag than in actually creating some sort of viable alternative. That’s importance in a society-changing sense, of course. Choosing your food based on how it is produced can be very important to individuals for perfectly sensible reasons. ...

I have a number of scripts I’ve written that send updates to Twitter automatically. They are Perl scripts that run database queries and then post to Twitter using curl. Unfortunately, since Twitter turned off basic authentication they’re all dead. Twitter ended support for basic authentication in order to prevent third party applications from asking Twitter users for their passwords. Phishing for Twitter passwords is rampant, and it’s harder to combat phishing when legitimate sites are asking Twitter users for their usernames and passwords. ...

This respect that people are giving to me? This was one moment. In my battalion, I am mediocre at best. This shows how great the rest of them are. Medal of Honor winner US Army Staff Sergeant Salvatore A. Giunta.

The big news today is that Apple has relaxed some of the incredibly onerous restrictions they imposed on iOS applications back in April. Specifically, Apple has killed section 3.3.1, which prohibited applications built using any kind of translation or compatibility layer. They’ve also published the guidelines used in the review process, adding a layer of transparency that has been lacking thus far. I still think the review process should still be much more transparent than it is, but these are important steps forward. We can all thank Android for putting competitive pressure on Apple and outspoken developers for shaming the company for these changes. ...

I am an unabashed fan of Wikipedia, but it still shouldn’t be relied upon for anything more than hobbyist-level interest in a subject. If you’re curious about the historical context for the TV series The Pillars of the Earth, Wikipedia is an outstanding resource. On the other hand, if you’re writing a news story about outbreaks of infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria in hospitals, you shouldn’t rely on what you read in Wikipedia. Science journalist Steve Silberman writes about how spurious information sourced from Wikipedia is pervasive in stories about acinetobacter, and why that bad information could cost people their lives. ...

Modeled Behavior explains our fundamental economic dysfunction, with charts: This is a failure of our basic institutions of production. The job of the market is to bring together willing buyers with willing sellers in order to produce value. This is not happening and as a result literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced. Let me say that again because I think it fails to sink in – literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced. Not misallocated. Not spent on programs you don’t approve of or distributed in tax cuts you don’t like. Trillions of dollars in value are not produced at all. Gone from the world entirely. Never to be had, by anyone, anywhere, at any time. Pure unadulterated loss. ...

Tyler Cowen takes a stab at answering a reader question about why corporate communications is laden with so much BS: People disagree in corporations, often virulently, or they would disagree if enough real debates were allowed to reach the surface. The use of broad generalities, in rhetoric, masks such potential disagreements and helps maintain corporate order and authority. Since it is hard to oppose fluffy generalities in any very specific way, a common strategy is to stack everyone’s opinion or points into an incoherent whole. Disagreement is then less likely to become a focal point within the corporation and warring coalitions are less likely to form. ...