Author: Tim's Bookmarks

Operations research is everywhere, or how the decoupling of order processing from order fulfillment allows Starbucks to maximize coffee throughput.

Dave Winer reads the tea leaves in the Magic Trackpad announcement and sees Apple porting iOS to Mac devices. “They’re going to close your Mac!” Me, I see people who like the trackpad experience better than the mouse experience finally getting a good alternative for the desktop. I’m one of those people but have used a MacBook Pro for about 5 years.

The article, about a recording session with Marsalis’s band and a visiting classical pianist, is less about Marsalis’s tribute than about the mechanics of recording a band live in the studio. Nice vignette.

Brilliant analysis of what makes font revivals work, and some things that don’t, in the context of Caslon, the most revived typeface(s) of all.

Informative takedown of the world’s most notable dysfunctional marriage, Apple and AT&T.

The original MacPaint source code is available for download. Five files, 67.8K of code. Nice.

Nice bit on the unplanned network effect: why bother interviewing in a Murdoch paper since the piece will have no life online?

Just because your application is “behind the firewall” doesn’t mean it’s secure.

This is where the decline of “objectivity” in the media becomes a problem. No one is ready to stand up and call this guy the character assassin that he really is.

There has to be cold comfort in looking at this graph and saying you were right.

I guess that means I’m half proud of the denomination in which I grew up.

Interviews with a selection of user experience specialists highlight some of the changes in the market for user centered design.

That’s me, yo.

XSS on a brochureware site should be a wakeup. If your site just uses JavaScript, you’re vulnerable, and it doesn’t matter if you didn’t write it yourself.

Glee Club alum David Temple was the first man to desegregate the fraternity system at UVa.

Glyphs to name folders is a brilliant idea anywhere, but especially on space challenged iOS devices.

I do! I do! My favorite flavors at Toscanini’s, the only ice cream store that has ever truly understood me, have been the odd ones–basil, green tea, Guinness (now almost a cliche, in 2000 a revelation). Prosciutto ice cream? Government Cheese ice cream? Bring it…

The Windows tax strikes again. Microsoft is in a hell of a place right now. If Windows isn’t central to everything that they do, they kill their core strategy; but if it is, they risk killing all innovation at the company. I think that more people there should be reading “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”

Andrew Pincus is doing some first rate blogging of the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings.

Just Another Bass gives some insight into the pleasures of working with John Oliver and the TFC.

Nifty tip for easily filling up your iBooks bookshelf while you surf.

MSNBC’s new redesign moves away from pageview inflating tricks. I say it’s about time.

Joe Gross takes a contrarian stand and recontextualizes the vuvuzela in the company of ambient art.

Shocked, shocked, I am.

Amazing transforming page that goes from one column to 4 based on browser width. Very nice.

ASCAP vs. copyright holders… no one wins.

Smart JavaScript library for detecting and taking advantage of new CSS3 capabilities.

Brilliant. I have 140 years of Virginia Glee Club concert programs to run through this.

Kind of cool.

Nice writeup of Google’s recently released Google CLI.

Odds that we’ll see a 2010 Joint Strategic Plan on Reinforcing the Intellectual Commons: million to one.

Good discussion of how launches go wrong. I think the point about sales enablement is particularly critical.

Interesting discussion of the differences between product management and product marketing. While it’s true to say that both roles need to listen to the market, at the end of the day I think the difference is what each role produces. A product marketing manager and a product manager can both produce requirements, but at the end of the day a PMM produces positioning, pricing, and sales channel enablement, and a product manager produces the product itself.

Ars Technica’s usual in-depth review covers iOS 4, the new i(Phone/Pad/Touch) OS.

Interesting interview with Laurie Anderson at the cusp of something new.

Trenchant observations on the philosophy of bundling, or unbundling, features in releases. It’s a subtlety that most people don’t think about but that goes to the heart of product management: how do you get the brilliant things that your team has done to market?

Funny discussion of marginalia in books in the New York Public Library, including Nabokov’s grading a collection of New Yorker short stories.