Author: Tim's Bookmarks

Nice roundup of foolish Apple, Mac, iPad and iPhone punditry.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics, or how claims that stimulus spending is biased toward Democratic congressional districts can be debunked by simply examining the relationship between the districts and what else is there (clue: state capitals!).

An excerpt from Clay Shirky’s “The Collapse of Complex Business Models.” When you hear someone sputtering to defend their old business model, think about whether it means anything more than a failure of their imagination.

Nice link to one of my favorite improbable typographic success stories. And the part quoted is even from before Jan Tschischold revolutionized the design of the line.

The old University of Virginia Magazine, later the Virginia Spectator, is on Google Books now with some issues dating back to the mid 19th century.

Interesting discussion about the role of product management at Gmail. Look at the comments thread for how this approach is received by customers.

I swore I was done buying clever tshirts, but I may have to buy this tshirt.

’cause you have to figure that those red light cameras are doing OCR on the images before they insert them into a database… and that the developer never anticipated that the result might be an injection vector.

Nice illustrated guideline to mixing fonts.

Roundup of reactions to the passage of the healthcare reform legislation.

Interesting and useful roundup of Flash management tools.

Helpful graphic and text laying out the impacts of the health care legislation on the insured and the uninsured.

…Edward Tufte kills a kitten.

Today’s daily WTF: a draft spec web API for zero-polling two-way communication in HTML and JavaScript. Because nothing says “cool” like having some server be able to ram data down to your browser unrequested. … Actually, scratch that. Nothing says “insecure” like having some server be able to ram data down to your browser unrequested.

Executable file format hacking for fun and … profit? Seriously, if you’ve ever wondered how it’s possible to get self replicating code to be small enough to fit inside a single UDP packet (SQL Slammer, e.g.), now you know what some of the tricks are.

Best Alex Chilton anecdote of all time.

Memories of Alex Chilton.

Great post and series of photos of the Massachusetts March flood.

Another good voice is gone. I had hoped that there would be a day before he died that Big Star would be playing on everyone’s iPod. I guess that day is going to be tomorrow.

A brilliant media put-on from Devo that reads like a lot of posts I’ve read on Pho recently.

I find it interesting that very few of the anti-health-care folks I hear from online address the effects of the exchanges, or the tax cuts.

Thought provoking survey of Eastwood’s career on the cusp of 80.

Thought provoking survey of Eastwood’s career on the cusp of 80.

It's been a wet day in the Boston area.

Cool visualizations of years of listening habits. Of course, it might take a year or more to pull the data stream down; I’ve been a Last.fm user since 2005.

Guess I’ll be paying money for another reissue. Lost “Exile”-era tracks are like lost “Pet Sounds”-era tracks.

Today’s clever marketing award goes to firewall management vendor Matasano, who provide a hysterically funny “FCR-1” form on the back of their marketing literature.

Strong interview with Joanna Newsom.

Backdoored battery chargers: They just keep going and going…

Indeed. “Goodnight Force.”

I, too, have been long interested in automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters. But the Turbo-Encabulator’s use of the drawn reciprocating dingle arm to reduce sinusoidal depleneration is nothing short of brilliant.

Address space randomization and data execution protection are no longer sufficient to keep buffer overflows from being exploited.

Bad, bad news. Here’s hoping we get Guru back soon.

The article gives props to PG for laying back and singing quietly and somberly. Me? On first listen to “The Boy in the Bubble,” it sounds like he’s been shuffling about in a bathrobe with a lump in his throat, and occasionally weeping, since the release of “Up.” Maybe since “Us.”

This is the most awesome thing I have ever seen. I think Boston–or maybe Somerville–needs a league.

Massive, obsessive graphic summarizing factoids and figures about everyone’s favorite Mountain View-based information overlords.

2009 market share numbers show iPhone at 14% of all mobile phones (not just smartphones), behind RIM but ahead of Windows Mobile.