Author: Tim's Bookmarks

Why hatred is a bad business driver — if all you know is you’re against Company X, it’s very hard to be for something. Plus, it leads to weaker understanding of what the customers really want.

Strong checklist to evaluate products, business models, and startups.

I’ll have to download this before we go to the reunion at UVA.

Frankly, at this point, any sign that Apple takes security seriously is welcome.

I wonder how that works for FiOS customers in those states. I’m guessing “landline” here means traditional copper, though they don’t specify.

Nice. A ton of books from the Cornell Library are now on the Internet Archive.

The “river of news” (to cite Dave Winer’s long standing description) is a little too markup heavy to be the Times’s front page–and the picture wall to the right is distracting when you mouse over it. But it’s a big step up from the table-heavy, newspaper manque layout that it’s an alternative to, and it has one big benefit–fresh news is on the top. I’d like to see other news outlets play with this format.

There’s nothing more humbling than watching actual end users struggle with your software.

Making a stronger connection between Krazy Kat (“There is a heppy land fur, fur, awaaa”) and the history of African American freedom. I had no idea that the Happy Land was real.

The connection between self-control and academic performance: “The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.”

New Salman Rushdie short story.

Incidentally, password protected ZIP and RAR archives aren’t secure.

“Blaming blogs for not being real newspapers is too silly. Newspapers in the main are no longer real newspapers either.”

Rands continues to plumb the depths of organizational psychology. Good stuff.

It’s rare that NYT has a public web fail–generally they seem to understand how to work on the web. But nuking old URLs without implementing redirects is the worst kind of fail, because it kills conversation and reputation as well as content. I also wonder how many {{deadlink}}s there are on Wikipedia in references now because of this.

I like the “marketing” (editorial) short URLs, but I like the amzn.com/ASIN (Amazon stock ID number) even better. Every product on Amazon has an ASIN, so it’s easy to go directly to the product you want to point to.

Yet another reminder: applications are the perimeter.

I know what I’m doing tonight…

This is the iron trap that newspapers are in, and it reveals that they still don’t understand tech strategy after 20 years of trying to make it in a digital world.

Explanation of the process of the stress tests.

Talk about a refreshing statement: “One thing you’ll find less of: celebrity news. Our research told us you didn’t want it, which is a relief since we were doing it only because we thought we had to.”

There’s probably a version of these markings for Mahler’s #2, because many of them look appropriate, e.g. “Langsam – Slowly; Schleppend – Slowly; Dampfer auf – Slowly; Mit Dampfer – Slowly; Allmahlich in das Hauptzeitmass ubergehen – Do not look at the conductor; Im Anfang sehr gemaechlich – In intense inner torment; Alle Betonungen sehr zart – With more intense inner torment; Getheilt (geth.) – Out of tune.”

Might have to check this out. I hate the feeling that I'm killing the planet every time I put a new AA in the Wiimote.

Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. This is the funniest thing I've seen in a good long time.

You know, my admiration for Uncle Joe continues to grow.

Digging into the Cluetrain, ten years on.

Aaargh. I really really really want to kick this browser to the curb. Far be it from me to incite a riot, but could someone please write a worm that goes through and upgrades people's IE6 machines to IE7 or IE8?

Old but good article positing that socially constructed media comes out of the social surplus created when people stop watching so much TV.

Dead simple: a new Facebook app that takes your news feed from Facebook and republishes it as RSS.

Alternative cuts of meat for recessionary times.

Aaand Biden has some connection to Specter’s switch too.

An interesting thread–how Hillary’s continued candidacy helped bring about the shift in Pennsylvania voting patterns that led to Specter’s change of party.

A sober counterpoint, based in statistics, to the conventional understanding of the average family’s economic situation.

Shorter Steele: “Don’t hold us accountable for anything that we do as a grand gesture. This is theater, not government.”

OMG. Felling healthy trees and re-laying bricks because no one checked the handicap accessibility? Yagottabekiddin.

I like how the hype circle (unconfirmed reports of swine flu) is so much bigger in Mexico, but there’s no hype circles at all in Canada.

I like #9 and #4.

Main points: 1. Oracle has so far used the open source it’s bought as a more or less unsuccessful upsell path to its leading closed source technology. 2. MySQL is doing a good enough job of stagnating on its own.