Author: Tim's Bookmarks

Differences between IE7 and IE8, and nuances of compatibility mode. Nice rundown .

Excel will create an XSD from an XML document that doesn’t have one. With a little work you can get the XSD back out again:

“Start the Visual Basic Editor with Alt+F11. In the Visual Basic Editor, hit Ctrl+G to open the immediate pane. In the immediate pane, type:

Print ActiveWorkbook.XmlMaps(1).Schemas(1).Xml”

Genius.

One indispensable feature of this toolbox is the ability to reload a modified schema without having to recreate all your XML mappings. Unfortunately it doesn’t work with Excel 2007.

When cyberwar — politically motivated DDOS and other attacks — becomes commonplace, computer security becomes national security.

Advice from SOURCE Boston: don’t secure the systems, secure the data.

What’s the right way to disclose security flaws? Full disclosure, partial disclosure, or responsible disclosure? I only wish I were kidding.

Jim Cramer and Jon Stewart sit down and do extended fisticuffs. In three parts.

Um. Come again? I can’t think of a single reason that discussions about copyright can’t be conducted in the open, unless there’s something shameful going on.

iPhone 3.0, oh boy. Wonder if it will run on O.G. iPhone hardware?

Interesting data set showing trends in consumer spending, and how IT spending trends tend to lag–but magnify–trends in consumer spending. Look for more info about this in coverage of SOURCE Boston.

Dan Guido’s presentation from SOURCE Boston. I found myself thinking that these tips could apply generally to teaching any class, not specifically pen testing.

Dino’s presentation from Source Boston. Buffer overflow exploitation strategies and other fun stuff. Question: does Snow Leopard get significantly more secure?

Because Boston shouldn’t be the only city with a big dig–er, big elevated rail project.

Cool. New metro station near my old address! Coming one of these days.

The new iPod Shuffle is awesome. But queue some sort of lawsuit regarding the voice features in 5, 4, 3…

It’s nice when family legends, attested in the New York Times, are verified by the Smithsonian. I’ve been looking for verification of our family legend for quite a while without much luck.

“Gosh, how could anyone think that an opinion voiding the Fourth Amendment might endanger the Constitution? How could anyone worry that legalizing torture might endanger human rights?”

I’ll have to check the archives in my basement. I’m pretty sure I have a Mac OS X Public Beta CD ($100) and an original Mac brochure from 1984 ($200) down there.

The Bard apparently did have a portrait painted in his lifetime. Neatly kicks another leg out from under the Bacon theory.

Milton Babbitt by the Bad Plus, plus dancers — awesome. This will do more for “thorny” modern music than … well, many other things… Do click through to Ethan Iverson’s blog for the cover notes explaining the modernist covers that the group did on their most recent album.

Making enterprises secure by demanding that all code be secured at the border — of the organization itself. Meaning: don’t purchase anything that you haven’t examined for security issues just as though you created it yourself.

Sasha Frere Jones thinks the new Neko album is her best yet. I’m still working on deciding that.

The title track of the new Neko Case album features programmable music boxes first featured in MAKE magazine.

Just because the military doesn’t carry it out doesn’t mean it wasn’t government policy. Nasty.

Theremin kit! Fun for the whole family! I’d love to be able to do a home studio version of “Velouria” with this.

This is a new product? OMG. OMFG. If Ballmer isn’t throwing a chair about this, he’s not paying attention to his competition. Safari Mobile doesn’t just drink Windows Mobile IE6’s milkshake, it slays its cow and burns down its barn.

Review of Alan Gilbert’s Sibelius/Rachmaninoff/Ives program. The TFC (not me) sang in the Ives.

Joe Gross lays out the impact of Watchmen on the 12-year-old psyche.

A great Christmas project.

Reality based science collides with some kind of … what the heck is this? It’s not like there’s a big deep pocketed “Pluto is a planet” lobby out there…

Congressional API! Let the XML-RPC vs. JSON vs. REST debate commence.

Time to get the updates.

I really dig this hack. I’m dissatisfied with our current setup; might be time to budget for a little shelving unit and hackery.

Tactical tips for doing win-loss analysis.

This is a big and long overdue shift.

Nice step by step instructions for cleaning up those shots of Mt St Helens from the air.

The Kindle app for the iPhone highlights Amazon’s razor and blades strategy with their ebook reader. They care about the content sales, not the gadget sales.

Another nail in the coffin.

Sam Ruby leaves Big Blue.

Smart thinking about flexible layout strategies with CSS.

Sure, the banks don’t want that bailout money. So they’ll pay it back. Um, when they get around to it.

I’m only a lay reader and not a theologian, but having grown up working my way through various gospels I find this sort of stuff–which gospel came first, and what other traditions might be in play in the later ones?–fascinating.

Guerrieri’s First Law? “The perceived difference between the musical past and the musical present is a symptom of the limitations of information technology.” I think this axiom only works in classical music: it doesn’t explain the timelessness of Nick Drake compared with the temporal anomaly of, for instance, Hanson.

Really? I’m not sure I see the point… and looking at the download it’s all PHP code, with no .NET glue that I can see. Very odd.

A full plain-English explanation of how AIG took itself over the edge with incredible hubris and why we’re still on the hook to bail them out. Required reading for those who still don’t understand why trusting financial institutions with strings-free bailout money is a bad idea.

The hagiography on display here is a far cry from Joe Gross’s more tough-nosed take on the album. I guess I’ll have to hear it for myself.

I started losing my shit when Larry wrote about Steppenwolf singer John Kay getting a beatdown from Junior Wells, whose song he had just stolen on stage, and lost it completely reading about the demise of the toughest motorcycle gang in Minnesota. Absolutely essential reading.

This wasn’t the point of Sullivan’s column, but it’s the most quotable part: “Rove today endures as the architect of the biggest and deepest political implosion since the Democrats in the 1970s. It was all tactics, no strategy; all politics, no governance. He remains the worst single political strategist of modern times.”

Hidden defaults setting that forces links that would open in a new window to open in a new tab instead. Should be default behavior.

Why I don’t want to hear any more Republican austerity claims: “Louisiana has gotten $130 billion in post-Katrina aid. How is it that the stars of the Republican austerity movement come from the states that suck up the most federal money? Taxpayers in New York send way more to Washington than they get back so more can go to places like Alaska and Louisiana. Which is fine, as long as we don’t have to hear their governors bragging about how the folks who elected them want to keep their tax money to themselves. Of course they do! That’s because they’re living off ours.”

On the stupidity of the publisher’s guild. I can’t imagine that a text-to-speech feature is going to dent the sales of audiobooks.

Do we have a bank recovery strategy, or are we just going to keep the zombies going?

As Dave has written elsewhere, the interests of the shareholders and the public are not in alignment on the bank bailout.

Digging into the various theories.

The DTD for importing a bug into Bugzilla.

Master list of color scheme tools online.