Author: Tim's Bookmarks

A landmark article on phone phreaking, absolutely riveting 38 years later.

Investigating low-volume ways to cook pasta. Conclusion: with a little pretreatment, you can cook a pound of pasta in as little as 1.5 quarts of boiling water.

John Park continues his transformation from unassuming animator into world dominating celebrity.

EMI and Apple monetize the pre-release leak. Kind of brilliant, really.

Now that’s a home office.

Guess I know what I’m reading next.

Ooops. Hope the satellite is recoverable.

Let’s be careful out there. It’s a good idea not to open Excel documents from people you don’t know anyway.

Too bad it’s Windows only. But LyricWiki looks like a good bet for pop-up free lyrics. Wonder how long it is before they’re C&D’d?

How far it’s come. XML Notepad was a top search term on Microsoft.com while I was there. It was a sample project that was hosted for a while on MSDN, then went away, and people went nuts trying to find it again. I guess someone noticed. It’s a nice little XML editor.

This is positive. Ever since the first BloggerCon I’ve been feeling the gap between truly participatory conferences and “wisdom receiving” conferences. I can’t go to too many Gartner conferences for this reason. I think if more speakers thought about the backchannel as a positive force for their sessions they’d embrace it.

Right on.

Like the Darden professor quoted, I’m puzzled. What kind of business school has cheatable exams?

Profile of Rahm Emanuel. Interesting counterbalance to the prevailing media portrait of Rahm as nothing but a profane fixer.

Classic Ken Morse quotations, such as the JFK analogy regarding entrepreneurship: “They asked him ‘How did you become a war hero?’ and he said, ‘They sank my boat’. In this case the question would be, ‘How did you become an entrepreneur?’, and the answer, ‘I got fired’.”

RSS hits the big time.

The community comes to the rescue with a plug-in to reenable Hulu on Boxee.

Detailed thoughts on the BSO recording announcement.

I’m on three of the four recordings–Bolcom, Brahms, and Ravel. Excited to hear they’ll be on iTunes in March.

Informed speculation on the deal that cut off Hulu on Boxee. It sounds all too likely.

On the irrational religion of tax cuts.

Greg Raiz is a superb designer (Microsoft Windows XP theming and user experience, some work for iET Solutions). He has some good points about the design of the Kindle, but I think his revisions only go partway there.

Stealth attack kit for Mac targets the application memory space and leaves no traces. Exploits the weaknesses in Mac OS X’s address space randomization.

Again–secure the apps. They are currently the weakest point in anyone’s infrastructure.

Pretty awesome JavaScript+CSS app to allow you to design a color scheme with a deep palette and sample uses.

Please, rich people, spend us out of this mess!

In other words–endpoint and application security are where we should be spending our time, not redesigning the core protocols.

Nice way to de-dupe dynamic content on the web: link rel=”canonical”. And there’s a WordPress plug-in.

My reading: The New Yorker joins the rest of the world in projecting a post-inaugural letdown onto poor Shepard Fairey for his creation of the Obama Hope poster.

“It wasn’t often that President Eisenhower lingered on the ground floor of the White House. But something on that sticky summer evening had summoned him downstairs, to the unfamiliar corners of the Vermeil Room, where he stood transfixed before the alabaster temptress with the narrow black eyes. True, it was only a painting, but the hero of D Day was besotted nonetheless, lost in the glossy visage of Dolley Madison.”

Static analysis magic quadrant. There’s a little apples to oranges going on in some of the comparisons.

How to get a good web graphics palette starting with a single image.

Read and comment on the bill. Seems like it’s a little late in the process, but better late than never.

Explaining the XSS vulnerability in Safari’s RSS feed reader. Seems to have been a specific problem for the filtering strategy that Apple used to filter feed content.

The most amazing cross-platform personal media sharing tool I’ve seen yet. Install locally and remotely, sign in both locations, and stream music from one location to the other. Yes, stream–it sends the music as an MP3 stream regardless of original format (AAC, etc.). Just connected my home library from my office and it was responsive almost immediately (though it takes some time for all the data to populate). Apparently also available as iPhone client.

More detail about how the sausage was made.

Freaking awesome.

Happy Darwin Day! Think I’ll celebrate by evolving a little bit.

Breakdown of the final composition of the stimulus bill.

Nice. We don’t have some of the things in the Arlington store (notably, liquor) but most of it rings 100% true.

If you want a big old sign of the times, this would be it.

Comparing the WSJ coverage of the meltdown to the NY Times and others. How short does the WSJ fall? Pretty damned short.

It sure didn’t take long for the whining to start from all the banks that got billions of US dollars about how the oversight is so burdensome. Wah wah wah. Here’s an idea guys: you stop flushing my 401K money down the toilet, and I’ll stop caring whether the government is watching everything you do.

You know how, in the James Bond films, the stupid villain always stops to tell Bond exactly how he’s going to overthrow the world and how to stop him? Wouldn’t it be funny if stupid politicians did the same thing? Oh wait… I’d say tweeting about caucus negotiations in progress is a good career limiting move, Republican Party of Virginia chair Jeff Frederick.

I’ve been doing a party trick for years where I pick an inexpensive Italian bottle off the wine list when I’m out with co-workers, and wow them with it. This article gives away a few of the secrets–aglianico is my go-to grape.

Now, if they could just make it so that us paying subscribers could access our comics pages in the iPhone app UI, it would be a much better thing. I can’t imagine browsing the whole list of comic strips through that web interface on WiFi, much less over EDGE.

Hey, one step at a time for openness. I’m inclined to Rubel’s opinion that making the White House more open is like turning the Titanic.

SQL injection into third party code? Hey, I hear there’s a company that examines third party code for you as part of your purchase process and identifies security problems. You don’t even have to have the source code, ’cause we scan binary.

Um, not if I have anything to say about it. Call your senator.

Congrats to Black Duck for their fourth round. Any funding in this market is to be commended.

Nice to see an affirmative offense-is-the-best-defense of fair use in this case.

This is the second version of this video I’ve seen, with better sound quality. An amazing performance.

I remember these McCall drawings and got to see Robert McCall speak in the late 1980s. Alas, inflation and Vietnam took the wind out of these projects and they’re now images of a future that never happened.

I for one welcome our new cell phone overlords. I also don’t think students will miss the lengthy wait to get phone service activated in the fall.

Very pretty humanist sans serif, with a semibold weight for free.

OMFG. Hysterical.

Market research in a card deck? Sign me up….

“Accusing Shepard of vandalism is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”

As Facebook moves toward open systems, how much longer can Twitter hold out?

A winter favorite.

I couldn’t get plugin upgrade working from the plugins administrative UI until I read this thread, which suggested trying different hostnames for the FTP login. Using localhost worked for me.

Interesting–hadn’t thought about the impact of snow on solar collection efficiency.

Systemwide tagging. This sounds really interesting. I wonder how/where they store the data.

Google Books goes mobile. Cool. Now if only they could straighten out being able to publish the “orphaned” (in copyright but abandoned) books in full, there would be true beauty in the world.

Interesting add-on site for Wikipedia visualizes the edit history as metadata.

Hmm. Tempting.

Remote administration of Macs and iPhones in a handheld console.

Just saw this on Ars. I had heard about flickery when it was released but hadn’t checked it out–looks interesting.