Category: linkblog

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.

Videos will continue to work? “Deprecated” ain’t what it used to be.

The actual IE6 funeral party.

With both Google and SalesForce announcing that IE6 will be de-supported, the end of a long nasty nightmare is in sight.

I don’t know how I missed this before, but this is simultaneously the coolest 1990s era Macintosh software story ever, and the best explanation yet why Apple lost its way in the 1990s.

Don’t call your users idiots.You’re not doing yourself any favors.

Glad Comcast is spending its money so effectively.

This is what I don’t understand about the idiots who are calling for Holder’s head for trying to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: what else would they have us do with him? “Without exception…every previous terrorist suspect apprehended inside the country had been handled as a civilian criminal. Even so, critics such as Krauthammer were denouncing Holder for failing to send Abdulmutallab directly to Guantánamo. As a senior national-security official in the White House put it, ‘It’s a fantasy! Under what alternative legal system can Special Operations Forces fly into Detroit, and take someone away without court oversight?'”

Root certificate vulnerabilities to attack the phone.

Buried in the Outlook Shortcuts > For All Items list (hidden away behind disclosure triangles) is a most useful Inbox Zero tip: Use CTRL+SHIFT+V to move one or more selected mail items. If like me you only have one mailbox to which you move items once you’ve tagged them (my archive), the popup that comes up always has the right mailbox selected, so the workflow is CTRL+SHIFT+V, then Enter. My mouse was getting in the way of fast email processing and this is a good alternative.

Interesting tips for making a headless Mac headful.