Category: linkblog

As Gruber points out, if any other vendor were to fix a buffer overflow bug in their product, we’d call them responsible.

Jen Sorenson’s iPhone/Palin/Obama Nobel/Terminator mashup cartoon got a big shout out from Fake Steve Jobs today–awesome.

Heh: “You know your web program is in trouble when your site can’t even handle the traffic bump from people making fun of your web program.”

Handrolled iTunes LPs make sense.

Google-ized HTML version of a PostScript set of class notes on queuing theory. Good reading.

Julian Bond throwing his weight behind LGBT equality is significant.

Industrial scale tomato sauce making in a New York/Basilicata apartment kitchen.

Practical advice for directly working with the @font-face CSS directive.

You know, I wasn’t reading these stories until this one. I don’t know why I didn’t expect that companies would be resigning from the Chamber of Commerce because it wasn’t doing enough to protect the environment. This is one of those moments where I’m unabashedly proud of capitalism.

Interesting discussion on some concrete ways to think about focusing on usability issues.

Publishing the Federal Register in XML, with two remixes leading off showcasing effective use of the data.

The long and strange history of “management consulting” and its relationship to home ec and “Cheaper By the Dozen.”

What has changed in online banking over the last ten years? Well, this really interesting technical discussion outlines some ways in which the industry is trying to address the security challenges.

My takeaway from this, other than the continued problem of insecure web applications, is an observation by Veracode founder Chris Wysopal: “'The market is saturated with [stolen] credit card data'… As a result cybercrooks looking to monetize what they are doing are moving up to higher value attacks where possible, he said.” Some economist looking to make a name for himself should focus on the dynamics of the PII black market.

The bra-that-changes-into-a-gas-mask was a shoo-in. Great photo.

Aaargh! But I agree with Chris. The juice went out of Dee a while back. Can’t wait to see the next adventure.

This makes me very angry. The initial Recovery.gov didn’t have a lot of functionality, but it was well constructed and standards compliant. Then some hack of a consultant charged the government HOW MUCH? to shift it to an unfunctional platform (I’m sorry, Sharepoint, but you weren’t made for this project) that didn’t even meet the government’s OWN STANDARDS for accessibility. This is a travesty.

Awesome: “And you don’t need to be rich or powerful to lift your voice in song or get out of your seat and shake your groove thing. (Laughter.) You don’t need to be a Van Gogh to paint a picture, or a Maya Angelou to write a poem. You don’t need a Grammy or an Oscar or an Emmy to make your work on the cultural life of your community or your country a valuable one. And to people who might not speak a single word of the same language, who might not have a single shared experience, might still be drawn together when their hearts are lifted by the notes of a song, or their souls are stirred by a vision on a canvas. That is the power of the arts — to remind us of what we each have to offer, and what we all have in common; to help us understand our history and imagine our future; to give us hope in the moments of struggle; and to bring us together when nothing else will.”

I think this is an important note that has been lost in the debate. Part of what is being done in the healthcare reform proposals is to try to address the uninsured–and the 44000 deaths each year that result from lack of health coverage. When someone tells you that the new plans will cost more, it’s because they’re trying to solve a problem that the other side hasn’t begun to address.

End of an era–the decommissioning and eventual tear down of the Langley Full Scale Tunnel, one of the largest wind tunnels in the world, after 80 years of service.

It’s always good to hear that reasoned debate wins out over incitement to riot and assassinate. Unfortunately, with NewsMax columnists advocating a military overthrow of our own government–“to protect the Constitution,” no less–I don’t think that reasoned debate has too much life left in it.

I find myself wondering how much of my time I spend in Creative right now.

Signs we are back in the 1970s: Jerry Brown is the frontrunner for the 2010 California governorship.

The occasionally cranky Cory Doctorow is spot-on here. First they came for the rectal-cavity terrorists, but I didn’t speak out because… wait a minute…

One side effect of the steady downward spiral of newspapers: two hours of choral singing get two sentences in an otherwise nice, if brief, review.

Ouch: “By all means, then, let’s have a new ‘Tosca.’ But it needs to be good. And this is not. Although Bondy has conceived potent stagings of ‘Salome,’ ‘Don Carlos,’ and Handel’s ‘Hercules,’ among other operas, he has failed to find a clear angle on ‘Tosca,’ and instead delivered an uneven, muddled, weirdly dull production that interferes fatally with the working of Puccini’s perfect contraption.”

Nokia’s new platform documentation includes a pretty good chapter on mobile application security.

The meltdown as a system dynamics problem.

I mourn the death of Mr Safire, a humane conservative and a great writer, in a time when both seem rare. I read his columns on language with the purest pleasure.

Makes me want to say Hwæt!

Interesting practical web usability findings.

Arguments from a writer in favor of Google Books. I agree–it’s been invaluable in writing the history of something whose history has never been written but which is scattered across hundreds of books and documents.

Details the legal efforts required to establish that City Hall employees were deleting emails in violation of retention policy, and that the retention policy wasn’t enforced.

What I should probably be doing this weekend.