Category: linkblog

Heh heh heh. Nice set of Marvel characters in the Disney style and vice versa.

User research on the effectiveness of inline validation concludes: Focus it on fields that are difficult (passwords), keep it persistent, and show the validation messages after the user is done typing, not while.

The usual deep missive about a new Mac OS X release from John Siracusa. Exhaustive down to Spotlight indexing times, the mechanics of transparent application compression, the mechanics of QuickTime playback, and more. I like this quotation about QuickTime X: “This is just the start of a long journey for QuickTime X, and seemingly not a very auspicious one, at that. A QuickTime engine with no editing support? No plug-ins? It seems ridiculous to release it at all. But this has been Apple’s way in recent years: steady, deliberate progress. Apple aims to ship no features before their time.”

More digital news archives.

The Snow Leopard compatible version of the Reunion genealogy software for the Mac is out.

The deeds describing the disposal of Abraham Hershey’s property after his death are listed here.

Photos of the index pages (by grantor) of the Lancaster County Deeds, permitting you to use the microfilm reader to find the deed you’re looking for. Brilliant.

Black Francis (and Bob Lefsetz) indict “I’m a PC” and the music business in one fell swoop: “Too many lame-ass, greedy cooks in the kitchen! The soup is SOULESS!”

Stay classy, Arizona: “Steven Anderson, the Arizona pastor who says he’s praying for President Obama’s death has now thrown in some helpful specificity. He wants him to get brain cancer like Sen. Kennedy.”

The Incredibles Fantastic Four? Captain Amerimickey? The mind boggles. Wonder what this does for the cause of creator owned characters…

Rands discusses the review experience and its breakdown from both sides of the desk.

Laser cleaning isn’t just for exfoliation: a backpack laser will be used to clear years of pollutants off marble capitals on the Lawn.

Partial list of transcripts of the Friday night memorial for Senator Kennedy.

Of all the speeches last night, Biden’s hit home for me: “He’d constantly renewed my faith and optimism in the possible… I never saw him petty. I never saw him act in a small way. And as a consequence, he made us all bigger, both his friends, his allies, and his foes. His dignity, his lack of vitriol, his lack of pettiness forced some of the less generous members of our community to act bigger than they were.”

Oh Frabjous Day! HP actually updated their software for Snow Leopard. And best of all: “Scanning: The Scanning interface is now built into Snow Leopard and supported with the Apple Image Capture application.” !!!!!!

What we call the Internet is too big a box to serve as a good metaphorical basis from which to make decisions. There are infrastructure layers of the Internet that should be driving our thinking, but without a sound metaphorical basis we’re making policy decisions about it that are grounded in the physics of radio.

A nice way to get offline access to ebooks for free. I read all of Patton’s “Jefferson, Cabell, and the University of Virginia” on the iPhone using the Google Books web interface, and I think this would be better, not least because of the offline capability.

Wonder how you get the books into an iPhone app.

The UVA Arts Box Office actually does ticketing for student organizations, like the Virginia Glee Club, too (even if it doesn’t link to them). I may pass out from surprise. Back when Arts $ was launched, student orgs were locked out.

File Quarantine (“this application was downloaded from the Internet”) has been augmented by a known bad list. A decent start, but what if the user’s badlist is out of date? Or if they downloaded a file from Bittorrent? Needs improvement.

Alas, I won’t see much in the way of disk savings from Snow Leopard if most of it is from deleting unused print drivers. I purged those a long time ago.

Hey cool–some fringe benefits from the Black Dog.

Nice move to online ticketing, though, of course, this article is useless without a link.

A look at the security of the Mac OS X platform on the eve of the Snow Leopard launch.

Hog Bay Software discovers the power of marketing price promotions: doubling daily sales and adding 15000 new downloads by briefly taking the price of their iPhone app to free.

The author of Wired’s Craigslist piece digs deeper into the site and where it’s going. Nice follow up blog series coming.

I’d love to find a way to get back to Ft. Monroe once the base is decommissioned. Beautiful location on the water, tons of history, childhood memories of being there every Independence Day… and houses on the Historic Register.

Some ideas for getting rid of physical discs. Doesn’t suggest how to scale the approach to a collection of over 1000.

Incredible video showing the evolution of the UI for an iPhone app. Inspirational; makes one want to get the details right.

Links to readings and interview with the poet and translator, whom I was lucky enough to publish when I was at Virginia.

Awesome hidden doors projects in the gallery.

Free Clash tribute with some Sally Timms and Camper Van Beethoven tracks. Worth a listen at the price.

Mark Pilgrim starts delving into HTML 5, and the results are beautiful and thought provoking.

No kidding? Well, it’s at least good to know that that’s on the record now, from someone who should know. The only thing we have to fear, other than fear itself, is someone deliberately fostering fear to gain power.

A real time hack for real time two factor authentication. Ugly.

Interesting ways to deal with wrapping up one’s digital affairs.

Barney Frank takes on the health care protests (see video). Best line from the Phoenix: “I knew that poor and working class Americans were surfacing in droves to rival their best interests, but it’s especially sad to see them up close. They’re clearly blinded by ignorance and fear; why else would they fight on behalf of greedy insurance companies? Why else would they oppose tax cuts for people making more than $325,000 a year? Judging by their clothes, jewelry, and cars, it’s unlikely that many people there have ever earned substantial six-figure salaries. Come to think of it, of course big bank jerkoffs who benefit from healthcare inaction didn’t show to battle Barney. After all, they have an army of white trash circus clowns, ideologues, and talk radio wannabes who are glad and willing to execute their dirty work.”

Classy: James Taylor is donating his part of the revenue from the upcoming Tanglewood concert series to the BSO.

Currently listening obsessively, again and again and again. Free new song from Radiohead that goes some pretty amazing places.

Nice little audio project — 74 pop music screams all spliced together into one 3:32 single, on vinyl of course.

A technique for doing MVC in JavaScript, for more scalable and maintainable code.

DHS would have final recommendation to OMB on security spending, and would also work on “Establishing baseline IT security standards, in cooperation with IT vendors, for commercial off-the-shelf products, with the aim of driving cost efficiencies.”

Bondholders as "loan to own" players.

A thoroughly thought out strategy guide to Othello from a master of the game.

I like the concept of an RT API, and I think the user experience sketches illustrated here are spot on. I also think that this is a great example of crowdsourced features–Twitter is slowly evolving from a generic messaging system to a highly evolved conversation system with the help of its users, who pioneer new features with social conventions and 140 characters.

Astonishing set of photos of the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s collection. I particularly liked Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection, and the collection of tanagers which looks for all the world like Joseph Cornell put them together.

Clinton sounds a note of caution to net progressives: “Trying to hold the president’s feet to the fire is fine, but first we have to win the big argument. It’s ok with me if you want to keep everybody honest. But try to keep this thing in the lane of getting something done. We need to pass a bill.”

Another good reason to get an iPhone 3GS — the camera is just faster.

#blogpostfriday is a great idea. For me, the rest of the week is linkblogging. I try to actually write on Friday. The good news is, sometimes it spills over to the rest of the week.

Nasty nasty nasty. Using base64 encoded tweets, that translate to tinyURLs, that download as zipped archives, that unpack with malicious payloads.

Detailed shootout of five Mac OS X page layout apps from smaller ISVs. I had to go through this exercise recently, and found I didn’t like the options that were out there. Will have to go back and look at iCalamus again.

Thoughts about having VCs in board meetings are not that different from having anybody in any meeting. Do you want to add value or just “give good body temperature”?

I think there’s an implicit “for now” on the end of that sentence, but I applaud the return of the single.

How proper fertilizing helped to reduce lead levels in the White House garden.

This is what photoblogs should be like – indelible and just what they say. This is impossibly cool.

Shorter Gingrich: I was in favor of end of life care before I was calling it a “death panel.”

Leonard Bernstein’s FBI files reveal that he was perpetually under suspicion of being Communist and that Nixon called him a “son of a bitch.” Which, I suppose, is par for the course for a musician in the 1950s through the 1970s.

Excellent summary of UI design issues.