Category: linkblog

Part of a project to build Richmond, VA in LEGO. I like what they did to the state capitol (a Thomas Jefferson building).

Abita in play, Dixie might be back there soon. If beer comes back, can the city be far behind?

C30 – C60 – C90 Go!

A coherent, articulated strategy and set of goals for, significantly, engagement in both Afghanistan AND Pakistan.

Are financial wizards like stage magicians, manufacturing money out of thin air? Krugman’s brief blog post is the only thing that’s made me laugh out loud all week.

The NYPL library is like dinnertime conversation with your favorite erudite, eclectic scholar. Really a joy to read.

Running OSx on generic Intel hardware.

Hackintosh distributions. Old article but interesting stuff.

An Outlook 2007 hotfix is being strongly recommended by Microsoft’s Outlook team because it dramatically improves performance. We’ll see.

Astute commentary on why the AIG bonus issue, and corporate compensation at the bailout firms in general, has generated such heat.

Religious tweeting defined in the new NYT blog about words.

Handy little tip that was pretty well buried in the help Q&A for Facebook. Would it have killed Facebook to put a Feed button somewhere on the profile page?

Hulu has Cosmos. I’m going to go back and look for that episode with the Library of Alexandria, which still haunts my dreams.

The BIOS is the battleground.

Goodnight, Mr. Schilling.

On Being a Therapist is a good list of advice, including “you will never be content for very long.”

A meditation on the Brooklyn Bridge and on the meaning of digging oneself out of a hole.

A briefly satisfying Woody Allen short piece, but it puts me too much in mind of the Elvis Costello song “…This Town…”: “It was a song with a topical verse which I’m afraid he then proceeded to sing…”

Router: a nice new sans serif typeface, inspired by a handcut subway sign. The story of the process is pretty compelling.

Useful, since I can never remember the names of any of the trattorias we tried.

This is the difference between designing for one transaction (i.e. “give now” button) and designing for a relationship (repeated engagement with and clear value proposition to the donor). Translate it into product management and it’s the difference between “feature to close the deal” and “coherent user experience that solves a business problem.”

An awesome drag and drop UI that still runs afoul of my chief criticism with mixtape sites–if you try to make it all about sharing the actual music, either you’re breaking the law or you’re limited to a small selection of tracks. How about a replacement for Art of the Mix that just gives a nice UI to share the playlist description?

On Flickr, MIT photo studies of Boston prior to urban planning. Very cool.

I really, really like where this is going.

Google’s new line of experimental web apps are probably more properly called Modern Javascript Experiments, because they work just fine in Safari 4 beta and Firefox 3. Domtris would be a great game if it weren’t for the controls (space should be drop, since Enter is inconveniently situated on a Mac laptop keyboard).

Lancaster County vintage images. There’s a lot of stuff that I remember here from growing up visiting my grandparents.

Part of a set of vintage postcards from Lancaster County. My grandmother worked at Lengacher’s for years, and their “Swiss” cheese was superb.

Wartella makes three–three of my former UVA publishing comrades to make careers in cartooning and animation (after Slowpoke’s Jen Sorenson and PES). Must have been something in the water…

And, with that, hopefully we can drive a stake through the heart of IE6.

Tips for frying fish for tacos, if you don’t want to chicken out and get the panko-crusted tilapia from Costco to make them with. (Which, shamefully, I usually do.)

This is absolutely incredible–a scavenger hunt of hidden panels, drawers, cryptograms, and hidden poems in New York.

Getting ready for performance on the Old South organ, silenced since the crack opened up in the wall last winter. Cool video of the organ being tuned.

The real points here: 1. A lot of innocent people were swept into Gitmo through incompetence or ignorance. 2. Some in the Bush administration tried to correct the issue, but Rumsfeld & Cheney insisted on keeping everyone there. 3. We’ve gotten nothing useful from any detainee. 4. Gitmo isn’t stopping Al Qaeda from reforming. 5. Cheney is using Gitmo to whip up the base, knowing damned well his criticisms of the administration are baseless.

11 AIG executives who received “retention” bonuses of more than $1 million … are no longer at the company. Sounds less like “bonuses” and more like “looting.”

Alex Ross gives an early review of Dylan’s latest, due out at the end of April.

Still time to start playing…

A formal study of Wikipedia’s dispute resolution and arbitration processes concludes that they are successful because they don’t resolve disputes. Rather, they weed out unproductive users and encourage productive users to engage constructively in further debate.

Working around hotel and airport firewalls.

Happy Evacuation Day, everyone! Today in Boston, we celebrate the evacuation of the British from the town after Washington trained guns on their positions from Dorchester Heights. And that’s why government offices are closed and people take sick days from work. Right?

Odds that there will be a lot of noise in the streets? I don’t know; what’s the current unemployment rate? Might get interesting.

Feck off!!

If the pizza here was as great in character as the owner, this is a big loss: “‘For 85 years we’re doing the same thing, dropping the coals into the firebox every night,’ said Ms. Ciminieri, who promised to kiss this reporter if he did not reveal her age. ‘Why would this happen now? I don’t know.’”

So this is kind of game changing: you can now make content available outside of your pool of friends on Facebook. Like, to all users. So if you want to read what I’m writing on Facebook, and you don’t want to friend me, I could just make my posts public to all users. Kind of cool.

Cyberwarfare as proxy wars–interesting thesis.

With lots of large commercial enterprises banking on Hadoop, I wonder what’s next for this open source package?

Worth a listen, for sure.

Any hack involving both IKEA and Lego is a good idea.

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…