Category: linkblog

It’s nice when family legends, attested in the New York Times, are verified by the Smithsonian. I’ve been looking for verification of our family legend for quite a while without much luck.

“Gosh, how could anyone think that an opinion voiding the Fourth Amendment might endanger the Constitution? How could anyone worry that legalizing torture might endanger human rights?”

I’ll have to check the archives in my basement. I’m pretty sure I have a Mac OS X Public Beta CD ($100) and an original Mac brochure from 1984 ($200) down there.

The Bard apparently did have a portrait painted in his lifetime. Neatly kicks another leg out from under the Bacon theory.

Milton Babbitt by the Bad Plus, plus dancers — awesome. This will do more for “thorny” modern music than … well, many other things… Do click through to Ethan Iverson’s blog for the cover notes explaining the modernist covers that the group did on their most recent album.

Making enterprises secure by demanding that all code be secured at the border — of the organization itself. Meaning: don’t purchase anything that you haven’t examined for security issues just as though you created it yourself.

Sasha Frere Jones thinks the new Neko album is her best yet. I’m still working on deciding that.

The title track of the new Neko Case album features programmable music boxes first featured in MAKE magazine.

Just because the military doesn’t carry it out doesn’t mean it wasn’t government policy. Nasty.

Theremin kit! Fun for the whole family! I’d love to be able to do a home studio version of “Velouria” with this.

This is a new product? OMG. OMFG. If Ballmer isn’t throwing a chair about this, he’s not paying attention to his competition. Safari Mobile doesn’t just drink Windows Mobile IE6’s milkshake, it slays its cow and burns down its barn.

Review of Alan Gilbert’s Sibelius/Rachmaninoff/Ives program. The TFC (not me) sang in the Ives.

Joe Gross lays out the impact of Watchmen on the 12-year-old psyche.

A great Christmas project.

Reality based science collides with some kind of … what the heck is this? It’s not like there’s a big deep pocketed “Pluto is a planet” lobby out there…

Congressional API! Let the XML-RPC vs. JSON vs. REST debate commence.

Time to get the updates.

I really dig this hack. I’m dissatisfied with our current setup; might be time to budget for a little shelving unit and hackery.

Tactical tips for doing win-loss analysis.

This is a big and long overdue shift.

Nice step by step instructions for cleaning up those shots of Mt St Helens from the air.

The Kindle app for the iPhone highlights Amazon’s razor and blades strategy with their ebook reader. They care about the content sales, not the gadget sales.

Another nail in the coffin.

Sam Ruby leaves Big Blue.

Smart thinking about flexible layout strategies with CSS.

Sure, the banks don’t want that bailout money. So they’ll pay it back. Um, when they get around to it.

I’m only a lay reader and not a theologian, but having grown up working my way through various gospels I find this sort of stuff–which gospel came first, and what other traditions might be in play in the later ones?–fascinating.

Guerrieri’s First Law? “The perceived difference between the musical past and the musical present is a symptom of the limitations of information technology.” I think this axiom only works in classical music: it doesn’t explain the timelessness of Nick Drake compared with the temporal anomaly of, for instance, Hanson.

Really? I’m not sure I see the point… and looking at the download it’s all PHP code, with no .NET glue that I can see. Very odd.

A full plain-English explanation of how AIG took itself over the edge with incredible hubris and why we’re still on the hook to bail them out. Required reading for those who still don’t understand why trusting financial institutions with strings-free bailout money is a bad idea.

The hagiography on display here is a far cry from Joe Gross’s more tough-nosed take on the album. I guess I’ll have to hear it for myself.

I started losing my shit when Larry wrote about Steppenwolf singer John Kay getting a beatdown from Junior Wells, whose song he had just stolen on stage, and lost it completely reading about the demise of the toughest motorcycle gang in Minnesota. Absolutely essential reading.

This wasn’t the point of Sullivan’s column, but it’s the most quotable part: “Rove today endures as the architect of the biggest and deepest political implosion since the Democrats in the 1970s. It was all tactics, no strategy; all politics, no governance. He remains the worst single political strategist of modern times.”

Hidden defaults setting that forces links that would open in a new window to open in a new tab instead. Should be default behavior.

Why I don’t want to hear any more Republican austerity claims: “Louisiana has gotten $130 billion in post-Katrina aid. How is it that the stars of the Republican austerity movement come from the states that suck up the most federal money? Taxpayers in New York send way more to Washington than they get back so more can go to places like Alaska and Louisiana. Which is fine, as long as we don’t have to hear their governors bragging about how the folks who elected them want to keep their tax money to themselves. Of course they do! That’s because they’re living off ours.”

On the stupidity of the publisher’s guild. I can’t imagine that a text-to-speech feature is going to dent the sales of audiobooks.

Do we have a bank recovery strategy, or are we just going to keep the zombies going?

As Dave has written elsewhere, the interests of the shareholders and the public are not in alignment on the bank bailout.

Digging into the various theories.

The DTD for importing a bug into Bugzilla.

Master list of color scheme tools online.

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.