Category: linkblog

I’m on three of the four recordings–Bolcom, Brahms, and Ravel. Excited to hear they’ll be on iTunes in March.

Informed speculation on the deal that cut off Hulu on Boxee. It sounds all too likely.

On the irrational religion of tax cuts.

Greg Raiz is a superb designer (Microsoft Windows XP theming and user experience, some work for iET Solutions). He has some good points about the design of the Kindle, but I think his revisions only go partway there.

Stealth attack kit for Mac targets the application memory space and leaves no traces. Exploits the weaknesses in Mac OS X’s address space randomization.

Again–secure the apps. They are currently the weakest point in anyone’s infrastructure.

Pretty awesome JavaScript+CSS app to allow you to design a color scheme with a deep palette and sample uses.

Please, rich people, spend us out of this mess!

In other words–endpoint and application security are where we should be spending our time, not redesigning the core protocols.

Nice way to de-dupe dynamic content on the web: link rel=”canonical”. And there’s a WordPress plug-in.

My reading: The New Yorker joins the rest of the world in projecting a post-inaugural letdown onto poor Shepard Fairey for his creation of the Obama Hope poster.

“It wasn’t often that President Eisenhower lingered on the ground floor of the White House. But something on that sticky summer evening had summoned him downstairs, to the unfamiliar corners of the Vermeil Room, where he stood transfixed before the alabaster temptress with the narrow black eyes. True, it was only a painting, but the hero of D Day was besotted nonetheless, lost in the glossy visage of Dolley Madison.”

Static analysis magic quadrant. There’s a little apples to oranges going on in some of the comparisons.

How to get a good web graphics palette starting with a single image.

Read and comment on the bill. Seems like it’s a little late in the process, but better late than never.

Explaining the XSS vulnerability in Safari’s RSS feed reader. Seems to have been a specific problem for the filtering strategy that Apple used to filter feed content.

The most amazing cross-platform personal media sharing tool I’ve seen yet. Install locally and remotely, sign in both locations, and stream music from one location to the other. Yes, stream–it sends the music as an MP3 stream regardless of original format (AAC, etc.). Just connected my home library from my office and it was responsive almost immediately (though it takes some time for all the data to populate). Apparently also available as iPhone client.

More detail about how the sausage was made.

Freaking awesome.

Happy Darwin Day! Think I’ll celebrate by evolving a little bit.

Breakdown of the final composition of the stimulus bill.

Nice. We don’t have some of the things in the Arlington store (notably, liquor) but most of it rings 100% true.

If you want a big old sign of the times, this would be it.

Comparing the WSJ coverage of the meltdown to the NY Times and others. How short does the WSJ fall? Pretty damned short.

It sure didn’t take long for the whining to start from all the banks that got billions of US dollars about how the oversight is so burdensome. Wah wah wah. Here’s an idea guys: you stop flushing my 401K money down the toilet, and I’ll stop caring whether the government is watching everything you do.

You know how, in the James Bond films, the stupid villain always stops to tell Bond exactly how he’s going to overthrow the world and how to stop him? Wouldn’t it be funny if stupid politicians did the same thing? Oh wait… I’d say tweeting about caucus negotiations in progress is a good career limiting move, Republican Party of Virginia chair Jeff Frederick.

I’ve been doing a party trick for years where I pick an inexpensive Italian bottle off the wine list when I’m out with co-workers, and wow them with it. This article gives away a few of the secrets–aglianico is my go-to grape.

Now, if they could just make it so that us paying subscribers could access our comics pages in the iPhone app UI, it would be a much better thing. I can’t imagine browsing the whole list of comic strips through that web interface on WiFi, much less over EDGE.

Hey, one step at a time for openness. I’m inclined to Rubel’s opinion that making the White House more open is like turning the Titanic.

SQL injection into third party code? Hey, I hear there’s a company that examines third party code for you as part of your purchase process and identifies security problems. You don’t even have to have the source code, ’cause we scan binary.

Um, not if I have anything to say about it. Call your senator.

Congrats to Black Duck for their fourth round. Any funding in this market is to be commended.

Nice to see an affirmative offense-is-the-best-defense of fair use in this case.

This is the second version of this video I’ve seen, with better sound quality. An amazing performance.

I remember these McCall drawings and got to see Robert McCall speak in the late 1980s. Alas, inflation and Vietnam took the wind out of these projects and they’re now images of a future that never happened.

I for one welcome our new cell phone overlords. I also don’t think students will miss the lengthy wait to get phone service activated in the fall.

Very pretty humanist sans serif, with a semibold weight for free.

OMFG. Hysterical.

Market research in a card deck? Sign me up….

“Accusing Shepard of vandalism is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”

As Facebook moves toward open systems, how much longer can Twitter hold out?

A winter favorite.

I couldn’t get plugin upgrade working from the plugins administrative UI until I read this thread, which suggested trying different hostnames for the FTP login. Using localhost worked for me.

Interesting–hadn’t thought about the impact of snow on solar collection efficiency.

Systemwide tagging. This sounds really interesting. I wonder how/where they store the data.

Google Books goes mobile. Cool. Now if only they could straighten out being able to publish the “orphaned” (in copyright but abandoned) books in full, there would be true beauty in the world.

Interesting add-on site for Wikipedia visualizes the edit history as metadata.

Hmm. Tempting.

Remote administration of Macs and iPhones in a handheld console.

Just saw this on Ars. I had heard about flickery when it was released but hadn’t checked it out–looks interesting.

It would be interesting to check this out and compare it to the iTunes Genius.

So far it seems just to be posting links to the Flickr page. Hope they do more with it.

Qui custodies custodiet? You can, on Flickr (and Twitter). Building up the alternate history as a set of social media "leaks" is brilliant.

Very true, and explains quite a lot about why some bugs get fixed and some linger.

“Due to the unfortunate liquidation of Circuit City we will no longer be able to match their prices.” Um, burn.

Gee, you think?

The counterpoint to this argument is: sometimes you need the gravitational pull of a large, prestigious grad degree to move your career into a different orbit.

How many convenience store clerks can name the bat’leth?

Raymond Aceto was superb Saturday night–looking forward to how tonight turns out.

Adam Gaffin is now officially the most criminally underappreciated man in Boston. Here’s hoping he finds a safe landing.

Nice abstractions of city details in small numbers of bricks.

IE has 67.55 % of the global browser market, shedding 7% in a year, with Firefox picking up 3%, Safari another 1%, and Chrome about one %. Most notably: IE6 is now less than 20% of the market. Rev up the chainsaws and get ready to trim IE6 from your “supported browser” list, kids.

On the short list of things I never thought about making at home: crackers…

The counterpoint to a set of otherwise excellent points about what sales engineers look for from PM.

On the need for a balanced approach to security.

New one from Seamus Heaney.

Summary of information of how to do a Drawdio. Looks like a great kid project.

I’m now considering removing my FM antenna just for the experiment.

Via Lifehacker, a brilliant website that claims to find the most interference free station in your ZIP code. I’ll try 101.3 tomorrow — I’m tired of my FM adapter for my iPod getting swamped by “real” radio.