Category: linkblog

If there were ever a sign that a change is a-comin’, this is it.

Looks great. I can’t imagine trying to use my iPhone on the side of a mountain, though.

Emailing a visual of your OOF calendar for really dense people.

Nice essay about why Rick Warren as an inauguration speaker might be a good thing. I hear you, David, but I’m not sure it outweighs the gay marriage stance. It’s like inviting someone who’s pro-Jim Crow to speak at an inauguration in 1954.

Interesting, if a little navel-gazing, article about how the Obama relationship with the press is evolving in the transition.

Go get it. Now. Since you can’t easily uninstall IE, it’s better to be patched even if you’ve already made the switch to Firefox.

Interesting historical archive of WordPress administrative UI. I was just looking for something like this since I can’t look at my WP 2.5/2.6 dashboard any more. It also gives context for why people hated the 2.5 administrative views so much, though I though they were pretty good.

A fairly creative way to get around a shortage of gray blocks and plates.

Dust off that old Unix disk, the user-space AncientFS filesystem for MacFUSE will let you mount it from Mac OS X.

More documentation on how the blended GIF + JAR (GIFAR) attack worked, and some thoughts on mitigating it. In particular, I like the idea of having a separate domain to store user contributed content.

A quotable year.

View the score of Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No. 4 online.

The BSO and MFA avoided the Madoff mess through due diligence, apparently.

Interesting for the Civil War photos and the building of the Statue of Liberty; fans of early cinema should be pleased too. Interesting to see what else comes on line from NYPL.

Multifactor vulnerabilities lead to massive exploits. The scary bit about this is that this points out that the 500,000 or so IIS servers that got hit with SQL injection attacks are, if they remain unpatched, fertile ground for exploiting just about any other vulnerability that comes around.

I’m thinking steak for Christmas. Will try this method once before then.

Brilliantly evocative explanation of a colossal f-up. I didn’t know the connection to Mantoloking.

Sony apparently likes the taste of egg in their face.

Yet another iPhone Twitter client. Might be time to evaluate alternatives to Twinkle.

Hat tip to Pes for linking to this visual history of the S. S. Adams company, makers of sneezing powder, joy buzzers, and snakes in a can.

If you’re on Windows, and you haven’t switched to Firefox yet, now’s the time.

Interesting tips on doing grid-style layout via CSS.

Man, I’d love to be able to make this.

The Cupertino effect in spellcheckers.

Optimized for “word processors,” but nice to know about a site with public domain resources.

It always amuses me to learn new slang, even if it comes with a healthy dose of patronizing anti-Americanism.

Interesting to read Patrick Ruffini’s take on Obama’s offline campaign and what it means for the next Republican candidate.

Whaddaya know, something approaching a substantive, respectful discussion of the issue.

Shorter advisory: Use Firefox.

Whither Window?

A rare inside look at the workings of a particle accelerator. Despite misspelling “quadripole”, the photo feature is interesting and informative.

In commemoration of Messiaen’s 100th birthday, Alex Ross posts a performance of “The Resurrection of Christ” that’s absolutely spine-tingling.

The notoriously ephemeral poem/book Agrippa spawned a lot of legends. I think I still have the 1992 text file of the poem on my machine at home. It’s only fitting that this particular “reading” of the poem has drawn so much traffic that it’s taken its host machine offline.

Dan Gillmor’s memo to the Pulitzer committee, one of the things that resulted in opening up the award to online only publications.

That ain’t good. Not so much the fat lady singing, more a canary in a coal mine.

Matthew Guerrieri’s annual Christmas carol, this time around a nice Annunciation carol with a 16th century text.

Alex Ross capsule retrospective of Leonard Bernstein’s career, complete with anecdote of a National Cathedral performance of Mahler’s 2nd. Wonder who the chorus was for that one?

The fire sale on private equity firms is more than a little scary.

NYTimes starts linking to other websites. The end of business as usual at the Gray Lady. Nice.

The model of using antivirus software to reactively identify and remove worms is badly broken. The security market has to shift its focus to hardening the applications (and increasingly it’s applications, not the OS) that enable the hacks.

The T’s construction work has opened a crack in the wall of Old South Church. Grrrr.

If you have anything in c:program filestinyproxy and you’re running a service called Security Accounts Manager (SamSs), you’re infected.

It would be interesting to see how the infection is spreading, but I think it’s likely just a conventional virus using Facebook as a vector, not exploiting a hole in Facebook’s security.

Another one to see in the theatres. If it’s anything like “Machers and Rockers” it’ll be a brilliant ride.

One to see in the theatres?

Here we go down the rabbit hole. This is what I was afraid of when I started getting these fringe conspiracy theories forwarded to me. How do you fix these broken minds?

Matthew Guerrieri gets an indepth interview with Elliott Carter reaching back to his student days.

Overflow from Guerrieri’s Elliott Carter interview. Very nice stuff.

Simple URL shortcuts like http://itunes.com/ArtistOrAppDeveloperName. Brilliant!

An intelligent approach to managing application security risk.

WordPress 2.7 drops tonight for all the guinea pigs, er, users on WordPress.com. Looking forward to trying it out when it hits GA.

New Google Reader UI. The ability to turn off unread count is probably the best thing here. But is it better than Helvetireader?

The API docs for the YouTube player document a parameter that turns off the new default Search bar that suddenly appeared on every embedded YouTube video today.

iTunes 8’s Grid View has more features than meets the eye, including some nice playback features.

Interesting design resource for grid based design.

Tyler Shields begins an interesting series on practical development considerations for application security, starting with "anti-debugging"–methods used to hinder the reverse engineering of a process.

Lightweight JavaScript solution for transparent PNGs in IE6.

Supported integration between Google Calendar and Apple’s iCal. Hopefully the iPhone won’t be too far behind.

Interesting perspective on the role of the designer in agile development.

More details on the YouTube virus.

Simple truth: Product managers can live in the marketing or development organization or report directly to the CEO and they’ll still be product managers.

Setting the record straight about Bush’s “regret” for the failure of pre-war Iraq intelligence.

Sign the Open Government petition asking President-Elect Obama to publish transition materials in a barrier free way.

You know those YouTube links you get sent? Check and make sure they’re really pointing to YouTube.

Documentation of the RSS XSS vulnerability fixed by WordPress 2.6.5. Get out there and patch.

Shifting from discovering new vulnerabilities to being more proactive about the defenses is good practice. I also think that finding your own vulnerabilities and fixing them before someone else finds them makes good business sense.

Interesting analysis of Clinton’s new position in the Obama administration.

It’s interesting how “national security” trumps every basic decency that has come to pass in the last hundred years in this country. Thanks for illustrating that so well, Mr. Bush.

The new BSO download service gets a lengthy review. I’m very excited to see what repertoire becomes available. (Brahms Requiem 2008 and Gurreleider, please?)

A much better look and feel for Google Reader.