Category: linkblog

Littlepage lifts the no-signs policy. About damned time.

Olsson’s, we hardly knew thee.

The art and science of asking Nasty Softball Questions and the election.

Campaign management from the ground up just got seriously mobile. Very, very cool.

Using Inkscape as a poor man’s Illustrator. I recently used the first tip in this article (opening the AI file in Acrobat Reader), but I think the Inkscape tip could really be a killer trick for any engineer or product manager who works a lot with design professionals.

OMG. OMFG. “I had to give up. This sentence is not for diagramming lightweights. If there’s anyone out there who can kick this sucker into line, I’d be delighted to hear from you. To me, it’s not English—it’s a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction…”

The alternative to the VP debates: the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize webcast. Or, you know, you could watch the debate WHILE you watch the webcast. And drink. Oh yes.

Interesting document calling out security issues in NTLM. Not new, but new to me.

Is the financial crisis our next Katrina?

Inevitable: the longer it goes through the process, the costlier the bill gets. Any bets that Bush ends up threatening to veto what Congress passes?

Heh. Quite funny.

Cool. Hope they don’t run it into the ground.

With the removal of the iPhone API NDA, expect to see more cool tips & tricks on how to leverage the platform. Specific criticism of this idea: part of the power of URL schemes is that you can choose which app to handle a particular protocol, but this recommendation is to choose an app-specific scheme. So, for instance, Exposure and Cocktails will post to Twitter through Twitteriffic but not through Twinkle. That ain’t cool.

Really interesting visualization–each cycle of the spiral represents a variable timeslice, and you can see at a glance whether a cycle represents an increase or decrease in value for the measured data. The Dow and temperature data slices are really interesting, and the prime and divisor cycles are absolutely fascinating if you use the index values on the slider.

Notes makes it to the iPhone.

Cogent advice on creating a working customer advisory group.

Google in 2001. This was before my blog started.

How a group of restaurants buys meat in bulk–real bulk–and uses everything from head to foot.

It shouldn’t surprise me that Palin isn’t up on her science. That seems to be par for the course.

CSRF goes mainstream.

How scale free nodes intersect with bandwidth caps.

Krugman discusses the options faced by the Democratic Congressional leadership. Screwed, or more screwed, but not as screwed as the House Republicans.

Transcript of Pelosi’s remarks. And that was what so inflamed House GOP that they voted against the bill? Yougottabekiddingme.

Something to do with your multimonitor PC when the market tanks: screensavers.

Good thing that John McCain took credit for the bailout before his House friends voted against it. Really helped my 401(K). And then blamed Obama for killing the deal? Thanks, John!

There are two ways to combat smear chain emails: reply aggressively, publicly, and loudly, or dig deep to uncover the source and expose it to daylight. I tend to do the first, and this researcher does the second.

Strong analysis of Obama’s presence and challenges in Appalachia.

The performances really were something extraordinary. Levine came out at the end to express his appreciation for putting out a powerful performance at what he admitted were slower than usual tempi–and for producing an even more dramatic effect.

Update, update, update.

“The point is this is one of the most important irrevokable economic decisions we will ever make. Let’s make it in a state of panic.” — Steven Colbert.

Some valid counterpoint to the Agile drumbeat.

You didn’t think astroturf wrote itself, did you?

You know, if you have to bet consumer against industry, I’m pretty sure consumer is going to win. Every single time.

Pledge to vote on Wilco’s website, get a free download of Wilco and the Fleet Foxes covering Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” Sweet!

McCain’s ties to Freddie and Fannie are now down to one degree of separation. So why does he keep insisting that Rick Davis has no connection with them?

PDF exploit toolkits spotted in the wild. Update your browser plugins, kids, it’s going to be a fun ride. Better yet, if you’re on Mac OS X, uninstall Acrobat Reader entirely.

Hysterically funny and very pointed at the same time.

The proper solution to the dilemma is, of course, taking an equity stake in exchange for purchasing the distressed assets.

No way that my tax dollars will go to buy distressed mortgage debt at above market value. I might as well just flush the money directly down the toilet; at least that way it would be entertaining and I’d have a small chance of getting the money back.

I’ve long thought that a good statistical mechanics analysis was going to be necessary to fix the Boston roads; I might be right.

Hard to believe that the administration tried to make the bailout non-reviewable, but here it is: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency. Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency. “

Levine was in New York for the Met premiere to conduct Renee. He’ll be in Boston this week for the BSO season premiere. Nothing like hitting the ground running.

Beta story-sharing feature on the New York Times. Nice UI. Don’t know if they have enough readers online who are into this sort of thing to build a real network.

Alex Ross receives a Genius Grant. Right on.

Wil Shipley has common sense about the Apple Store. I don’t want to read any more stories about Apple pulling apps that compete with its own. Ever.

Inspirational listening: MLK speech about civil disobedience. “Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”

I have a couple bags full of VHS tapes that are worth BILLIONS.

Heh. The bailout letter as Nigeriam spam. Brilliant.

Real time commentary on the bailout bill. Go nuts.

The source of that Bernie Sanders quotation (below). Yes, it’s very left-wing stuff, but it’s also thought provoking. How much of the risk taking was enabled by the thought that senior government officials like Paulson would be there to bail them out?

I think–I hope–Krugman nails it here. The Bush administration tried to slip a fast one by us, a last gift for his cronies. There are enough people who were paying attention that it slowed down. Now, with Bernie Sanders, we can ask, “We’ve been told…we can’t afford—that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street.”

I think–I hope–Krugman nails it here. The Bush administration tried to slip a fast one by us, a last gift for his cronies. There are enough people who were paying attention that it slowed down. Now, with Bernie Sanders, we can ask, “We’ve been told…we can’t afford—that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street.”

Great article by Steven Weinberg on the ongoing collision of religion and science.

The investor in me agrees with the administration’s request for full speed ahead on the mortgage bailout. The citizen in me says that should be “all deliberate haste” and particularly thinks that the request not to weigh down the leglislation with “provisions that would undermine” the bailout–i.e. provisions to ensure the money is spent correctly and that individual mortgage holders get some relief too–is disingenous at best, crap at worst.

Cisco buys Jabber; much concern about the future of Jabber as an open source platform. These guys were among the first to help leverage standard blogging APIs, so Mazel Tov.

An aircraft carrier, apparently built to minifig scale. We’re gonna need more gray pieces.

Of the massive bailouts, Matthew says: “I hereby propose that, from now on, any banker who disparages government arts funding as unfairly rewarding organizations that can’t make it in the free market gets the business end of a broken beer bottle.” Yep.

Levine is back, and better. Can’t wait to work with him next week on the Brahms Requiem.

Um. Nothing I can say about this post could possibly be taken the right way.

OMFG. The look inside Barack Obama’s email inbox is funny, but his deleted mail is even funnier.

Free lightweight BitTorrent client for MacOSX.

Obama seizes the attack, sharpens his criticism of McCain’s economic policies: “The ‘old boys network’? In the McCain campaign, that’s called a staff meeting.”

David Weinberger summarizes McCain’s interview in which he apparently confuses the Prime Minister of Spain with a leftist Latin American official, then stands by the position when he’s corrected.

Did SEC rules exemptions lead directly to the collapse of Lehman, Bear Stearns, et al?

Incisive thoughts about the ethics of blogging vs. the ethics of journalism, boiling down to closed vs. open means of production for the written word.

Clear, calm articulation of the Obama plan for the economy. Spread the news.

Interesting list of WordPress plugins that speak Twitter.

Interesting perspective: “I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.”

…and here’s how they could have done it. Not every hack requires the knowledge of exploiting buffer overflows and SQL injections… sometimes there’s just plain bad design at work.

From the same twisted impulse (though probably not the same people) who brought you “HillaryIsMomJeans.com”.

There is, of course, a web application security spin to this story, but I would guess that social engineering is involved in the hack. The real question is, how much light does it shine on Palin’s governing style and on the whole shady practice of using personal email for government business?

Nice summary of aglianicos on the market. I’m with Eric–I’ll happily drink any aglianico I find on a wine list, which isn’t many.

Be careful on BusinessWeek.com.

Interesting discussion of how to get children to eat healthy: keep them in the kitchen, don’t diet in front of them, avoid “forbidden fruit.”

Just out of curiosity, how DOES an ACC team like Virginia get beaten like an old carpet by Connecticut?

New Obama ad using press coverage of McCain’s dishonest campaign against him.

Hmm, a ratings system for web applications! What a great idea!! Seriously, with a market like Facebook’s, a reputation system is a really critical thing to get in place.

As usual, trenchant observation from Gruber: “Perhaps this will refocus presidential campaign coverage on the economy rather than bullshit.”

Oh crap.

Man, the Japanese cellphone market is weird.

A surprisingly concise and cogent peom by Bob Dylan in th!s week’s New Yorker.

Katie Couric starts to get some respect, and got a killer quote from Mike Dukakis, of all people: “Look, I owe the American people an apology. If I had beaten the old man, you would never have heard of the kid and then we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Epic fail,” indeed.

The first official release of the Common Weakness Enumeration, a standard way of classifying and describing software flaws that may lead to security vulnerabilities.

Proving that there are characters still in Boston: a man has eaten oysters at the Union Oyster House every Wednesday night without a break for 15 years, and shows no signs of slowing down. Nice.

Dave Weinberger does a great job of disemboweling a set of standing anti-Obama arguments.

Okay, I take it back. She makes a pretty good Cheney on a small scale.

Unsettling evaluation of the current state of the race–even if Palin does make an unlikely Cheney figure.

PES makes BoingBoing, and spaghetti.