links | January 31, 2012
William Safire and Margeret Atwood's tips are my favorites.
links | January 24, 2012
Started reading Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel.
links | January 24, 2012
Future Perfect » The Handbag Paradox
...handbags carriers (and to a lesser extent other carriers of daily-use bags) are confronted with the handbag paradox that states: it is nearly always easier to add additional items to the bag than to sort through items to be removed, with the net result being that people walk around with significantly more stuff than they need.
links | October 13, 2011
Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot is here! Go upgrade now!
links | June 30, 2011
Custom maps in Processing with TileMill via FlowingData
links | June 27, 2011
Websites used to be things. Sites, even big sites, used to consist entirely of a single Movable Type installation, or a Drupal setup, or your own little big homegrown solution. But that’s hardly ever the case anymore, not for big sites anyway. Your hypothetical news emporium may have blogs that run on Wordpress, but you also maintain a couple of wikis, readers respond using Facebook Comments, your online advertising is taken care of by DoubleClick, analytics by ChartBeat, classifieds using a custom-built Django app and that special project the newsroom did last week got its own microsite.via When websites stopped being things | stdout.be
Patchwork websites can be pretty messy: you kind of have to hope that all these different applications and widgets will mesh without much issue, and not look like they were just thrown together. But the alternative is pretty messy in its own way, too. Imagine a monolithic system that tries to handle blogging, ad handling, analytics, video serving, live chats, commenting and special-purpose mini-apps all by itself. What you end up with is a CMS that tries to be everything but is good at nothing. And few things sap the life out of product managers and programmers faster than a big old system that’s breaking under its own weight.
So the challenge when building a website in 2011 is not to select the best CMS and then tweak it to perfection. Instead, it is to find the kind of components that together will make up a good experience. And that’s hard.
links | June 22, 2011
Announcing GitHub for Mac - a desktop GUI for GitHub.
links | June 13, 2011
Honeypot Captcha: you can create a honeypot form field that should be left blank and then use CSS to hide it from human users, but not bots. When the form is submitted, you check to make sure the value of that form field is blank.
links | June 8, 2011
In Which We Consider The Macabre Unpleasantness Of Roald Dahl - This Recording.
Funny that I should stumble across this just after a conversation about how our society gives celebrities (especially athletes) passes for being bad human beings. I loved Dahl's books as a kid, and never noticed the misogyny or antisemitism (apparently thanks to good editors). But talent is no excuse for bad behavior.