Marco.org

Enderle and Khanna are arguing that the iPhone is insecure because it doesn’t (at least yet) allow for third-party software, which means you can’t install third-party software designed to let you securely install additional third-party software.

— Daring Fireball: More Crap From Rob Enderle on the iPhone

Object-oriented programming generates a lot of what looks like work.

— Paul Graham

Tumblr’s latest feature: Mobile phone uploads! 

Now cellphone cameras suck slightly less. 

Tumblr makes what is entertaining and creative in blogging frictionless and either does away with or automates the less engaging parts of the process.

— baldur in the comments on the Davidville Blog

Does anyone think this is a good idea? What the hell are you people thinking?

Somehow, I don’t think the iPod HiFi is backlogged because of demand.

— New Apple products soon? Signs point to “Yes”

CocoaMySQL’s GUI had an interesting interpretation of this MySQL command.

j4cbo in SA Forums: I am a font

libxml_use_internal_errors(true)

This single function, added in PHP 5.1.0, will save me so much grief, it’s beyond words.

Ever use $dom->loadHTML($crappy_html_code) to get a website’s content into an XML DOM for parsing or other processing? Normally, every unescaped ampersand and misplaced P tag would generate a PHP warning, just like xsltproc, which made it extremely difficult to use these functions without having a bunch of special-case error-handling routines to ignore these pointless warnings.

Now, we can turn those stupid warnings off, and can safely call ->loadHTML() on anything and have it quietly return false if it has so much trouble that it actually matters.

tinabeatr in the SA Font thread

If I had to take one book to a desert island, this would be the one - even if there was nothing to write on there.

— An Amazon reviewer who really likes The Elements of Typographic Style

A car alarm that fills the cabin with fog and blinds the driver with a strobe light.

That might be the worst idea I’ve ever heard. 

The Microsoft press release

This is great and all, but why do we care? It only has a purpose if it can replace JPEG for web-browser graphics. There’s no place for it in high-end photo processing and archival, since DNG does an excellent job of that (and I think it’s more open).

The license terms are lenient, but it’s not free, so it’s unlikely to be supported  by Firefox… ever. And I’m sure Apple will be reluctant to support it in Safari. Plus, we’ve had JPEG 2000 for years, which is far better than JPEG and similar in many ways to HD Photo, and hardly anything supports it (except Safari, actually), so nobody uses it.

Nice job, Microsoft, making yet another redundant product. At least you changed it from the original name, “Windows Media Photo”, so your precious Windows Media brand won’t be tarnished too badly by its failure.

LensHoods - Free printable lens hoods for DSLRs.

Interesting idea, and the site’s easy enough to use, but the “hoods” just aren’t very practical. I had severe vignetting problems on the 17-55 seen here. And who wants to be seen with a paper or cardboard hood stuck to the end of their DSLR? I look like enough of a nerd when I whip out this beast of a lens - and if I’m going to lengthen it even further with a hood, it better not be held on by a rubber band.

I think I’ll bite the bullet and spend the $40 for the official rigid plastic version.

Pls advise

— Can we please ban this ridiculously stupid phrase from all written communication?

A big part of the lesson of WalMart is that the commodities aren’t actually as cheap as they seem: many of the costs that WalMart avoids still must be paid by someone, and often local and state governments are the ones who pay, through channels like increased stress on emergency rooms for WalMart employees with no insurance.

— Jacob Rus<br/>

Maybe now the Second Avenue Subway can race the Freedom Tower to see who finishes first, the prize being a ribbon cutting by Bigfoot riding a unicorn!

— mrmcd on the SA Forums

Never bet against the path of least resistance. You will lose. Every time.

— Coding Horror: Are Web Interfaces “Good Enough”?

If your girlfriend doesn’t make you feel good about yourself and bring joy to your life, fire her. That’s what girlfriends are for.

— best of craigslist : Advice to Young Men from an Old Man

Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.

— You are kidding arent you ? — jerryleecooper’s comment on “Why Linux will not displace Windows” | TalkBack on ZDNet

Microsoft suggests several different methods for “encouraging” employees to use Windows Live Search during their daily web browsing: an in-house training session to teach the employees how to “get the most from search” using Windows Live, the removal of existing web browser toolbars that use other search engines, setting the users’ home pages to Windows Live Search, and even an “e-mail message of encouragement from the CEO.

— Microsoft paying businesses to use Live Search

I hope nothing breaks…

I perceived a new dimension to earplugs—to keep things in.

— The peculiar pleasure of earplugs. - By Thomas Beller - Slate Magazine

When was the last time you had a surprisingly bad banana? Never, that’s when.

— Fruit: a risk vs. reward analysis (found via Serious Eats)

Tenure distorts people’s effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career and very weak incentives forever after.

— Steven Levitt on the Freakonomics blog

While it virtually wrote itself, it did not virtually polish or virtually edit itself.

— Dan

The packaging and [Apple TV] are a sterling example of Apple minimalism, all the way down to the complete lack of video cables.

— Apple TV unboxing - Oops…

This is the best brownie pan in the history of the universe.

It’s like what I did in 1999 but without having to open files in vi. And more media types. And a much better design.

— What is this, 1999? on Tumblr

One more tip we got regarding Leopard is that InputManager plugins are no longer allowed. That’s right… no more little hacks from anybody besides Apple. No more Apple menu hacks. No more Safari plugins.

— Leopard not ready for April: If that’s true, say goodbye to Saft and Sogudi… 

This page has SO MANY ADS

— David on What can Tumblr do for SEO?

Most video blogs, unless made by an attractive woman, have a likely audience of one.

— How Ze Frank became a Web video star - Slate

At some point - a point we passed long ago - the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government’s use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.

— My National Security Letter Gag Order - washingtonpost.com

The McDonald’s Videogame:   You absolutely MUST play this Flash game.

Goons Illustrated (NWS)

From beth’s brain dump

Am I a computer nerd for thinking it looks like the Big Bertha from Total Annihilation, or a photography nerd for wondering if it was a 600mm prime lens? 

Note to bookmarklet developers everywhere: IE only supports up to 512 characters of total code. Knowing this can save you a lot of time.

Firefox 3 (Gran Paradiso) Alpha 1 Preview

Among its many problems:

Gecko, not “Gekko”, is Firefox’s rendering engine, not a “search engine”. Mozilla has not decided to compete with Google quite yet.

I program using the DOM (Document Object Model) all the time, but I have no idea what the “Dominant Object Model (DOM)” is. It sounds dirty.

Firefox 3 will not allow Mac users to “create Cocoa Widgets for their desktops”. I don’t even know where to begin with this possible Dashboard-widget reference, but they’re trying to tell us that Firefox 3 will render its HTML form-input widgets using native OS X interface widgets instead of the manually-created buttons they use now that look like they’re from Windows 95.

The really sad part is that Wikipedia linked here (footnote 90). 

Desktop Tower Defense: Shit, there goes the weekend.

(Tip: Hit the U key to upgrade. Saves a lot of mousing back and forth.)

OK, I’m getting better at Desktop Tower Defense. The key is to spend whatever it takes to upgrade a few key buildings all the way. The fully-upgraded Squirt Towers cost a ton of money, but a few of them can fend off even the largest army. The fully-upgraded Pellet Towers fire more slowly, but are much cheaper, so they’re good against super-strong bosses.

(from this SA thread)

It depends on what you care about. People have different levels of caring about different things in their life. There’s usually a subset of your possessions for which you’re willing to pay a premium to have the best.

Some people spend $20/lb. on world-class coffee beans. Others spend hundreds of dollars on great wine. And some people spend $600 to get the best video card every 9 months. Most people are perfectly happy with Folger’s, Charles Schwab, and integrated graphics, but to these people, they’re willing to pay whatever it takes to get the best because they can tell the difference (or think they can, which is effectively equivalent) and it matters to them.

I used $30-120 Staples/OfficeMax chairs for years. Even the $120 ones were cheaply made with poor back support, but at the time, I didn’t care. Then I started getting frequent lower-back soreness. I started using an Aeron at work, and the difference was huge. The only reason I haven’t replaced my $30 home computer chair with one is that I only spend an hour or two per day in it.

Just learned this:

svn diff -r{2007-01-12}:1119

Subversion accepts dates instead of revision numbers if you put them in curly braces. You learn something new every day.

I should switch my email font to Comic Sans.

— David, out of nowhere

Helvetica cake<br/>

Manhattan streets are exactly 264 feet apart.

— Joel. I’m sure this information will come in handy someday. 

If you’re smart enough to worry that you might not be smart enough to start a startup, you probably are.

— Paul Graham

How much growth has Twitter lost because of all the time it’s unavailable?

— Marshall Kirkpatrick » Twitter’s Downtime

Brooklyn StoreFronts: This guy went and took pictures of all of the shady Brooklyn camera dealers’ addresses who advertise expensive cameras for ridiculously low prices (and are 99% scams).

Wouldn’t you love to buy a $1500 lens from this place? 

The Joy of Tech

When will computer geeks finally learn that RAID-5 doesn’t make sense with SATA drives in 2007?

Amazing video of my favorite game, Desktop Tower Defense.