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The horrors of stop words.
Posts from August 2009
Old Mill
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Aerial Photographs of the California Coastline
Rosea
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"On May 21st, 2009 the City of Vancouver passed a motion that directed City Staff to begin sharing the data and information the city collects, to share this data in open standards and to place open source on an equal footing with proprietary software." [via cshirky]
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Lakoff is brilliant. A move from calling health care reform the "public option" to "The American Plan" would help build support. We've been comparing our options with what Canada, UK, France, and other countries have, but we like things invented here.
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Oliver Sacks on Migraine Auras: "I was playing in the garden when a brilliant, shimmering light appeared to my left -- dazzlingly bright, almost as bright as the sun. It expanded, becoming an enormous shimmering semicircle stretching from the ground to the sky, with sharp zigzagging borders and brilliant blue and orange colors." I've had these and it's always amazing to read that others have experienced the same thing. [via Ironic Sans]
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Helpful step-by-step guide to fixing deadlock problems in SQL Server 2005.
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Some good ways to improve ColdFusion application performance. Doing a lot of these already, but picked up a few new coding practices I should follow.
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Umberto Eco on the features of Eternal Fascism. "In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism." [via MeFi]
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"More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in to track users and store information about them..." [via schneier]
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"Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play." [via Daddy Types]
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"Superfeedr is Real-time Feed Parsing in the Cloud." Great idea that could help build specialized aggregators. Bummed it's ATOM at the end. I'd prefer RSS.
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This blog connects Mad Men episodes with advertisements and details from the time. [via kottke]
Landsowne Resort View
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"...the rev mechanism is very powerful and very tricky, because while it doesn’t change the semantics of a link relation, it does change the relationships between the parties, with many consequences that aren’t obvious." Good arguments against using rev-canonical for short URLs. (pssst, Flickr!) [via delfuego]
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An XMPP Interface for Desktop Notifications. Like Growl for web apps using an open standard. (Does Growl do this?)
Hotel
Conference Guy
Landsowne Resort
The People of ColdFusion
Music Share: Montana
Montana is my favorite Frank Zappa tune. There is just so much to love, including the complex background vocals. It turns out those were sung by The Ikettes—Ike & Tina Turner's background singers—even though they aren't credited on the track. Take a listen:
Barry Miles quotes Zappa about this song in his appropriately titled book Zappa:
Barry Miles quotes Zappa about this song in his appropriately titled book Zappa:
"It was so difficult, that one part in the middle of the song 'Montana', that the three girls rehearsed it for a couple of days. Just that one section. You know the part that goes 'I'm pluckin' the ol' dennil floss...'? Right in the middle there...Tina was so pleased that she was able to sing this thing and she went into the the next studio where Ike was working and dragged him into the studio the hear the result of her labour. He listened to the tape and he goes, 'What is this shit?' and walked out."Now Ike Turner was a well-documented jerk, but The Ikettes usually sang rock edged soul like Sweet Inspiration. So whenever I hear Montana I always imagine what a strange, strange few days in the studio with Zappa that must have been. The version I posted is on Strictly Commercial. I don't care if you think it's silly, folks.
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Search for icons or browse icon sets they've indexed.
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Cell phone nostalgia! I had the Ericsson S710a right before the iPhone, and it's true that the camera was better and Internet tethering just worked. I'm tempted by a Google phone now too just to show my unhappiness with the iPhone App Store. It'll be interesting to see how this goes.
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J.D. gets close to the TV media machine and finds everything a bit too scripted. It's a good reminder of one of the reasons many folks started writing weblogs.
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I honestly hope Merlin turns his blog into a treatise on creativity through Steely Dan anecdotes.
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Anil offers a high-level view of Apple's current developer-relation woes. He blames their culture of secrecy.
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Steven Frank is letting go of his iPhone until the Apple fixes serious problems with the app store.
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This is great. I'd love to see more people aggregating tweets and offering them outside of the Twittersphere.
These are links I added recently to my shared items at Google Reader. Just catching up.