onfocus

This was a fun surprise at the GEL conference this year.

This is a free ePub book about SQL indexes. Loaded up on my iPad for light reading.

This article includes an interesting use of social media for identity obfuscation. "...we create bogus individuals around client names. One person could be a photographer, one person could be a chauffeur, or whatever. We develop about 15 to 20 web sites and create all these social media sites around you. Now if you are traveling somewhere and someone puts your name in, they are going to locate those 20 other people before they get to you, depending on how much information is known about you."

Crowdsourced documentary about life across the world on a single day: July 24th, 2010.

"What would a Business Class news site look like?" Great question.

A few ideas that could reduce the friction of signing up/in.

"Metafilter moderator Josh Millard talks to Brooke about what you do when a celebrity joins your website anonymously in order to attack his critics." Great interview with Josh on one of my favorite radio shows.

Great security reminders. A password made up of three distinct words is fairly secure against a brute force attack. If developers build in a delay after failed password attempts that also helps deter brute force attacks. [via capn design]

ugh, this isn't good. "The fructose component of sugar and H.F.C.S. is metabolized primarily by the liver, while the glucose from sugar and starches is metabolized by every cell in the body. Consuming sugar (fructose and glucose) means more work for the liver than if you consumed the same number of calories of starch (glucose)."

"Allow me to offer a suggestion. If you are privately communicating with someone for the first time, as a general rule, the best course of action is to be polite and to the point."

Solarized is a color palette for code editors. I've been using these colors in TextMate for a day or so and I'm enjoying it.

"Diesels are wildly popular in Europe, accounting for roughly 50 percent of the car market there. So why don't automakers simply bring the European cars here?" An older article that explains why diesels are hard to come by here.

It's true. This is a very nicely done SSH for iPad/iPhone.

Good reminder: "Complain about the way other people make software by making software." Put another way: be the change in the world you want to see.

"We reckoned there there are five different things people mean in different contexts when talking about identity and the Internet." Nice summary of the pieces that make up Online Identity.

A nice jQuery image cropping library.

How-To: Art.

"...your visitor will have a limited amount of time (specified by you) to fill in the form and send it. And if a spammer tries to post information to your form processor remotely they’re going to hit a big fat roadblock."

"...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." Pure CSS bot thwarting.