- Vote Zod in 2008! “Instead of hidden agendas and waffling policies, I offer you direct candor and brutal certainty. I only ask for your tribute, your lives, and your vote.”
- Adrian Holovaty talks about programming and computer-assisted journalism “If you want innovation, hire people who are capable of it. Hire people who know what’s possible. And once you hire the programmers, give them an environment in which they can be creative. Treat them as bona fide members of the journalism team”
- The new version of Yahoo! My Web launched a couple of days ago I know some of the people who worked on this, and they’re really awesome – and this is an enormous step forward in My Web functionality…
- London Underground are experimenting with water-cooling and heat-exchange to chill the Underground Air conditioning the Underground has proven impractical – the tunnels are so far underground…
- Vitamin has a feature on how to design and code HTML e-mails I had to do some of these a few years back and it was a miserable process. Wish I’d had this article then…
- Lost-theories.com – an astonishingly well made repository of information and theories about the TV series It’s a beautiful and solid piece of design, and I believe was built using my colleague’s Django framework. Very nice indeed.
- The Political Compass goes beyond simplistic the simplistic left-right dichotomy I’m sure I’ve linked to this before, but it’s still pretty solid and interesting. I remain economically slightly to the left of centre and way down towards the libertarian end of the spectrum
- Def Leppard are on the comeback trail The Guardian’s got a fairly loving article about the old rockers who became old-fashioned overnight when grunge came along
- A revolutionary new drug for HIV apparently leaves the virus defenseless “A small human trial of the drug, reported last August, showed that when given on its own it rapidly clears most HIV from the blood, driving down the levels tenfold in a matter of hours.”
- Jointcrackers.com – the web’s best knuckles, toes, ankles, neck and spine joint cracking community… I’m upsetting Paul in the office pretty regularly by the number and regularity of crunchy noises my body makes during the day. Sorry Paul!
- The US senate has been intelligent enough to reject a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage Take that, George Bush. Take that and shove it up your tail-pipe you horrible malevolent little man…
Category: Links
- Kris Krug mounts the Great Wall You can almost see all the Chinese people standing around him, looking horrified, quietly thinking, “Soon we shall destroy America and their foolish naked geeks…”
- If you’ve been wondering why your Expos√© needs to be manually reset sometimes after playing World of Warcraft, then you should download Expose Fix 1.0 It’s ridiculous but awesome – and particularly funny since it does the whole thing through AppleScript so you get to see all the drop-downs being manually selected.
- Alas, Second Life! Web 2.0 in a virtual world Matt Biddulph dragged me into Second Life this evening while I should have been working to blow my mind with fun Flickr widgets in game. Could revolutionise the poster industry!
- Eva Longoria has topped the one hundred most beautiful women in the world poll in Maxim again. I love this highly self-aware and self-deprecating comment, “I was like, ‘Surely there are more beautiful women in the world.’ I can name 10.” Not bad out of six and a half billion…
- The Christian Science Monitor has noise about a study on how e-mails are misinterpreted At first glance this is a pretty mediocre story about the old truim that you can’t convey emotion well on e-mail (something we’ve known since the mid-nineties). But this digs a little deeper than most stories and cites some good research…
- Derek Powazek’s written an interesting piece on people following Google’s design patterns for Vitamin He’s arguing for not blindly copying Google. The alternative argument would probably be something like Google have established a pattern language which now the rest have to follow or improve upon. Probably a bit of both…
- Apple have announced the 13″ widescreen MacBook It’s quite sweet actually. Quite powerful, relatively small and if you’re prepared to spend a couple of hundred extra dollars then you can get one in black (with a little extra hard disk space)…
- Feed Rinse looks like an extraordinarily useful little service for making your RSS feeds more valuable… “Feed Rinse is an easy to use tool that lets you automatically filter out syndicated content that you aren’t interested in. It’s like a spam filter for your RSS subscriptions”
- Yahoo! Tech Monkey Challenge I’m not making this up – my employers have trained a monkey to race a human in getting a camera memory card into a computer to promote tech.yahoo.com. I have nothing to say about this whatsoever…
- It gets worse – the Yahoo Tech Monkey has a Flickr account I’m completely overwhelmed by this. You don’t get this stuff when you work for the BBC, although I think maybe you should…
- Snap.com is a new, weird and quite interesting search engine One of the weirder interfaces I’ve seen in a while – large, almost full-size screencaps, heavy on Ajax and interesting interface technologies. Pretty interesting… And the blog has nice digg-like buttons which I might have to steal…
- The Los Angeles Police Department has its own weblog Apparently seven policemen who lost their lives have a star on Hollywood Boulevard. Didn’t know that. Quite interesting.
- 37signals job board seems to be ticking over quite nicely… I wonder what the quality of the candidates they get through the site is like, and whether they’re a good fit to their potential new employers…
- Chris Bowley talks about opening up the BBC’s data in the form of APIs through BBC Backstage I worked with Chris on the Annotatable Audio project and he’s now working for the team that I used to look after. He basically pretty much rocks, so you’ll all be needing to go and read his blog now…
- The new World of Warcraft Alliance race has been announced and they are Draenei Not the most immediately exciting of the new races – nowhere near as cool as the Blood Elves, but then maybe that was the point…
- The Daily Mail has seven sets of secrets of the new series of Big Brother UK The most notable feature is the ‘golden ticket’ angle – wherein one of the contestants will be chosen randomly from people who find a ticket hidden in Kit Kat chocolate bars.
- Channel Four has more on the Big Brother Golden Ticket lunacy “100 golden tickets will be placed into KitKat four-finger single bars and Kit Kat Chunky single bars for distribution across the country.” Seems like it’s only one in four hundred odds of getting one, which is a little nerve-wracking…
- Caffeinated and Unstrung in Seattle… “This wiki is intended to be a guide to the best places in the city to huddle over a table with your laptop, a cup of something hot and get online”
- A new theory – and remember this is not generally accepted – says that our Big Bang may have been just the latest of many… It’s a pretty fascinating theory, although I’ve not got a sense of how it engages with concepts like space-time and how time exists before the Big Bang. I need more!
- Micro Persuasion reports on a study that suggests social media ad-spending is going to hit $757M in 2010 This is apparently a remarkably small proportion of the overall bin of ‘non-traditional media spend’ available. The site is suspicious of the figure – citing MySpace – and I have to say I’m not convinced either…
- Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music v2 I think having finally found a good starting niche of electronic music thanks to Mr Biddulph, I’m going to have a bit of a rapid explosion of intrest in the area. Ishkur’s awesome flash guide is sure to help considerably…
- Business Week wrote an article a little while back about the ways in which Microsoft and Yahoo are responding to Google’s dominance in the search ad market I’m obviously not going to comment on it in any formal capacity – it’s not an area that I work closely with for a start – but it’s a pretty interesting read nonetheless.