K-Squared Ramblings » links

Link Archive

Kelson — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 02:10:32 +0000

I used to keep a sidebar linkblog here, but I’ve long since stopped. These days I’m more likely to post an interesting link to Twitter, or just save it up for a later post. I figured the WordPress 2.8 upgrade was as good a time as any to clean out the old plugin.

Still, I hate removing things from the web, so here’s an archive of 2½ years’ worth of linkblogging from 2005-2007.

I suspect anywhere from 20-30% are probably long gone, but I’ll go through them later. Edit (June 15): After switching from my ancient linklint-based script to the Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress, it turns out that surprisingly few of the links here have gone bad. Maybe 10-15 out of almost 180. I’ve fixed a few already, and I suspect the remaining ones are just gone. One news story (and professional news organizations are terrible at preserving URLs even when they keep stories around in paid archives), two sites that I know have done major reorganization and dropped a lot of old material, and one novelty site.

May 2005

June 2005

Grant Morrison: The DCU Revamp Guy
EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers
Microsoft’s Security Response Center: How Little Patches Are Made → A look inside the Microsoft patch-making process.
I, Cringely: Going for Broke – an interesting theory on the Apple/Intel deal
Windows rapidly approaching desktop usability → A great piece of satire
New Macs: Intel Inside

July 2005

The Comic Book Periodic Table of the Elements
UCSD Stonehenge
lowercase L
Top 10 Web fads
NPR : Shakespeare’s Tongue, Heard at the Globe in the original pronunciation
Harry Potter currency converter → From CNN/Money.
APOD: 2005 July 4 – A Panorama from Mauna Kea → Astronomy Picture of the Day

August 2005

September 2005

Curso de Photoshop! (Spamusement)
Talk Like A Pirate Day – September 19
No Mr. Ballmer, Microsoft Will not Win the Web
Is Katrina a Message from God? → Not a joke, but thought-provoking.
Alternative browsers pose challenge for cybersleuths

October 2005

November 2005

December 2005

January 2006

The Most Popular Myths in Science
Bombspotting: Police or Starbucks Baristas? → Who’s better at finding improvised explosive devices, the police or Starbucks baristas? (from Homeland Stupidity)
Failed Redesigns « Le «blog personnel» de Joe Clark → Website redesigns by people who should know better.
Tropical Storm Zeta – 27th in 2005 → Just running out of names wasn’t enough?

February 2006

Joss Whedon vs. Warren Ellis → Warrenellis.com: The Long March To Nerd Prom Begins
The Return of Sneakernet
ISC: Phollow the Phlopping Phish → A cautionary tale in which a hypothetical phishing victim does everything right…and still gets hooked.
TechEBlog WR-07 – A Real Transformer → Just a toy, but still interesting!
Light Pollution – and the Return of Night
Movie Jewelry Physics (2) → From the Esoteric Science Research Center
Movie Jewelry Physics (1) → From Czarina69
IE7 web developer checklist

March 2006

Stupid Politician Tricks: Linux hacked my website! → CentOS: It’s L-i-n-u-x, that is an Operating System, or Why every city council needs at least one geek.
Tales From the Public Domain: Bound By Law → Comic book from Duke University law school where the protagonist ‘navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property’ and copyright law.
National Wildlife PhotoZone
Safer Online Shopping Guide (via SANS ISC)
Eva Wiseman: An introduction to spoetry → Guardian Unlimited Books

April 2006

Standards in a Nutshell
The Cutest Human-Test: KittenAuth → Forget CAPTCHAS — let commenters prove they’re human by identifying kittens!

October 2006

Mars Rover Beginning To Hate Mars → The Onion: Unmanned Vehicle ‘Bored Out Of Its Mind’
100% Secure Firewall?
The beast has awoken; or, The beginning of Web 2.0 → Chris Messina on the wider implications of IE7
For Opera, smaller really is better → CTO Håkon Wium Lie says the company’s moving faster on the tech front than much larger rival Microsoft.
In Saturn’s Shadow → Photo of Saturn and its rings, backlit by the sun (from Cassini)
Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute → An interesting Alertbox column from Jakob Nielsen
Spread Opera – Analysis and options → An interesting look at why IE and Firefox have higher marketshare, and what approaches the Opera community might take to catch up.
Discworld Cake

November 2006

Rules for Writing
Warning Sign Generator
Firefox Myths Myths → Debunking Myths about Firefox from the Firefox Myths site
Dev Opera has launched! → Web developer resource site for Opera and building cross-platform web apps.

December 2006

The Perils of Colleen – Adventures in the Comics Industry
Opera 9.1 is out with fraud protection

January 2007

February 2007

Building a Steampunk Keyboard
Ghost Rider Studio Notes From Hell – Does it have to be a blazing skull?
Science and Faith Compared: A Flowchart
The Mozilla Manifesto
Paraglider sucked into killer storm → A paraglider survived being pulled up to 32,000 feet in Australia, and woke up in mid-air, encased in ice. Another glider caught in the same storm wasn’t so lucky.
Getting Clueful: Five Things You Should Know About Fighting Spam
George Takei on Starring in Heroes

March 2007

April 2007

May 2007

Who says clouds screw up observing?
Star Wars is like a fine wine…
Heroes Historical Accuracy (Eclipse)
Common Errors in English
The Roar of Comics: NOTHING WILL BE THE SAME!
People will click on anything → An experiment in advertising (title via ISC).
Wikipedia’s lamest edit wars

June 2007

uly 2007

August 2007

September 2007

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The REAL Problem with Twitter

Kelson — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:52:17 +0000

Forget Ashton Kutcher and Oprah, forget #unfollowfriday, forget 25 Random Evil Things about Twitter — the key problems with the social media / microblogging / broadcast IM / whatever you want to call it service boil down to two problems:

It asks the wrong question
It was designed around limitations of cell phone text messaging

The Wrong Question

Twitter’s prompt is not something general like “What’s on your mind?” It’s “What are you doing?” That encourages people to post things like “I’m eating lunch” or “Just got into work,” or “Posting on Twitter.” Presumably what they mean is “What are you doing that you think people would find interesting?” but of course that’s too long a prompt from a usability standpoint.

The thing is, there’s no reason to broadcast the mundane to the world. Don’t tell me “I’m eating soup.” Tell me, “Just learned that gazpacho soup is best served cold. I wonder if they eat it in space?”

Unfortunately, that means the signal-to-noise ratio can get pretty bad at times.

Outgrowing its Limitations

Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters of plain text so that the your name and comments can fit in a standard SMS message. Now, this is great if you use Twitter via text messages on your mobile phone. It’s not so great if you use Twitter on the web, or through a smartphone app like Twitterific on iPhone or Twidroid on Android, or through any of the zillions of desktop apps.

I don’t have a problem with the 140-character limit itself (it can actually be liberating in a way), though it would be nice to have some formatting options beyond all-caps and *asterisk bolding*.

The real problem is that links have to share that limit. URL-shortening services have exploded lately as people try to squeeze links into the tiniest space possible to save room for their precious text. Even if you use something as short as is.gd, just including one link means you’re down to 122 characters.

Plus URL shorteners come with a host of problems, in particular the fact that they hide the destination. That’s no big deal if the target matches the description, or if it’s a harmless prank like a Rick Roll, but it’s all too easy to disguise something malicious.

Seriously, if you got an email that said something like this:

Look at this! http://example.com/asdjh

Would you click on that link? Even if it appeared to be from someone you know? That’s just asking to get your computer infected by a virus, trojan horse or other piece of malware. Or to see something you wish you could unsee.

Better Link Sharing: Facebook

I hesitate to bring up Facebook as a good example of anything, and I know the current layout is largely reviled by its users, but they really got posting links right.

When you want to post a link to your Facebook profile, you paste in the full URL. Facebook reads the page and extracts the title, a short summary, and possible thumbnail images. Then you have the normal amount of space to write your comment.

The one thing I don’t like about it is that it opens the link in a frame with a Facebook “toolbar” at the top, but aside from that, it’s much cleaner and more informative. I mean, compare this:

to this:

In the Facebook example, it pulled in enough information that I didn’t even need to add a comment. The link itself consists of meaningful words, there’s an indication of where it goes (googleblog.blogspot.com), an excerpt…and then of course there’s the image.

In the Twitter example, I made an effort to come up with a description (many people don’t bother), and then the link itself is just gibberish.

I’d like to see at least some of this capability in Twitter.

Maybe make links a separate field, so that the message itself doesn’t have to share those precious 140 characters, and have some sort of fallback for SMS users and older applications.

Or maybe just offer enhanced display on the Twitter website and on newer apps. Automatically follow the links (up to a certain number of redirects), extract a title (if there is one) and display something a little more legible than http://is.gd/rOoi

Come to think of it, that second option could be implemented in any Twitter client, or in a Greasemonkey script, without making any changes to Twitter itself. Hmm…

Summer of the Browser

Kelson — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:07:47 +0000

Firefox: The new release candidate Firefox 3 RC2 is out. No date yet on the official launch, but they’re still saying June. Also, developers are starting to talk work that’s gone into what will become Firefox 3.1, such as completing CSS3 selectors support.

Opera: A new Opera 9.5 preview came out today, showcasing the browser’s new look. Also, the Opera Core team takes a look at what you can do if you put hardware acceleration on the whole browser.

Internet Explorer: IE8 beta 2 is scheduled for August. I’m looking forward to seeing what they’ve done, and figure I’ll start updating sites to accommodate changes. I held off changing too much when IE8b1 came out, because some of the differences were obviously bugs (triggering the Caio Hack, for instance; and yes, I reported it).

Flock has been moving ahead with small, rapid releases, adding integration for new services each time. They just added Digg and Pownce in Flock 1.2 a few days ago. Now they’re getting ready to start on Flock 2.0, which will merge in all the new capabilities of Firefox 3. That means it’ll get new rendering capabilities, better memory management, probably EV certs and such.

Sci-Tech Links

Kelson — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:47:11 +0000

Scientists have built a computer model of the Neanderthal vocal tract based on fossils, and have simulated the kinds of sounds they could have produced. Ever since I read Robert J. Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax novels, I’ve been fascinated by the idea that there were two distinct human species, living side by side, for perhaps thousands of years. What happened to them? Did our ancestors kill them off, or interbreed with them? Did they fail to adapt to a changing climate? (via Slashdot)

On a related note, it seems that Expelled, the anti-science propaganda film that actually invokes Godwin’s Law by claiming that “believing” evolution leads to Nazis, opens this weekend. I’m curious to see how badly they misrepresent things (it’s always best to look for yourself, instead of just taking other people at their word—that’s the whole idea behind science, after all), but I can’t bring myself to support them by actually giving them money. Meanwhile, Expelled Exposed is interesting reading.

Somewhat(!) less controversial, InformationWeek reports that Windows XP SP3 may be out as soon as next week. This reminds me: I really should look up some reviews of Vista SP1 and see if it’s improved matters any.

Still in software, dria.org explains why the AwesomeBar is awesome. That’s the nickname given to the new address bar in Firefox 3, which lets you search your browser history as you type. It’s the reason I never went back to Firefox 2 after trying out one of the later FX3 betas, and why I’ve installed Fx3b5 on two more machines. The Opera 9.5 previews have a similar feature, but Firefox’s implementation is better visually. It’s easier to spot the page you want, and over time, it learns which pages you visit more often. It’s so much faster to type a word or two than to hunt through the bookmarks menu. (via Asa Dotzler)

[Edit] I forgot to include IEEE’s article on how copyright law applies to websites, What Can You (Legally) Take From the Web?

Finally, ***Dave relates an incredibly cool story of going to see Avenue Q and what happened after the show. I had no idea that (at least in New York), the “Give Me Your Money” segment was actually collecting for a charity.

Linking the Real and the Virtual

Kelson — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:45:14 +0000

The WaSP Buzz’ article on a new mobile web browser test made mention of phones that can read QR Codes—one of several types of 2-D bar codes that you see on things like shipping labels. In this case, the idea is that you can point your phone’s camera at the QR code and it’ll decode it and send you to the appropriate URL.

My first thought was that this was just like the CueCat, which was a bar code scanner that you could plug into your computer’s USB port, then scan bar codes in magazines, or on cans of soda, or whatever, and it would tell your computer to bring up relevant information. It was marketed in the late 1990s, during the tech boom… and it was a total flop. No one wanted them. The company went under and had millions of the little scanners sitting around unsold.

But now there are multiple schemes in use for object hyperlinking. In addition to graphical codes, there are RFID tags, GPS coordinates, and short text codes that you can easily type into an SMS message or a web portal.

So why is this sort of thing working now, 10 years later? Is it a societal change? Was the CueCat ahead of its time?

I think there are two reasons:

CueCat was a single-purpose device. All the applications listed involve smartphones or other multi-purpose handheld devices. No one wanted a device that would only scan bar codes, but a phone/camera/browser/MP3 Player/bicycle that also scans bar codes? Sure, why not?
CueCat was tied to the desktop. Sure, you could plug it into a laptop computer, but you’d still have to take the object over to your computer to scan the bar code. Unless you’re a lousy typist, swiping the CueCat across your can of Coke isn’t that much easier than typing in www.coke.com. As a home user, you’re not likely to be scanning a dozen objects in a row (unless you’re cataloging all of your books for LibraryThing).

All the applications listed on that page are mobile. A tagging scheme does give you an advantage when you’re out walking down the street and see something interesting. It’s much easier to punch in a short number than to try to type a URL on most phones, easier still to point your camera at a graphic, and dead simple to pick up an RFID tag or pull in GPS coordinates.

Links, from the Astronomical to the Surreal

Kelson — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:01:02 +0000

The Value of Space Exploration, via Phil Plait’s response.

Neil Gaiman on The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, a painting by a madman that’s inspired its share of stories.

And from Comics Worth Reading, our WTF entry for the day: Paradise by the GoPhone Light. It’s a commercial done in the style of a music video, featuring Meat Loaf and Tiffany as the parents of a kid who wants a GoPhone. Completely surreal, especially once the random explosions start.

It’s just occurred to me that, aside from it being some sort of cell phone, I have no idea what a GoPhone is. [/me types "gophone" into Google] Ah, OK. Pre-paid cellphone. Meh. (And now I’m imagining how much spam is going to get posted to this thread. *sigh* )

Techno-weird Links

Kelson — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:47:02 +0000

Lisa the Barbarian: A woman poses with a viking helmet and a sword…and an Opera Browser T-shirt. (via Espenao’s Opera the Barbarian)

CNET UK presents The 30 dumbest videogame titles ever, including “Spanky’s Quest,” “Ninjabread Man,” “How to Be a Complete Bastard,” “Touch Dic” and “Attack of the Mutant Camels.” (via Slashdot).

Cowboy Bebop at His Computer — examples of media articles (especially about pop culture) in which the reporters (and editors) clearly didn’t do their research. The title comes from a caption on a still from Cowboy Bebop. That’s not the character’s name, and the character in question is female. It probably is her computer, though.

Archeophone Records: Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s. Comedians telling bawdy stories, recorded on wax cylinders. The write-up is PG, though the track list looks to be at least PG-13. Looked up after reading NY Times’ article on voice recordings from 1860 (recorded with ink on paper), which is also worth a read. (via Slashdot)

Edit: Forgot to list the (temporary?) resurrection of 1994-era home.mcom.com, the website of what was then Mosaic Communications Corporation and would soon be renamed Netscape. Subsequently picked up by Boing Boing and Slashdot. For more old web browsers, check out the Browser Archive at evolt.org. (via Justin Mason)

Geeky Links

Kelson — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 01:24:30 +0000

Another Geek Hierarchy. This one, instead of focusing on how geeks of all stripes rank themselves, portrays the way “mainstream society” ranks geeks. I appreciate that it includes sports geeks. I’ve never understood why it’s considered acceptable to paint yourself blue, wear cheese on your head and giant foam gloves for a sports team, but wearing a Star Trek uniform makes you an outcast. (via sclerotic_rings)

And several links found during a recent Wikipedia binge:

Diagram of video resolutions, many of which I had no idea had actual names.

Next time we go to the Bay Area, I want to check out the Computer History Museum.

The Hello World Collection. Sample programs in hundreds of computer programming languages.

Web News: Acid3 and IE8

Kelson — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 07:20:20 +0000

Two items of interest today: First, the Web Standards Project has announced the completion of the Acid3 Test. Like Acid2, it’s specifically designed to test features that are in the specs, but that have incomplete, buggy, or nonexistant support in current web browsers. Acid2 focused primarily on CSS, and Acid3 focuses more on scripting.

Also, Microsoft has come to their senses and announced that IE8, when encountering a web page that says it was developed for standards, will actually treat it that way instead of treating it as a page that was designed for IE7. This is a much saner approach to the version targeting scheme, which as previously announced would have (depending on developer response) either frozen IE in place or forced us to go through the same process all over again next time.

Strange Visitors

Kelson — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:04:56 +0000

There’s been a surprising number of visitors today to my post about getting up at 2:30 A.M. for last August’s lunar eclipse. Strangely enough, they’re not only looking for the same phrase, “lunar eclipse pictures,” but they have the exact same referrer, down to options and encoding. The fp-today parameter leads me to suspect that some module on Yahoo’s homepage (not one I can see, though) included a link to this set of search results. Though I suppose it could have been a newsletter or a blog with more regular readers than mine.

Another surprise: visits from commentary on last night’s Clinton/Obama debate. The comment thread includes a link to my post on JMS’s Londo/G’Kar campaign signs. Found while skimming the comments for links: T-shirts for the Capricorn ticket, Roslin/Airlock.

And then there’s the surge in searches for the Black Flash, no doubt inspired by people reading today’s Something Positive strip. In addition to landing directly on the profile, people are coming in from the Wikipedia article, and finding Flash Foreshadowing via an image search.

Skiffy Links

Kelson — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 04:44:27 +0000

The Beat has a couple of follow-up posts on the San Diego Comic-Con hotel issue: first, a wrap-up of the experience, then a post that puts San Diego into perspective, what makes it different from cities like New York or Los Angeles, and why just moving to Las Vegas won’t solve everything.

GTD In Space: Seven Habits of Highly Effective Spaceship Captains ranging from James T. Kirk to Malcolm Reynolds. (via ***Dave)

And, for the WTF-worthy, there’s Computer Love Day. As Mandriva puts it in their mailing:

Valentine’s Day is nearly here… February 14th, 2008. But think about it, who do you hang out with, who shares the good times and the bad ones, who drives you crazy but keeps your life together?………..Your computer, and it’s time to say it out loud: I love my computer!

Stylish Links

Kelson — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 06:35:50 +0000

2008: Year of the Layout Engine – CSS3.info takes a look at the four major categories of web browsers, and where they’re likely to go this year.

Also, Progressive Enhancement with CSS3. This is an approach I’ve been taking for quite a while, particularly with my personal sites, but it’s starting to creep into sites I’m building for work as well. Essentially: Build it to look decent in everything, but throw in enhancements to browsers that you know can handle them.

An example of progressive enhancement: the rounded corners on the tabs on my Flash site. They’re not critical to the design, but it does make it look better in Safari and Firefox. And in theory, Opera and IE will eventually pick up the capability. (Though in this case, since border-radius is still experimental, I’ll have to change the CSS when they do—so maybe it’s not the best example.)

Links: Safety Last

Kelson — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:08:45 +0000

Forklift Driver Klaus (a.k.a. Staplerfahrer Klaus)- a parody of work safety films in which a forklift driver blunders through his first day on the job, maiming fellow employees left and right. German with English subtitles. (via TV Tropes: Scare Em Straight)

And, on a more serious note, the Internet Storm Center is reporting on people finding malware pre-installed on digital picture frames, memory cards, etc. Something to watch out for with portable devices that can connect to your computer.

Linkage: On Fx and SFX

Kelson — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 04:12:34 +0000

VXWorld: Crossing the Uncanny Valley – on the current state of the art of photorealistic computer animation, from Final Fantasy through Polar Express to Pirates of the Caribbean and Beowulf. As pointed out, one reason that Davy Jones worked so well is that he doesn’t look human. (via Neil Gaiman)

Firefox Floppy Disks – remember when software came on 3½-inch floppy disks? Or 5¼″? Just for fun, someone split the Firefox installer across 5 disks, complete with appropriate labels… and even took it a step farther

Legality Links

Kelson — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:17:37 +0000

Organization for Transformative Works – dedicated to protecting the expression of fan fiction, fan art, etc. (via Naomi Novik)

Open Standards, One Web, and Opera – Just why are standards important, anyway? (via Opera Watch)

Speaking of Opera, their EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft has been making waves. Responses at CSS3.info, Web Standards Project, Slashdot (edit: more Slashdot), Asa Dotzler, Opera Watch, plus a Q&A w/ Haarvard. My take: Good luck on unbundling, but if they can force Microsoft to catch up with the rest of the market in terms of standards support, I’m all for it.

Nissan vs. Nissan. On my way to work I saw a bumper sticker on an XTerra that said “In support of our freedom, it’s my last Nissan.” Huh? There was clearly a web address below it, but it was too small to read at that distance. So I looked up the phrase, and apparently there’s been a long-running dispute over the domain name nissan.com, between a small computer business named after its founder, Uzi Nissan, and the Nissan car company. The dispute was eventually resolved (correctly, IMO, since he has a legit reason to use the name) in favor of the little guy. On the other hand, I don’t see why the site makes such a big deal about Nissan’s “French Connection” to Renault.