onfocus

"...none other than Corvallis stands out as the top city in the country for innovation — after you account for its size. New York is merely average." Some theoretical physicists are looking at new ways to measure the creative output of cities.

Awesome vintage terminal emulator with a hilarious incentive to purchase. [via waxy]

And apparently the Web is for complaining. [via seanyboy]

Some auto-generated ebooks based on top Stack Overflow questions in various categories.

"Are we are evolving our contract with society through our increasing interactions with digital platforms, and in particular, through what we've come to call the web?"

Fantastic engravings from an 18th century book on religious practice across the world.

Nice description of the terrifying uniform plague doctors wore in the Middle Ages.

Matt Cutts: "...we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content." Nice to see Google responding to the recent flood of criticism.

A jQuery port of Prototype's PerodicalUpdater method that includes a polling interval decay if updates aren't happening.

"...if after a few Ajax polls there’s no data, there probably won’t be for a while. Maybe the site is overloaded or the queue is backed up. In those circumstances the continued polling adds additional unwanted strain to the site." Another polling approach: increase the interval every time.

"And the greater risk is not of Flickr’s deletion of customers, but of the market’s deletion of Flickr. Because, after all, Flickr is a business and no business lasts forever. Least of all in the tech world." Valid concerns about Flickr, advertising, and how we fund the Web.

"If I had to give you a single piece of managerial advice, I would say: 'Your job with your nerd is to bring calm to their chaos'." The author of Being Geek on managing software geeks.

Kellogg's: not the best source for parenting advice.

A nice alternative to a standard AJAX poller that takes network latency and server errors into account.

Hey great! Alan Taylor is starting a new photo journalism project in February. Can't wait to see it.

"As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities." Great hypothesis. Hard in practice.

Paintings that capture alchemists, messy labs and all.

"It’s almost always better to correct than to unpublish."

Wait for it...

The lesson: "Create a service experience around what you publish and sell." Some nice words about MetaFilter and an interesting way to view online audiences: "Why Wasn't I Consulted?"

"But it is now also possible to use a Multi-domain UCC SSL certificate. This allows you to have a single certificate which covers up to 150 domains."

This is a good answer about responding to a server intrusion. The stuff of nightmares, but it's good to think about how to respond to a crisis when you're not in the middle of a crisis. [via anil]

400+ Moby Dicks!