onfocus

I find myself referring to this classic by Eric Raymond frequently. I can't believe I haven't bookmarked it already.

If you wonder why people care about Net Neutrality, take a look at this image. It's going to give me nightmares. [via torrez]

"It turns out that milder sanctions can be swifter and more certain." Interesting article in the Economist about alternate strategies for curbing crime.

A TextMate plugin that provides a better "find within project" feature. Nice!

"What I didn’t appreciate, until I finally unzipped and untarred a copy...is the historical scholarship scribbled in the margins of this remarkable database, or document, or hybrid of the two." [via MetaFilter]

Getting the Google IDs of liking users is interesting, but I didn't know about "Reader's view of a feed", also interesting. [via kottke]

"To help you understand how Web Caches will treat a Web page, the Cacheability Engine will look at a URL (and optionally any images or objects associated with it), giving both specific cache-related data about it, and a general commentary on how cacheable the object is."

"I figured I'd chime in with my own experiences as a woman, except I want to try and reconstruct as best I can exactly how this instinctual fear evolved for me and what it really means in practice..." Chilling comments that made me see the world in a different way.

"[Fighting takedown notices] increase the 'cost' of sending cease-and-desists, as they make potential claimants consider the publicity risks being made to look foolish, bullying, or worse." These stories are great, but rare.

"...there is one asset that is still quite significant and the value of it is growing, not shrinking. It is their large, well trained, and well connected salesforces." A nice contrast to Clary Shirky's recent article Rescuing The Reporters. [via anil]

Hey, these HTML 5 attributes actually work on the iPhone! I set this up on the forms at Fuelly Mobile.

"I think you’re safer dealing with people who can improve your site holistically." Rafe responds to Derek's SEO rant.

A nice summary of fire lookout towers that dot Pacific Northwest peaks.

Nice, quick guide to setting ColdFusion error-handlers for public applications.

All Unicode characters in a handy table. Includes snowman. [via waxy]

"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]

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.

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]

Helpful step-by-step guide to fixing deadlock problems in SQL Server 2005.

"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]

"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]

"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.

This blog connects Mad Men episodes with advertisements and details from the time. [via kottke]

"...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]

An XMPP Interface for Desktop Notifications. Like Growl for web apps using an open standard. (Does Growl do this?)

Search for icons or browse icon sets they've indexed.

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.

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.

I honestly hope Merlin turns his blog into a treatise on creativity through Steely Dan anecdotes.

Anil offers a high-level view of Apple's current developer-relation woes. He blames their culture of secrecy.

Steven Frank is letting go of his iPhone until the Apple fixes serious problems with the app store.

This is great. I'd love to see more people aggregating tweets and offering them outside of the Twittersphere.

A promising publish/subscribe protocol that could help connect disparate applications. [via anil]