May 2009
Bob Graham's notebooks better than CIA's records →
The CIA claimed that Pelosi had been briefed in detail about the torture, and didn’t make any objection until long afterward. Therefore, if there is to be any kind of sanction for torture, it should hit the top Democrat who approved it as well as members of the Republican administration who ordered it. Pelosi, though, denies having been briefed about the torture.
Well, it turns out...
WatchColbert gets punked by the Keyboard Cat
resty →
58 lines of bash provides a better command-line interface to RESTful APIs, using curl under the hood. This should save me from running “man curl” several times a week.
(via Simon Willison)
The Little Manual of API Design →
Twittjr →
Hilarious!
Twittjr is a system that allows an IBM PCjr to search the public timeline on Twitter. In case you weren’t aware, Twitter is a social micro-blogging service introduced in 2006 and has over five million active users. The IBM PCjr is a personal computer introduced in 1984 and has a 4.77MHz processor, 128KB of RAM, and uses 360KB floppy disks for storage.
Watch: SUPERTRAIN! Express to Terror!! →
SUPERTRAIN has often been called the worst TV show ever made. It was definitely the most expensive at the time (1979) and almost bankrupted NBC when nobody tuned in to watch it. The series was canceled after nine episodes. But that’s all ancient history. Three decades later, it stands as an exquisite piece of entertainment.
via Kottke.org
What lies beneath the surface of New York Harbor? →
Teredos, which start life looking like tiny clams, grow up to be worms “as big around as your thumb, and nearly four feet long, with little triangular teeth,” says commercial diver Lenny Speregen. Like underwater termites, they devour wood. And Limnoria tripunctata, a.k.a. “gribbles,” are bugs about the size of a pencil dot that look like tiny armadillos, and eat not only wood but also...
Here’s where this insulting, degrading video to... →
While some people in it are really geeks, most aren’t, and the inclusion of some is baffling. Being a popular user of a “new media” site, or being a “new media” celebrity, doesn’t make you a geek. There’s absolutely no connection whatsoever. This video tarnishes true geek culture with new-media celebrities because — surprise — it was made by new-media people, many of whom try to be cool by...
Up With Grups: The Ascendant Breed of Grown-Ups... →
When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who...
Why the sea is boiling hot →
I’d never heard of Uncle Bob before today, but we need a lot more people like him in the Tech industry:
We professionals aren’t prefect. We all make mistakes. We recover from those mistakes by owning up to them as mistakes. We do not cover those mistakes by claiming that everyone else is wrong.
Confronting your mistakes and taking appropriate action is a discipline. It is a...
An approach to fair ad blocking →
The creator of Ad Block plus floats a fairly decent suggestion on allowing content publishers request that their visitors white-list their site if the reader visits fairly often (and chooses to support the site). I think the idea is OK.
Some sites, like Ars Technica—my employer for those unaware—, actually do a really good job at reigning in our ad departments and keeping things clean and...
The Big Eat SF: 100 Things to Try Before You Die →
Hoping I can hit at least one new place in SF when I’m out there in June! :)
“If your data is online, it is not private. Oh, maybe it seems private....”
– Schneier on Security: An Expectation of Online Privacy
Mercury More Exciting Than Mars? →
Mercury was once seen as a cold, dead little world, spinning around the sun unchanged for the past 4 billion years. No longer: Observations from the Messenger spacecraft say it’s anything but.