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Kindle for Mac
It ain’t fancy, but it’s functional. It’s kinda sad that I haven’t used my actual Kindle in months, though I do find the Kindle iPhone app to be rather useful. I have high hopes for their iPad app, but in the meantime, this will do.
Articles - The Wikipedia App
Try clicking the screenshots in Safari (ooh, smooth animations) and then in Chrome (kachunk, kachunk, kachunk). Man oh man, do I ever wish I could have Safari’s performance wrapped in Chrome’s user interface. Oh yeah, and I’d like to replace WebKit Inspector with Firebug too, please. And a pony, I’d like a pony, too. By the way, Articles looks like a very nice way to read Wikipedia on your iPhone.
Coyote Tracks: Tim Bray in the Garden of Good and Evil
If your iPhone application wants to use an Internet protocol other than HTTP, or support a content type other than HTML/CSS/JPG/PNG/PDF/M4V/MP3, then the only way to do so is to build a native app and submit it for Apple’s approval. HTML5 in MobileSafari can certainly meet a lot of needs, but it’s a mistake to think that “the Web” is the same thing as “the Internet”. In other words, Bray was right.Did you see what Bray did there? He talked about “the mobile Internet” and then about “the people who create the apps.” He’s equating “applications Apple approves for sale” with “the Internet.”
"The i’s usefulness makes the Smart Fortwo look even more stupendously dumb, mainly because the Mitsubishi has a back seat and genuine cargo capacity."
2009 Mitsubishi i AWD - Short Take Road Test - Car and Driver. Youch.
"I think I am going to heed Brandt’s warning."
This makes me extremely happy. You see, a few years ago I was half-assed about my backups (I kept only one backup copy and it wasn’t automated), and I ended up losing a decade’s worth of archives (almost all of the software I wrote between 1990 and 2000, gone in an instant). Helping others to avoid a similar fate is our solemn duty. Spread the good word, brother Tom!
"On the other hand, Microsoft’s refusal to switch to Webkit gives Apple and Google a competitive advantage, and that is good because a web in which one browser has a monopoly stifles standards and innovation alike. By torturing the IE rendering engine every couple of years instead of putting it out of its misery, Microsoft contributes to the withering away of its own monopoly. That might not be good for the shareholders, but it is great for everyone else."
IE9 preview – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report. Amen, brother.
Do your backups
This and this made me think that I too should give a little lecture about backups, for those of you who don’t do them (you know who you are).
YOUR HARD DRIVE WILL FAIL. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in a year, maybe in three years, but it will fail, and on that day all of the data on it will be irretrievably lost.
PROTECTING YOUR DATA IS EASY. Buy two external disks that are each at least as large as the disk in your computer, and setup Time Machine to use one of them and SuperDuper! to use the other one.
NEED HELP? Ask me now, don’t wait until after your hard drive has failed. I can’t help you if your data is already gone.
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Microsoft is investigating new, public reports of a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. Our investigation has shown that the latest version of the browser, Internet Explorer 8, is not affected. […]
At this time, we are aware of targeted attacks attempting to use this vulnerability.
"(emphasis added) Microsoft Security Advisory (981374): Vulnerability in Internet Explorer Could Allow Remote Code Execution. Bravo to all those IT departments keeping their employees on IE6/7. Bravo.
Intel's Core I7-980X Six-Core Benchmarked
Wait, how am I just now learning about Intel’s “Turbo Boost”? Since the MacBook Pro refresh will almost certainly include a processor with Turbo Boost (and be capable of using it), it’ll be my first computer with “Turbo” since the ’80s. Speaking of the ’80s, I may need to re-watch some Knight Rider, so that when I get my Turbo computer I’ll be ready to compute like the Hoff (see the video, cf turbo button). Putting aside the kidding and corny name, Intel’s Turbo Boost is pretty slick.
"The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It’s viewed as the art of medicine. That’s a mistake, a huge mistake."
Annals of Medicine: The Checklist : The New Yorker. Excellent article. (But you’re gonna need Readability to get through it all.)
"In order to prevent an overloading of a single availability zone when everybody tries to run their instances in us-east-1a, Amazon has added a layer of indirection so that each account’s availability zones can map to different physical data center equivalents."
Matching EC2 Availability Zones Across AWS Accounts. Wow, I had no idea. And here I’ve been avoiding us-east-1a for just that reason!
Trailer for Logorama, the 2010 Oscar winner for best animated short film. Buy the full movie on iTunes.
Diatoms, Butterfly Scales, and Spicules (via SEEDMAGAZINE.COM § The Pre-Electric Slide)
