Reddit Home PageReddit is a really interesting, stripped-down, fast social bookmarking site; while it doesn’t have the CSS/Web 2.0 props of Magnolia or Digg, neither does it have the excruciating wait time or incredibly heavy page load (both are easily over 250KB home pages). Reddit weighs in at under 50KB and has sensible caching commands, so the browser isn’t constantly following some insipid order to check for new content every time you click something. It’s style is very spartan, but conveys all the... [More]

King and KingmakerChile’s Gen Pinochet dies at 91 (BBC) brings the sad, sad news that a true monster no longer walks among us. Naturally, since he’s dead, it’s time to start remembering that “[d]espite his human rights record, many Chileans loved him and said he saved the country from Marxism.” (emphasis added). Despite? That’s all he’s known for! Probably everybody loved him except for the friends and family of the “3,000 people [who] were killed or “disappeared” during his rule which ended in 1990.” Instead make sure to... [More]

This portfolio page by Jonathan Yuen offers a unique Flash experience: its navigation is quite nice. The stark and simple silhouettes are mostly static, but some small pieces move: the fish swim around, clicking the finger makes ripples on the pond, the butterflies flutter. Combined with the music, it’s quite pleasant to look around, including the cryptic navigation links—for those not versed in whichever language they’re written in—and the horizontal scrolling. It’s well worth a visit.

Threat to CivilizationThe War on Christmas has begun. The opening salvo of 2006 is brought to you by this article, Woman faces fines for wreath peace sign (Yahoo News), which brings us the sad tale of Lisa Jensen, who was lying her face off when “said she wasn’t thinking of the war when she hung the wreath” (pictured left). Her arch fiend—and the enemy of a peaceful Christmas—Bob Kearns, said in a phone interview that he couldn’t allow it because it would pave the way for other forms of expression, like saying we should “drop... [More]”

Howard ZinnA recent speech, The Uses of History and the War on Terrorism by Howard Zinn (Democracy Now), shows that Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present (Amazon), still has a fire in his belly. It’s most excellent and well worth reading from start to finish. To make sure everyone’s awake and that they know they’re at the right lecture, he starts with a clear, succint, impossible-to-misinterpret topic sentence for his essay:

“They’ve taken over the country. They’ve taken over the policy. They’ve driven us into... [More]”

Following closely on the heels of the self-outing of the programmer of the Windows Vista shutdown menu is The Design of the Mac OS X Shutdown Feature by Arno, by one of the designers of the same feature in OS X (which hasn’t changed in 5 years now).

OS X Shutdown menu

After first sympathizing with Microsoft that managing a product as big as an operating system is incredibly difficult—and mentioning that Copland’s problems were in large part “due to an inability to manage this complexity”—he concludes by saying that,... [More]

“If you think that disagreeing and offering excellent reasons for your thinking will change anyone’s mind, you must be new on this planet.”

For a hard-hitting look at the neoconservative vision—in light of the disasters it has thus far engendered—there’s Neo-Con Futurology by Stephen Holmes (London Review of Books). Ostensibly a review of Francis Fukuyama’s latest book[1], it comprises a bold condemnation of that vision and of the blinkered philistines that wrought it for us. In particular, he focuses on the democratic agenda to which they have clung for the last several years. They have, with the help of a media willing to put in the time selling the idea, managed to make... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

One of the features we expect from a collections library is sorting. You should be able to use generic library mechanisms to sort a list of any kind of element. Most libraries include a generic sort function, to which a comparison functor (object or function pointer) is passed. This functor is called repeatedly on pairs of elements until the list is sorted.

Let’s define the simple class we’ll use in the... [More]

Keith Ellison, Terrorist?The United States has its first Muslim Congressman in Keith Ellison (D-MN). It’s good timing and he seems a good sport as the racist shitheads come crawling out of the woodwork—shitheads like Glenn Beck, who interviewed him on TV recently. CNN’s Beck to first-ever Muslim congressman (Media Matters) has the lowdown on this new low in American television. He was unutterably rude to the Congressman, hiding behind a “I’m just askin’ what everybody’s thinkin’” facade.

You can hardly blame Beck for his... [More]

Straight Outta LynwoodIt seems that the world, through the Internet, has finally developed a place where Weird Al Yankovic’s special genius can shine. A truly talented performer is becoming more mainstream than he ever was. And his new stuff is just as good as he’s ever been, from the free song download done in the style of “Save the World” charity songs from the 80s, Don’t Download this Song (video drawn by Bill Plimpton and also available for free online at his MySpace page) to the brutal parody of James Blunt... [More]

The Sales pitch is low and away (Macalope) tells us that Steve Ballmer is all agog over Vista. Hardly surprising considering the source, who’s widely known as “monkey boy” throughout developer circles for his excitable antics. Drinking your own kool-aid is almost never pretty, but Steve takes a big ‘ol swig for us:

“Asked about the timeline for Vista service packs, Ballmer quipped that as it is the highest-quality, most secure and reliable Windows operating system ever, there should be no need for a... [More]”

Normally, optical illusions are the stuff of chain letters and AOL home pages. Those found on the pages at eChalk optical illusions are a cut above that. The two most impressive ones are Colour perception and Colour perception 2. It’s hard to believe that there is no trickery, but, if you need to, take screenshots of the before and after to prove it to yourself.

Color PerceptionColor Perception 2

These tests are especially interesting for designers, and especially graphic designers. On the web, not only must you remember not... [More]

See how fast you can type! is a simple JavaScript-based typing tester. It counts mistakes and words per minute. On a stationary (non-laptop) US-English keyboard, I got:

“Wow! Your typing speed (with 2 mistakes) is:

“98.14 wpm
404.52 cpm”

Read it and weep.

Exploding Blue DanubeIf you’re only familiar with Monty Python through the movies or audio albums (like the Final Ripoff), this list of 59 amazing sketches of the Monty Python will be something new. They are all hosted on YouTube (for now) and some have Japanese subtitles (though don’t let that throw you—they are in the original English).

Thanks to Reddit users, we also have another old favorite, The Four Yorkshiremen.

Sean Bell Shooting Crime SceneSean Bell was murdered in Queens, NY early one morning in late November. He died in a hail of 50 bullets fired by New York City police officers. See A Fatal Police Shooting in Queens (New York Times), an interactive graphic of the crime scene (Flash). As usual in these situations, the officers involved have been remanded to administrative positions (taken off the street). Regardless of the circumstances, police officers get the full “innocent until proven guilty” treatment, not only being able to stay at large... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

Develop your web application using Firefox. Validate your (X)HTML, validate your CSS, test your JavaScript. Tweak graphics, tweak layout. Get the client to sign off. Now that everything’s looking and working just right, it’s time to get it running in IE. Fire up IE and load the application.

?!?!

Lingering... [More]

As of today, there are new rules in effect governing storage of electronic data for companies doing business in the United States. Though the title of this article is a bit misleading, New rules compel firms to track e-mails (Yahoo), it’s more or less true. More accurately, companies will have to keep track of every scrap of digital detritus that may be needed in possible future lawsuits.

“The rules, approved by the Supreme Court in April, require companies and other entities involved in federal... [More]”

The BMI, or Body-Mass–Index, has been in the news a lot lately. Whether because of runway models, whose BMIs are dangerously low, or because of kids in first-world countries, whose BMIs are dangerously high. The BMI myth by Peta Bee (The Guardian) takes a look at the utility of this measurement in determining health. As usual, now that the public (as well as insurance companies and government agencies) has glommed on to this statistic as the final say in health, scientists have taken a look at it and found it wanting.

Calculating... [More]

“Almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching.”

Humility should be taught in school, along with tact, ethics and critical thinking. And not just in graduate school, but early and officially. Naturally, out-of-class experiences at most schools impart valuable lessons in humility and tact, though these are, in general less structured—and more painful—than they ought to be. Instead of actually learning tools that will make us better people, we learn the coarse rules that make us better workers. Even though we spend at least 13 solid years... [More]

Here’s how America’s media and intellectual elite help Americans keep track of what’s important. Two recent articles about former presidents serve as illustrations below.

A Jihad on Jimmy

The first example comes from one of America’s leading lights of scholarship: The World According to Jimmy Carter by Alan Dershowitz (Huffington Post). In this, the eminent israel apologist and all-around war hawk takes Carter to task for his latest book about the Middle East, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid (Amazon).[1] After taking a moment for the... [More]

The recent Mark Foley scandal in the US dragged the issue of pedophilia back into the limelight. It’s an issue that has increasingly gripped public fears, resulting in medieval public registration programs and increasingly inflexible laws. By simply reading the mainstream media, one would think that child predators lurk around every corner and it’s only a matter of time before every child is preyed upon.

Hurting the Innocent

As irrational fears go, it ranks up there with the fear of... [More]

“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.”

“You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time. (Bertrand Meyer)”

Lookup for earthliThese days, it’s incredibly hard to find a domain name that hasn’t already been taken. This odious process usually involves going to a domain name provider and typing in a desired name, hitting submit and hitting back when the ensuing page shows that the desired name is taken. PC Names has found a perfect use for Ajax, testing the domain name you’ve typed as you type it and showing the results for .com, .net, .org, info, .biz and .us below.

There are other tools as well, for searching all... [More]

Take a look at this extremly short article, US carried out madrasah bombing (Times Online). It gives us the following information:

“The bombing of a Pakistani madrasah last month, in which 82 students were killed, was carried out by the United States.”

Initial reaction? Horror, of course. Or the numbed ghost of an emotion that passes for horror, when hearing of the murder of dozens of people you don’t know, from another culture, at extreme remove. An intellectual horror, if you will, if not necessarily a... [More]

In the article, Arabs’ Questions Throw Elder Bush on Defensive by Jim Krane (AlterNet), the elder Bush spoke before a more-or-less openly hostile crowd. One student used the forum to ask him what he had to say to the theory “that U.S. wars are aimed at opening markets for American companies and said globalization was contrived for America’s benefit”. Bush Sr., 82, responded:

“‘I think that’s weird and it’s nuts,‘ Bush said. ‘To suggest that everything we do is because we’re hungry for money, I think that’s crazy. I... [More]”

The article, Choices = Headaches by Joel Spolsky, starts with the following screenshot of Microsoft Windows Vista:

Vista 'Off' Choices

From there, he launches into a diatribe on a surfeit of choice. It’s pretty well-written, as usual from Mr. Spolsky, but somewhat poorly aimed, also as usual from Mr. Spolsky. The basic premise is a good one: don’t provide more choice than your customers know how to deal with. Provide just enough and no more. Extra functionality should be available to those who need it and no one else.

His... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

As of version 1.5, Java has blessed its developers with generics, which increase expressiveness through improved static typing. With generics, Java programmers should be able to get away from the “casting orgy” to which Java programming heretofore typically devolved. The implementation in 1.5 does not affect the JVm at all and is restricted to a syntactic sugar wherein the compiler simply performs the... [More]