More than a decade ago, the available web browsers—Internet Explorer, Netscape and Opera—differed widely in capability. Cutting-edge pages that worked in one browser either didn’t work at all in the others, or ceased to be cutting-edge. In those days, it was both common and appropriate to include a browser recommendation. “Best viewed in Internet Explorer” or “Best viewed in Netscape” flourished.

Today, however, the various browsers have standardized to a great degree. There is no longer a... [More]

Two articles drifted down my news-pipe today that caught my eye: Is anything nuclear ever really super safe small and simple? by Robert Cringely and The no-BS info on Japan’s disastrous nuclear operators by Greg Palast.

We’ll start with Palast, who was formerly employed as a “lead investigator in several government nuclear plant fraud and racketeering investigations”. He’s also the guy who proved that Bush & Co. stole the election in 2000 and who’s been working in England almost exclusively because no one will hire him in the... [More]

Seriously, calm down. Stop babbling about how the Japanese are a closed society that would rather immolate our whole planet, taking us all down with them as they refuse to admit any mistakes made in an effort to avoid losing face.

It’s all bullshit, just like all such blanket statements about millions of people are.

I’m going to put this right here: Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors by Dr Josef Oehmen.

Read it. It explains pretty well why a small explosion on top of a cooling tower in no... [More]

This was 45 years ago and the wheel of... [More]

Warning: semi-inchoate and stream-of-consciousness rant lies ahead. YMMV.

It’s time to reëxamine our myth, to reëvaluate the stories with which we allow ourselves to be lulled into a complacency about who we really are. Or rather and more precisely, what it is that America really is when the scales have fallen from our eyes, when the rose-colored glasses are put away, when we stop turning a blind eye to the horror that our lifestyles engender the world over just so we can continue living... [More]

Anyone who’s used Visual Studio 2010[1] for a non-trivial Windows Forms project has run into situations wherein the designer can no longer be opened. Usually, it’s because the class encounters null-reference exceptions when referencing data that is unavailable until runtime. Those are easy to fix: just avoid referencing that data in the constructor or load-routine while in design-mode.

However, sometimes Visual Studio has problems loading assemblies that it seems it should have available.... [More]

1. Salt (2010) — 6/10
2. Paranormal Activity (2008) — 5/10
3. Green Zone (2010) — 7/10
4. Evangelion 1.01 You Are (Not) Alone (2007) — 5/10
5. Evangelion 2.22 − You Can (Not) Advance (2009) — 5/10
6. Mean Machine (Kampfmaschine) (2001) — 6/10
7. 16 Blocks (2006) — 6/10
8. Shutter Island (2010) — 10/10
9. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009) — 6/10
10. I Love You, Phillip Morris (2009) — 8/10
11. The Lake House (2006) — 4/10
12. Greenberg (2010) — 3/10
13. The Rock (1996) — 7/10
14. The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)... [More]

The venerable Plastic.com is closing its doors for good this weekend. I’ve been a member for about a decade and contributed sporadically throughout. I saved my comments from the site before it goes dark and included them below. The context is often not there, but it’s an interesting compendium of issues from the last decade.

My stats were as follows:

• name: dur
• member since: Tue 23 Oct 2001
• karma: 8 (astute scholarly underrated succinct)
• favorite words: countries(16), already(10),... [More]

As usual, Stephen Colbert manages to encapsulate the problem with American media in a rant delivered to/in support of Mika Brzezinski on his show from the 18th (transcript below).

Mika Brzezinski Experiences Palin Fatigue by Stephen Colbert (Colbert Nation)

“Mika, you need to buck up. I know you think this story has no purpose other than to keep Sarah Palin’s name in the headlines for another news cycle. I know you think she has nothing to offer the national dialogue and that her speeches are just coded talking points mixed in with words picked at random from a... [More]”

Dear American Media, Political Talking Heads and Wonks of all Stripes,

If you’re going to insist on calling each other Nazis all the damned time, fine. I don’t even care that the shoe almost never fits.

But, if you’re going to invoke the dreaded Herr Göbbels (Wikpedia), at least pronounce his name correctly.

Take a close look, morons: that’s an umlaut, not an ‘r’.

While it’s inspiring that you actually manage the umlaut correctly, it’s a complete mystery why you all insist on adding an ‘r’ after... [More]

1. Goodfellas (1990) — 8/10
2. Cop Out (2010) — 5/10
3. Cloverfield (2008) — 3/10
4. The Joneses (2009) — 6/10
5. A Serious Man (2009) — 8/10
6. Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972) — 8/10
7. Fitzcarraldo (1982) — 9/10
8. Eraserhead (1976) — 7/10
9. Blue Velvet (1986) — 8/10
10. Dazed & Confused (1993) — 7/10
11. Wild At Heart (1990) — 8/10
12. Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) — 6/10
13. Factotum (2005) — 7/10
14. Broken Flowers (2005) — 7/10
15. Lost Highway (1997) — 8/10
16. Mulholland Drive (2001) — 8/10

Goodfellas... [More]

Late December/early January are what I call “guy movie month” here because the wife is away.

1. Inception (2010) — 9/10
2. Zombieland (2009) — 8/10
3. The Invention of Lying (2009) — 7/10
4. Surrogates (2009) — 7/10
5. Defendor (2009) — 8/10
6. 9 (2009) — 5/10
7. Primer (2004) — 7/10
8. Four Christmases (2008) — 7/10
9. Moon (2009) — 8/10
10. Fred Claus (2007) — 8/10
11. Family Guy − Something Something Dark Side (2009) — 7/10
12. JCVD (2008) — 8/10
13. The Expendables (2010) — 7/10
14. The Book of Eli (2010) — ... [More]

1. Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) (second half) – Umberto Eco
2. The Great War of Civilization (2005) – Robert Fisk (second half)
3. Naked Pictures of Famous People (1998) – Jon Stewart
4. The Drought (1965) – JG Ballard
5. Drowned World (1962) – JG Ballard
6. Spook Country (2007) – William Gibson
7. Free Lunch (2007) – David Cay Johnston
8. Stardust (1999) – Neil Gaiman
9. Heat (2006) – George Monbiot
10. Unbowed (2006) – Wangari Maathai
11. Grieche sucht Griechin/Mister X macht Ferien/Zeitungswesen in der Steinzeit... [More]

It was the start of the long week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve and it was time to start a new book. A quick scan of the book shelf revealed many interesting candidates, but most of those were a bit more challenging than a week of this kind warranted. But look who’s hiding on one of the shelves: good ol’ Dan Brown.

This copy of The Lost Symbol had been obtained from the local Salvation Army secondhand shop for only a couple of bucks. I’d gotten Brown’s two other books in the same way,... [More]

The article What WikiLeaks revealed to the world in 2010 by Glenn Greenwald (Salon)offers a terse and eye-opening list of leaks in 2010.

The leaks range from revealing that U.S. forces are operating in Pakistan and Yemen—contrary to official statements by high-level U.S. officials—to revealing that the Obama administration folded on prosecuting Bush-era human rights transgressions (as well as avidly continuing them) to the Pope refusing to aid investigators in sex abuse investigations to dozens of other instances... [More]

You would think that this article, Down and Out on $250,000 a Year by Karen Hube (Fiscal Times), is an example of Swiftian satire. You would be wrong.

“The bottom line: It’s not exactly easy street for our $250,000-a-year family, especially when it lives in high-tax areas on either coast. Even with an additional $3,000 in investment income, they end up in the red — after taxes, saving for retirement and their children’s education, and a middle-of-the-road cost of living — in seven out of the eight communities in... [More]”

The author wound up an article on recent findings on climate change with the following paragraph:

It is, apparently, indefinitely delayed due to the advent of a completely new class of devices that no longer need desktops. Pity. In a recent discussion on Hates Software, one commenter noted:

“Those of us with jobs and credit cards won’t put up with that nonsense and will pay for the problem to go away.”

“That nonsense” to which he refers is any of the typical just-download-the-sources-and-compile-it-yourself claptrap peddles by those who don’t understand a good-goddamned-thing about usability.... [More]

The article Leak Soup by Morgan Meis (The Smart Set) discusses Ambassador Ischinger’s[1] response to Wikileaks actions, published in the New York Times, in which he wrote: “[t]his is more serious: It is about war and peace, and it can be about life or death.”.

“And that is where Ambassador Ischinger lost me for good. That is where I went over to the other side, where I became a Julian man. There is only so much bullshit that any man can ingest, and I’ve been topped off. Mr. Ischinger is in the same lineage as all the noble men... [More]”

tl;dr: This is a long-winded way of advising you to always be sure what you’re comparing when you build low-level algorithms that will be used with arbitrary generic arguments. The culprit in this case was the default comparator in a HashSet<T>, but it could be anything. It ends with cogitation about software processes in the real world.

Imagine that you have a framework with support for walking arbitrary object graphs in the form of a GraphWalker. Implementations of this interface complement... [More]

I’d heard that Java was a memory hog, but this is ridiculous:

Java uses 16 million terabytes of virtual memory

It’s impressive that the machine was responding at all, actually. :-)

The essay interpreting Eric Cantor’s blatant religious censorship as an art statement is brilliant.

“This defunding threat isn’t some cheap exercise in mindless censorship; it’s an anti-paradigmatic revolutionary work of conceptual art-banning. And, while its point of departure may be Senator Jesse Helms’s admittedly ground-breaking defunding of the National Endowment of the Arts over André Serrano’s Piss Christ, it’s not a derivative “Oooh, I’m a Christian, I’m so offended” because, as the... [More]”

If you browse through the new iLife videos, you’ll notice that the person doing the iPhoto demonstration is clearly using an OS X with a new UI style. The styling of the controls has changed subtly, with a stronger and darker blue highlighting line around the focused text-box and a much smoother look for the dropdown list:

Text fields & Popup menu

When the dropdown list is opened, the popup menu is much different than that in Snow Leopard, in that it’s now black and sports a softer shadow:

Popup-menu Open

Well, exciting stuff... [More]

Another NFL season is upon us. The Jets—weary, beleaguered, eternally unrewarded warriors—once again trudge to the line of scrimmage. The New York Jets: Week One by Morgan Meis (The Owls) has sports writing that borders on poetry:

“His name is Darrelle Revis and … [i]t is his fate to be the greatest cornerback, the greatest. He is so good that he erases himself. Did you see him during that first game, on Monday Night Football even as the fog lifted? No, you didn’t see him. That’s because his defensive genius... [More]”

Just a quick note on Contador’s behavior in the Tour de France when he took advantage of Schleck’s mechanical failure on a mountain stage. Schleck caught Contador napping and managed to break free of the group with only Alexander Vinoukorov managing to keep pace. He was free and clear of the group and riding like a man possessed; it’s hard to say how it would have ended, but it certainly looked like Schleck was about to build on his lead over Contador.

Instead, his chain dropped and clamped... [More]

In the category of font-geek humor, the perennial whipping boy of the font stable fights back in the essay, I’m Comic Sans, Asshole by Mike Lacher (McSweeney's Internet Tendency).

“Need to soften the blow of a harsh message about restroom etiquette? SLAM. There I am. Need to spice up the directions to your graduation party? WHAM. There again. Need to convey your fun-loving, approachable nature on your business’ website? SMACK. Like daffodils in motherfucking spring.

“[…]

“While Gotham is at the science fair, I’m banging the prom queen... [More]”