2010 May 24, 6:26"What You See is What They Get: Protecting users from unwanted use of microphones, cameras, and other sensors," by Jon Howell and Stuart Schechter.
"We introduce the sensor-access widget, a graphical user interface element that resides within an application's display. The widget provides an animated representation of the personal data being
collected by its corresponding sensor, calling attention to the application's attempt to collect the data."
2010 May 10, 10:32Thanks to Matt -- this looks like another great site full of gifts for folks that I otherwise wouldn't know what to get... giftwishlisthumortoygeekvia:swannman
2010 May 10, 8:59Iggy Pop interviews Shepard Fairey, including his Obama HOPE poster and AP lawsuit:
"... but the American public is generally pretty superficial, so an image like that just allows them to project whatever limited idea they have onto it. Obviously, not everyone is like that—I
actually think there were a lot of people who were bummed by the image because they felt it was shallow propaganda."
"If I spend time conceiving and making a piece of art and somebody else sees that it has market value and replicates it in order to steal part of my market, then that’s not cool. But the way I make
art—the way a lot of people make art—is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important. It’s about making a work that is inspired by something preexisting
but changes it to have a new value and meaning that doesn’t in any way take away from the original—and, in fact, might provide the original with a second life or a new audience." artlegallawipshepard-faireyobeyinterview
2010 May 7, 6:29UMP instead of CORS for cross-domain access control: "...a developer can read only UMP and ignore CORS, yet still create safe code. This code can successfully message with CORS resources that do not
require credentials. UMP is therefore a way of messaging with the credential-free subset of CORS resources."w3csecuritywebbrowsertechnical
2010 May 6, 7:25Another subset of javascript and DOM access to make a sandbox: "FBJS is Facebook's solution for developers who want to use JavaScript in their Facebook applications. We built FBJS to empower
developers with all the functionality they need, and to protect our users' privacy at the same time."sandboxwebbrowserfacebookhtmljavascripttechnicalsecurityweb-sandbox
2010 May 4, 10:51Survey asks you for your gender and color blindness status and then shows you various colors one by one and asks you to type the name. The results of this survey are presented here. Very few
differences between genders but there's plenty of interesting results in this document.via:swannmansciencestatisticscolorpsychologyxkcdhumorart
2010 May 3, 7:27Amazon has the most highlighted passages of Kindle users. Of course Dan Brown is all over that. But in 94th place of most highlighted is a passage from the 'Kindle Shortcuts' book on how to highlight
passages: "Go to top Notes and Clippings (Kindle 2) To create a highlight: use the 5-way controller to highlight the content you want to clip and then press the 5-way to save your selection...
Highlighted by 319 Kindle users"humorhighlightamazonkindletechnicalmeta
2010 May 2, 3:14"This document contains normative guidelines for web applications built by the Interface Development practice of Isobar North America (previously Molecular)." Glad to see coding styles and best
practices for HTML, CSS, JS, associated HTTP headers etc etc etccodecsshtmlhtml5javascriptwebbrowserprogrammingdevelopmenttechnicalvia:kris.kowal
2010 Apr 29, 11:59"Over Christmas break I wrote Santa my browser wishlist. There was one item I neglected to ask for: improvements to the browser disk cache." If only it were so simple as to just increase the max size
of your HTTP cache...performancehttpwebbrowsercachetechnical
2010 Apr 29, 11:45"...Well guess what? The demand for hotel WiFi has not gone away, quite the opposite, a growing number of hotel guests not only demand the hotel they book have proper wireless access but most will
consider *not* staying at a hotel that can't meet their basic access needs." hotelwifitechnicalstatisticstravelnetworkinternetwirelessvia:boingboing
2010 Apr 21, 6:53"Lindsey Simon has got a powerful update to BrowserScope, the community-driven tool to test and profile browsers. The new feature is exciting as it truly delivers the “community-driven” piece at
scale: you can now add your own tests to the corpus, TestSwarm style."webbrowsertestgooglebrowser-scopeinternettechnical
2010 Apr 21, 6:48"The Web Open Font Format, already backed by Mozilla and many type foundries was accepted by the World Wide Web Consortium yesterday, marking the first stage in its standardization. The submission
included a surprising new sponsor: Microsoft."fontmicrosoftwebinternettypographyarstechnicabrowsertechnical
Sarah and I are just back from a successful wedding planning trip to California. We now have cake, food, officiant, makeup, and some other things. Planning weddings is tough. It was also, of
course, a pleasure to see my parents who made home made pasta -- yum!