GridFox is a Firefox extension that overlays a grid on any website. If you can open it in Firefox, you can put a grid on top of it. It’s easy to customize, allowing you to create the exact grid you designed your layout around.
May 5th, 2008
Grand Theft Auto, already an addictive and distracting presence in my house, contains not only hours of relentless violence, humor and countless foreign accents, but a novel and lucrative mechanism for selling music:
It’s been well established how TV shows, ads and videogames are growing areas of music discovery and promotion. But until “GTA IV,” there’s been no construct that allows for the immediate identification and purchase of those songs from videogames. “GTA IV” has added that “buy” button, and record labels welcome the innovation.
Chef Grant Achatz, owner of the remarkable Alinea in Chicago, was diagnosed with tongue cancer last year. He’s in remission and slowly regaining his palette. The exchange of Achatz learning on his sous-chefs is bittersweet:
“How’s it taste?” Achatz asked the three chefs.
“Not there yet, Chef,” one said.
Achatz put his nose deep in the bowl. “More drops,” he said. He stood back again, his concentration intense.
One sous-chef added more lavender, while another took out a spoon and swiped a bit off the top of the mixture.
“Do you taste it yet?” Achatz asked him. He danced around his staff.
“Not really,” one answered.
BusinessWeek looks inside eBay’s quest for Craigslist:
The following month, Buckmaster sent an e-mail to Whitman, who retired as CEO on Mar. 31, saying that Craigslist was “no longer comfortable having eBay as a shareholder,” and wanted to either repurchase eBay’s shares or have eBay sell them off. That’s when Whitman said eBay wanted to buy the rest of Craigslist, making it clear eBay had no intention of selling its shares.
The game is afoot.
How to properly cook bacon in a pan. Also, how to properly dice an onion, a topic which has caused many battles between me and my special-lady friend.
SkinnyCorp used to, or may still have, a welcome mat which read:
You wish you worked here.
One of their lucky-bastard employees Joe built a 12x12 mini-ramp in his office. You’re thinking that the mat was right, aren’t you?
A VI implementation written entirely in JavaScript. Impressive.
Megan McArdle has a fantastic bit about the previously mentioned uselessness of Clinton’s “elitist-angering” gas-tax holiday:
Like about a zillion economists and most other people who were not whacked upside the head with a stupid stick, I think it’s worse-than-useless pandering. There’s not so much a debate as a bunch of economists saying “this is bad policy” and two campaigns sticking their fingers in their ears, saying “lalalalalalalalalal I can’t HEAR you!”
Everyone knows some douche-monkey who exaggerates the truth, but a new study says perhaps it’s not quite lying. It might be a form of self-improvement:
“Basically, exaggeration here reflects positive goals for the future, and we have found that those goals tend to be realized.”
Ladies and gentleman, I would like to announce that I am a billionaire.
Author James Kunstler, he of peak oil fame, Y2K fear-mongering and an utterly myopic rant at TED, makes an odd point in this BusinessWeek article that the end of cheap oil will destroy suburbia and Wal-Mart:
Our gigantic metroplex cities will prove to be inconsistent with the energy diet of our future. I think our smaller cities and towns will be reactivated. We are going to be a far less affluent society.
Well hello Ms. Negative Nancy. Ignoring the fact Kunstler has yet to be right about anything at all, and the fact he’s mostly an icon for urban-leftie-re-res who see suburbs as some form of plague, Kunstler might have a point if he didn’t take it too far. First, gas is still relatively cheap in the US. Second, our last big oil scare, back in the 1970s, didn’t seem to have any effect on suburban sprawl. Obviously, high fuel costs are going to cause shifts in the way we live, but there are plenty of more-likely scenarios than Wal-Mart closing down and mankind moving to centralized, small towns.
Like, oh, an increase in telecommuting, better mass transit, and a magic genie that creates oil from the tears of suburban emos.
Noise.↬
May 4th, 2008
Not a damn one of them makes things better.
Every where you turn, some new service is springing up to clutter your world with noise. Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, RSS, FriendFeed, text-messaging, Dodgeball, MySpace, blogs, the list goes on. All of them seem to encourage drawing out a twenty-minute conversation over drinks into a week long extravaganza of micro-updates. If so desired, I could spend my entire life reading up on the seemingly prolific online activity of friends, ex-girlfriends, ex-roommates, co-workers and the assorted motley crew of somewhat-close-but-not-really-close acquittances one acquires on one’s adventures.
It’s exhausting knowing what everyone is up to. Exhausting just staring at the day-to-day online path my friends and family tread. The more noise I add, the more I seek, hoping for that rare occasion of signal. Fearing missing it. In a constant mode of addition, drawing in as much breath as possible for the ever slimming chance of oxygen.
Everyone’s seen everything by the time you send it. Everyone’s heard about everything by the time you mention it. And while I can appreciate the glory of an ever-expanding stream of new from which any one can drink, I can mourn the moments in conversation where two individuals passed cultural notes each one lacked. I can yearn for conversations with less meta and more data. Let me have my nostalgia.
Worse, so accustomed does one become to there being nothing new, you almost start to forget all the wonderful bullshit that makes up your week. You take it for granted that every party has already read your Twitters on how your day kinda sucked, and you bought a new hat and you were thinking about why August: Osage County is such brilliant American stage drama. You answer “What’s new?” with “Nothing much,” which, unless you just saw the person five hours ago, is a complete lie.
You forget to share, because you assume you already have.
These new-fangled whatzits and widgizmos are connecting us to our detriment. They’re turning us into boring machines of constant broadcast. 24 hour news channels with an ever smaller range of topic. We’re stuck having conversations we’ve already had some where else.
The absolute most fun one can have on a weekend is the first drink with a good friend. Those first thirty minutes of the run down and shared concern and laughter and mutual appreciation for the shit and glory of each other’s mundane existence.
And god dammit if you’re not all ruining it.
Not sure where I stand on this, but it’s obvious that the ethics behind attorney-client privilege occasionally conflicts with general morals:
The obligation to keep a client’s secrets is so important, they say, that it survives death and may not be violated even to cure a grave injustice — for example, the imprisonment for 26 years of another man, in Illinois, who was freed just last month.
Alright. Given. The attorney-client privilege is so fundamental to our legal system that waiving it has to be stigmatized. But there’s a weird logic here:
“I prefer to draw the line at the life-and-death situation,” said Monroe Freedman, who teaches legal ethics at Hofstra. “That situation is sufficiently rare that is doesn’t present a systemic threat. If that is extended to incarceration in general, it would end the sense of security clients have in speaking candidly with their lawyers.”
Incarceration is, in many ways, a life-and-death situation. And I don’t mean the violent nature of prison. When in prison, your entire livelihood and ability to actively pursue life is hindered to such a great extent that it should probably quality as a life-and-death situation. If a lawyer has privileged knowledge that can save a life, including from incarceration, exceptions should be allowed at the lawyer’s discretion.
Read the full article to get a sense of the issue with some perspective from the different sides.
A clever advert for some type of paper-holding device that’s been done before, but remains pretty great to watch. (via Textism)
Apparently the best way to seal the deal isn’t through empathy, but by thinking about the deal through the other person’s perspective.
A nice run-down of the differences between Obama and Clinton’s approach to the economy.
May 3rd, 2008
A list of the 100 best comic series, or multiple issue runs within a series, according to the Comics Should Be Good community. Not a bad list.
It started with this article in Portfolio, where Jim Giffin of Warner Brother’s advocated for a universal fee attached to all consumer’s internet-service bills that would go directly to the record labels:
Warner’s plan would have consumers pay an additional fee—maybe $5 a month—bundled into their monthly internet-access bill in exchange for the right to freely download, upload, copy, and share music without restrictions.
David Barrett, an engineer for Akamai, criticized the plan:
“It’s too late to charge people for what they’re already getting for free,” says Barrett. “This is just taxation of a basic, universal service that already exists, for the benefit a distant power that actively harasses the people being taxed without offering them any meaningful representation.”
And now it seems Akamai has fired him:
Akamai engineering manager David Barrett, who spoke on the record as being opposed to the Warner Music sponsored music tax (more) last month, was fired on April 25, sources say.
I’m sure one has nothing to do with the other.
Paul Collier’s summary of the food crisis has both depth and breadth:
The sharp increase in the world price of staple foods is an inconvenience for consumers in the rich world, but for consumers in the poorest countries, especially in Africa, it is a catastrophe…
The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something that is entirely feasible. The most realistic way to raise global supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market…
Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale…
Brilliant shit.
Bad Science digs deep into this whole “Pixie dust regrows finger” story that’s floating about, and figures out it’s almost entirely bullshit:
Simon Kay, professor of hand surgery at the University of Leeds, saw the before-and-after pictures, and says: “It looked to have been an ordinary fingertip injury with quite unremarkable healing. This is junk science.”
Wondering why gas in the US is so cheap compared to other countries?
Relatively low taxes have kept pump prices far below most other developed nations, which some say is precisely why the current runup is so painful.
Jason Kester makes a marvelous point about avoiding any programming language feature that hails itself as “magic”:
So you turn that feature on for all your pages and start to trust it. You get used to it. You take it for granted. You forget you’re even using it. Then suddenly something weird starts happening with one of your pages and you can’t figure out why.
May 1st, 2008
Realizing they were about to create several hundred millionaires, a pre-IPO Google set up a series of talks from a trio of brilliant financial gurus to help guide their employees. Each gave the same advice:
Don’t try to beat the market.
A thoroughly interesting story on index funds, and what your broker would rather you not know.
How many people can be hired with $100 and what will they do during that hour? Not to ruin it, but you can hire about 25 folks in China.
April 30th, 2008
Anand Rajaraman makes a convincing case that search advertising is a giffen good. For those wondering:
For most goods, demand decreases as price increases. A Giffen good defies this normal market behavior — the demand for it increases even as its price increases.
Matt Tyson and Mike Grimes grabbed local bands in Chapel Hill, Austin, Memphis and Kansas City and visited some damn fine barbeque places. On Fiorella’s in Kansas City:
The burnt ends (slightly charred ends of a smoked brisket) and pork ribs were amazing, possibly the best barbecue we ate during the trip.
Damn straight.
Vanity Fair’s piece on James Frey, the first true interview since the Million Little Pieces saga two years ago, makes for a great read. The narrative of Frey changing from a reluctant participant in the sham into a caricature of himself is particularly provoking:
Under the klieg lights of celebrity, he embraced the badass role he had written for himself. He now began standing by his book as straight nonfiction. He emphasized his honesty, saying on Oprah in October 2005, “If I was going to write a book that was true, and I was going to write a book that was honest, then I was going to have to write about myself in very negative ways.”
And a great quote by Normal Mailer on memiors:
“That’s why a writer writes his memoir, to tell a lie and create an ideal self. Everything I’ve ever written is memoir, you know, is an inflated vision of the ideal Platonic self.”
An interview with Michael Hanlon on his new book Ten questions science can’t answer (Yet!). Lots of interestings bits scattered throughout. On animal sentience:
People used to put pigs on trial for murder in the Middle Ages.
On what society should do with the stupid:
…some people get perversely offended if you suggest that there are innate differences in human abilities. I don’t understand why that’s so. I think people are uncomfortable about talking about genetic difference in humans, there’s all sorts of horrible eugenics implications, but it’s common sense that obviously not everybody is the same.
Jordan Bunnell has posted step-by-step directions on hacking a Verizon EVDO modem into the Macbook Air chassis. Jealous.
A poorly-executed, but still interesting look at super hero themes in high fashion. The future is slowly arriving.
While “fill the cup” might be a terrible tag line in the wake of the video-that-shall-not-be-named, take a moment and give to the World Food Program. The food crisis has taxed their coffers:
Short of cash, the World Food Program, the United Nations agency that feeds the world’s poorest people, can no longer supply 450,000 Cambodian children with a daily breakfast of domestically grown rice supplemented by yellow split peas from the United States and tuna from Thailand.
This won’t be the only program to go away as food prices continue to rise. And because I like to set a good example.
Turns out we’re not number one in gun violence:
Although America accounts for 40% of firearms in civilian ownership, people put them to more deadly use elsewhere. The gun murder rate in Colombia and South Africa, for example, is much higher than in America.
Take that Mr. Moore!
Albert Hoffman, inventor of LSD, is dead:
In death, he said, “I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that’s all.”
Oh for fuck’s sake, just throw a dinner party. Webcam wine-tastings are officially creepier than anything Chris Hansen has done.
The iPodObserver has a leaked “photo” of the rumored second-generation iPhone:
If the image proves to be legit, however, the glossy black finish will make a nice addition to the up-and-coming executive’s tech stash.
When was the last time a “leaked” photo of a rumored Apple product ended up being legit?
Command postsers from Atmostheory. Clever.
CSS variables have all the markings of a brilliant idea:
For those that have never considered the idea, here’s why variables would be so useful: imagine you have a common font-color declaration that you apply to all sorts of elements in your stylesheet; using a variable you could define the color once, making it much easier to change in the future.
The idea comes partially from David Hyatt, of WebKit fame, and if implemented, would save developers hours of time and make style sheets easier to maintain and share. Like most CSS advances, without a serious push by the community, we’ll likely only see a decent implementation in WebKit.
Transparency is generally a great idea, and the Transparency in Government Act 2008 seeks to make the US government as transparent as possible:
The draft legislation is an amalgamation of bills that have already been introduced, along with new provisions. If enacted, it would create historic changes in the way the executive and legislative branches provide information to the public, and Sunlight believes it would foster a better and more complete understanding by the public of how the government works.
You can comment on any section of the law. Nifty.
April 29th, 2008
Jason Snell of Macworld dug up some screenshots of the famously-never-delivered Apple operating system Copland:
But as I waded through the old files, what struck me was one of the promised features of Copland I had completely forgotten: an automated backup system that now resonates as a first hint of the Time Machine to come.
What struck me was how well the Platinum interface has aged.