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WordPress 2.7 drops tonight for all the guinea pigs, er, users on WordPress.com. Looking forward to trying it out when it hits GA.
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New Google Reader UI. The ability to turn off unread count is probably the best thing here. But is it better than Helvetireader?
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The API docs for the YouTube player document a parameter that turns off the new default Search bar that suddenly appeared on every embedded YouTube video today.
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iTunes 8’s Grid View has more features than meets the eye, including some nice playback features.
Month: December 2008
links for 2008-12-03
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Interesting design resource for grid based design.
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Tyler Shields begins an interesting series on practical development considerations for application security, starting with "anti-debugging"–methods used to hinder the reverse engineering of a process.
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Lightweight JavaScript solution for transparent PNGs in IE6.
Obscure HTML element of the day: dfn
I’ve had an opportunity to do a little static HTML + CSS work recently, and have had a few educational and reeducational moments about the joys of doing basic web development–all the stuff that a good CMS like WordPress hides from you.
Today’s educational moment was a question of footnote treatments. My application had footnotes at the very bottom of its page, with nothing beneath them, and did inpage links to the footnotes. But it was linking to the footnotes from a part of the text that was close to the bottom of the page, so the footnote was already visible. As a result, when a user clicked a link to get to the footnotes, nothing happened–the footnote was already there, and there was no more page to scroll up.
There are ways around this. Daring Fireball has a lot of empty space on its pages below its footnotes, meaning that the page can scroll to place the footnote at the top. But the bug got me thinking again about why I was doing the footnotes and how I could change the user experience. What if I moved the footnote text–which was generally some sort of quick definition–into a mouseover? I knew I could do it with acronym, but the text I was footnoting wasn’t an acronym so it wouldn’t have been semantically correct. Was there a semantic way to mark up the word or phrase being footnoted so that when moused over, a definition would show?
Enter dfn. See what that does? The dfn tag is basically tailor made for what I wanted to do, and is even reasonably well supported. FF3 and IE7 even automatically italicize the term.
I made one more change to my stylesheet to make it really explicit that more information was there for the mouseover, and applied the same rule that I had for abbreviations:
dfn {
border-bottom: 1px dotted #333;
cursor: help;
}
With that, the user got a dotted underline on the term, and a help cursor when they moused over.
I would probably make one more change if the application was expected to be printed, which would be to introduce some styles or JavaScript in the print stylesheet that would do an inline expansion of the definition. But for what I needed to do, dfn worked pretty well by itself. Yay obscure HTML elements!
Grab bag: Agile all the time
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Supported integration between Google Calendar and Apple’s iCal. Hopefully the iPhone won’t be too far behind.
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Interesting perspective on the role of the designer in agile development.
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More details on the YouTube virus.
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Simple truth: Product managers can live in the marketing or development organization or report directly to the CEO and they’ll still be product managers.
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Setting the record straight about Bush’s “regret” for the failure of pre-war Iraq intelligence.
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Sign the Open Government petition asking President-Elect Obama to publish transition materials in a barrier free way.
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You know those YouTube links you get sent? Check and make sure they’re really pointing to YouTube.
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Documentation of the RSS XSS vulnerability fixed by WordPress 2.6.5. Get out there and patch.
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Shifting from discovering new vulnerabilities to being more proactive about the defenses is good practice. I also think that finding your own vulnerabilities and fixing them before someone else finds them makes good business sense.
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Interesting analysis of Clinton’s new position in the Obama administration.
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It’s interesting how “national security” trumps every basic decency that has come to pass in the last hundred years in this country. Thanks for illustrating that so well, Mr. Bush.
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The new BSO download service gets a lengthy review. I’m very excited to see what repertoire becomes available. (Brahms Requiem 2008 and Gurreleider, please?)
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A much better look and feel for Google Reader.
Web birthday#8
This is my eighth birthday… since starting my blog in 2001.
Seems like it was an eternity ago. I didn’t even bother to blog on my birthday then–of course it was close to the end of my third semester of business school and I was going nuts. But then, I didn’t realize that I was starting a tradition.
I went back and looked at past birthday posts. 2001, as I mentioned before, wasn’t blogged. In 2002 I turned 30 and reflected on Bilbo Baggins’ birthday benediction (more on that in a minute). 2003 was gearing up for what turned out to be my last Microsoft Christmas party. 2004 was a reflection on over ten years of no one knowing you’re a dog on the Internet. 2005 was my quotation in Business Week over the Sony BMG boycott. 2006, a dinner with friends and reflection on mortality. And in 2007, turning Presidential and lining up my new iPhone.
This past year is definitely a year of change — new website, a shift to linkblogging, killer new job. But my birthday this year feels more like a homecoming. As my sister says, this is pretty much my first Facebook birthday, and the people I’ve reunited with over there are making it a very nice happy birthday indeed. In some ways, I think this is the first birthday in a long time where I’ve felt something like contentment. Probably a sign that vast upheaving changes are right around the corner.
Grab bag: BSO downloads
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Brilliant new download service does classical music right: you can buy by the track, major work, or album, and it’s available as MP3s or high fidelity recordings (the latter, unfortunately, only available for PCs). The real news is that they’ll be releasing new performances, including the performance of Daphnis et Chloe that I was in in 2007.
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HRC is officially on board. I think the dichotomy in NYT’s analysis of Obama’s policy (more diplomats or more soldiers, how can he afford both?) is disingenous and forgets where a lot of the defense budget is spent: on weapons system contracts that the Pentagon didn’t really want.
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The guest poster, Shyama Rose, is right on that tools aren’t as capable as security professionals in finding flaws. But her argument misses a critical point: the guild of security professionals isn’t large enough to find and identify one tenth of one percent of the critical security flaws that exist out there. We’re past the time when only manual analysis can keep us safe. That’s one of the reasons why the SAAS model at Veracode is an interesting solution–keep the security expertise on demand rather than trying to teach a developer how to use a tool to find security flaws.
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Computer security issues have real world, national security, life and limb implications.
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Annoyed by all the crud in your Google search results? A few tips on turning the SearchWiki features off.
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Master’s thesis looking at the performance of user generated tags in the context of LibraryThing.
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Amazing piece of WWII history surfaces, for sale by BT.
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Why a bias to action might not be the best thing.
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Dramatic retelling of the Kaminsky flaw discovery.