Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

Courtesy a little bird, it’s possible to download Firefox 3.0 already, though it hasn’t been announced yet.
The latest public download is RC3:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0rc3&os=win〈=en-US
but if you remove rc3 from the URL, you get:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=win〈=en-US
which is a valid URL. (So much for security by obscurity.) Enjoy your early start on Download Day! (Tip o’ the hat to Dil.)
Update: Or [...]

I’m working on a Google Site for a group I belong to, and it’s been an uneven experience. The user experience for general editing is quite good, but things get very hairy very quickly when you try to insert “gadgets” onto the page. I assumed that adding, for example, a Google Map to a page [...]

In the last few days of the primary season, I’ve become utterly addicted to NewsJunk, Dave Winer’s new aggregator for political news and commentary. I’m not sure how, but the site has managed to maintain a high signal to noise ratio while still reaching far beyond the usual news sites. Last night, for example, it [...]

The talented Shimon Rura just launched a new service called tweet and shout: music people are talking about. It mines Twitter to find bands and musicians that people are talking about, and provides the number of people and tweets and cross-references with the Amazon sales rank.
What’s refreshing about Shimon’s work is that he admits the [...]

Google started baking some mashups into the main Google Maps interface earlier this week. As a Wikipedia editor, the one that intrigued me was the ability to hover over a feature on a map and click through to a related Wikipedia article. The question I had was, how do I change my article so that [...]

Still working on getting the new site up and running. I reinstituted the blogroll today, starting from scratch (it’s amazing how many links, old friends’ blogs particularly, have lapsed). If you’re reading this in RSS, you’ll have to go to the site to check it out.
I also removed the del.icio.us widget from my sidebar, because [...]

Google App Engine appears to be Google’s answer to Amazon’s web services—a simple, highly scalable development and deployment platform for web apps that need to scale. It’s an interesting offering that takes a slightly different tack from Amazon, with the requirement to build an app as a fully integrated stack (not to mention, the application [...]

I’m starting to think that people on social networks, like everything else, follow predictable principles of organization. You can be in an equilibrium for months, adding very few friends to your local aggregation of people, when all of a sudden someone new shows up, and you make dozens of connections in the next few days. [...]

Man. You can tell the Internet is getting boring when no one bothers to do April Fool’s day pranks. Except for the following:

Google: Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes. Answer a questionnaire and upload a YouTube video and you could be on your way to Mars!
Zero in a Bit: New Attack Class: XSNADOR. Because we [...]

It seems to be the day for oracular pronouncements about the Net. An engineer I work with told me about an intermittent network connectivity problem he had experienced yesterday. Sometimes he could get on the network and sometimes he couldn’t. The cause? A bad network cable! He said, “Normally with a network problem like this [...]

In looking for a source for the “https = armored truck between two cardboard boxes” analogy referenced in my previous post, I came across a list of other famous analogies by the author, Gene “Spaf” Spafford. Many of the ones cited need some context, but #7, which I reproduce below in its entirety, is completely [...]

The tagline for Mofuse is a little overhyped. As far as I can tell, they provide a nifty self-provisioning capability to take an RSS feed and turn it into a mobile device optimized page—kind of a turnkey version of Dave Winer’s NYTimesRiver. Of course I’m oversimplifying and it’s more than that, like the ability to [...]

Here’s a hypothetical. You are one of two firms in a duopoly for a critical service. You are accused of abusing your position to give your firm a competitive advantage by making it selectively harder for competing products to work across the Internet. You are given an opportunity to explain yourself in a public forum. [...]

Yes, LinkedIn has released an iPhone optimized UI, about six months after Facebook did. Anyone else think that LinkedIn could have used those six months to come up with an iPhone UI that looked more innovative and less like a direct clone of what Facebook did in a weekend?
Still, it’s nice to be that much [...]

I’m probably the last person in the world to hop onto del.icio.us, and now I’m wondering how I avoided it all this time. Especially now that my time is too scarce to blog every interesting link I find—it’s much faster just to post it to del.icio.us, then come back later and skim the cream of [...]