January 2009
24 posts
Diners to Get a Quick Guide to Cleanliness →
Over the next two years, NYC’s restaurant inspections will switch to letter ratings instead of the current number of violation points. “Rating signs, to be supplied by the city, will be required to be visible from the street, either in a restaurant window or vestibule.” The city health department will be hiring additional inspectors, and restaurants with lower ratings will...
“If you’re using IE, then either you don’t care or you don’t know about all the...”
– Matt Knox, former adware author, Interview with an Adware Author [via]
What real life bad habits has programming given... →
Some that hit home with me:
I temporize way too much in conversation. Things that anyone else would say as fact, I will still throw a “probably” or “perhaps” on, because I know there could always be that one edge case where a meteor strikes my neighborhood and I wouldn’t after all be able to make it out that day to Thanksgiving dinner.
When I send an e-mail,...
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Source for Background Text in the Instapaper Icon
Unbeknownst to me until today, most iPhone apps have a super-large version of their icon (512 x 512 pixels) available as their “album art” in iTunes. The large icon is also used by Apple if the app is featured in the App Store.
Instapaper’s icon features a page of text in its background. Viewing the large icon in iTunes, I found that I could make out many phrases in the text. ...
“It’s a cash cow with a captive market: PROGRESS!”
– Dave Gray on peer reviewed scientific journals in his “Free the Facts” presentation: slide 12 [via]
Feingold to Introduce Constitutional Amendment... →
“The controversies surrounding some of the recent gubernatorial appointments to vacant Senate seats make it painfully clear that such appointments are an anachronism that must end.” [via]
Modern Perl Books →
New from chromatic: “The best way to write Perl programs in 1991 or 2001 or 2004 isn’t necessarily the best way to write Perl programs in 2009. It’s time to discuss and document and disseminate all of the wisdom of the greater Perl community. It’s time to talk about modern Perl.”
“The cable [news] maw must be fed with transient panics. Feeding frenzies and...”
– John McQuaid, Obama and the media [via]
“The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption:...”
– White House Memo on the Freedom of Information Act [PDF], as repoted by Wired’s Threat Level in Obama Promises New Era of Openness [via]
Top ten reasons managers become assholes →
“A person who has confused intimidation with persuasion, or leadership, behaves poorly all the time. They rely on their guns, not their minds, which enslaves the people who work for them out of using their minds either.”
“Google’s hiring process tends to have a lot of false negatives.”
– Greg, a former Googler, from an email thread reproduced in Why Google Employees Quit
5 tags
Transparent UIWebViews
I recently needed to display a link (blue, underlined text which, when clicked, launches MobileSafari) on a “settings” screen of an iPhone app which I am working on. It turns out that the way to do it that made the most sense was to use a UIWebView. I ran into a problem where the background of the UIWebView was always white, so in it did not fit in with the rest of the screen’s...
Device helped ensure US Airways plane would float →
“‘The ditching switch closes all of the open ports in the bottom of the fuselage.’” The switch is “a special device unique to Airbus planes.” [via]
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Why You’ll Love Paying for Roads That Used to Be...
Two guest posts on the Freakonomics blog advocating congestion pricing. From the first:
By driving onto a busy road and contributing to congestion, drivers slow the speeds of others — but they never have to pay for it, at least not directly…. Using tolls to help internalize the congestion externality would somewhat reduce the number of trips made on the most congested roads at the peak...
5 tags
iPhone Development: Getting Proxy Objects To Work
Working on some iPhone code, it took a while for me to get Proxy Objects (aside from the standard File’s Owner) working correctly. In hopes of helping others, here is what I needed to do.
First, I wanted put some controls in a different NIB file from the one with the objects that deal with actions the controls send. The way to handle this is to put Proxy Objects in the new NIB that...
“[Schiller] noted that Apple marches to certain annual product cycles: the...”
– David Pogue, convenying information to help Apple fans know when to look for new Apple products, in A Strange Macworld Expo [via]
“Biometrics are unique identifiers, but they’re not secrets.”
– Bruce Schneier, Biometrics
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The science of shopping: The way the brain buys →
Roundup of the psychology of shopping and technological techniques used to measure it. “Often a customer struggling to decide which of two items is best ends up not buying either. A third ‘decoy’ item, which is not quite as good as the other two, can make the choice easier and more pleasurable…. [A researcher] believes the deliberate use of irrelevant alternatives should...
Still Broken: New York State Legislative Reform... →
Summary of a report on what is wrong with the legislative branch of New York’s state government. E.g. “In both chambers, but especially in the Assembly, leadership maintained a stranglehold on the flow of legislation at all stages of the legislative process.” [via]
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“We are a culture without the will to seriously examine our own problems. We...”
– David Simon, creator of The Wire, Finale Letter
A slice of Danish: An ancient Scandinavian model... →
A short Economist piece on why Denmark’s mortgage market’s resilience. “…the Danish system has two characteristics that change it almost completely. The first is that the issuers of mortgage bonds remain responsible for making payments on them…. The second … is that mortgage-holders can also buy the bonds in the market and use them to redeem their...