onfocus

Impossible! I had no idea Airplane! was based on an earlier movie. This video shows where the dialog overlaps between the two.

"Yet despite all the innovations in the iPhone 4, without basic telephony service it’s just a piece of shit." Matt Honan succinctly sums up Apple's AT&T problem. The frustrating part is that it's potentially solvable by opening things up to other carriers.

"Building a great display for typography without building great typographic tools is a dereliction of duty." I've been noticing this too especially on the iPad's potentially gorgeous display. The app-makers, including Apple, just don't seem to care. [via jessamyn]

ColdFusion code to geocode locations with Google Maps.

And Google gets in on the Twitter Archive goodness. I'm glad Tweets are becoming less ephemeral.

The Library of Congress is going to archive every tweet. It'll be interesting to see how they make the archives available.

"Slate ad critic Seth Stevenson tries out a Google service that allows you to run your own commercial on national TV for as little as $100." (Neat. But Slate 5? Did I miss 2-4? har har.)

The history of Alfred E. Neuman (aka. Melvin Cowznofski). I always thought he originated with Mad Magazine.

These are fantastic. I love matchbox design.

Yes, please. [via middleclasstool]

"The goal is not to prevent them from making mistakes, but to allow them to. Risk assessment, trust development, value determination, responsibility, self-direction — all of these very important skills grow out of the opportunity to explore, to experiment, to make mistakes and correct them."

"I spoke with Haughey this week about how he grew Metafilter from a side project into a profitable venture. In our conversation, he stressed three main things: build the site you want to use, listen to the community, and stay small."

"Unicode 5.0 encodes exactly 98,884 graphic characters on different planes...we collect information on every single character."

Cartoon intro to Neil Postman's book.

I had this reaction to Avatar too, glad to see io9 spend some time explaining this problem. Hadn't made the Dune connection, that's spot on. [via mathowie]

argh, burned by this on my personal mail server.

Regex snark traced back to Unix snark.

"What I didn’t appreciate, until I finally unzipped and untarred a copy...is the historical scholarship scribbled in the margins of this remarkable database, or document, or hybrid of the two." [via MetaFilter]

Some samples of single-pane comics by H.T. Webster. Sadly, his collections appear to be out of print and there aren't any at nearby libraries.

Scan of the 1955 book with wonderful caricatures by Ronald Searle. [via peacay]

"So, this is why I say white supremacy is the only functional form of racism; the only kind that actually works."

"...you’re just making a fool of yourself when you go around telling users of singular they that they’re wrong, because they’re not."

It's going to be that time of year again soon. These Thule chains look nice, but I'd rather see real people putting on chains in freezing weather in the demo, not spinning/floating CG.

Eight rules for writing a short story. [via merlin]

"The fundamental problems with the American health care system are all linked, directly or indirectly, to the fact that the vast majority of folks get insurance solely through their employers." Amen, and go Wyden! [via Kattullus]

"The problem is Twitter isn’t really open. For Twitter to be truly open, it would have to be possible to use “Twitter” without an any way involving Twitter the institution. Instead, all data goes through Twitter’s centralized service." I'm not a fan of people pushing content to Twitter like it's an RSS reader for social reasons as well, but that's probably just me.

A nice summary of fire lookout towers that dot Pacific Northwest peaks.

Nice, quick guide to setting ColdFusion error-handlers for public applications.

Some good ways to improve ColdFusion application performance. Doing a lot of these already, but picked up a few new coding practices I should follow.

Umberto Eco on the features of Eternal Fascism. "In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism." [via MeFi]

"...there’s a nearly infinite universe of things you might wish to express that simply can’t fit into 140 characters. It's not that the Twitter form forces triviality upon us; it's possible to be creative and expressive within Twitter’s narrow constraints. But the form is by definition limited. Haiku is a wonderful poetic form, but most of us wouldn’t choose to adopt it for all of our verse." [via sippey]

Greenwald on Cronkite, Russert, Halberstam, Lapham, Hunter Thompson, and journalists as celebrities.

Book that contains historical arguments between Judge Matthew Deady and Judge William Strong about the official spelling of the Oregon river. It'd be fun to track down a copy.

A brief history of the word Willamette, debunking a common myth about its meaning.