onfocus

"More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in to track users and store information about them..." [via schneier]

"Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play." [via Daddy Types]

"Superfeedr is Real-time Feed Parsing in the Cloud." Great idea that could help build specialized aggregators. Bummed it's ATOM at the end. I'd prefer RSS.

This blog connects Mad Men episodes with advertisements and details from the time. [via kottke]

"...the rev mechanism is very powerful and very tricky, because while it doesn’t change the semantics of a link relation, it does change the relationships between the parties, with many consequences that aren’t obvious." Good arguments against using rev-canonical for short URLs. (pssst, Flickr!) [via delfuego]

An XMPP Interface for Desktop Notifications. Like Growl for web apps using an open standard. (Does Growl do this?)

This looks like a nice performance plugin for IE8 by the folks at MySpace. (That sentence doesn't sound right.)

Firefox 3.5 seems great, but that giant [+] to open a new tab isn't necessary. This extension will remove it.

"I'd argue that attention is an important part of the status metric; but I don't think more attention always translates to more status..." Interesting thoughts about why people contribute on the Web. [via anil]

10 typefaces for programming. I'm trying out their top pick--Inconsolata--and I like it so far. [via protherj]

"This system of 50 symbol signs was designed for use at the crossroads of modern life: in airports and other transportation hubs and at large international events. Produced through a collaboration between the AIGA and the U.S. Department of Transportation, they are an example of how public-minded designers can address a universal communication need." [via migurski]

People share and vote for their favorite command-line snippets at this site, and these are the most popular. Didn't know about "sudo !!"—that's worth the price of admission right there.

Paintings of alchemists in their laboratories. Posted to Flickr by the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

"People went to Google to find specific information about the President-Elect and the ceremony. People go to Twitter and Facebook to share the experience with one another. That means, Twitter and Facebook are delighting users more than Google, because they are keyed into natural human needs and emotions that trigger far greater and more addictive endorphin rushes than just finding a piece of information." [via msippey]

Tom Armitage on journalists learning to code: "Learn to think like a programmer. What's really important is to not understand how to do magical things with code, but to learn what magical things are possible, what the necessary inputs for that magic are, and who to ask to do it." [via rc3.org]

"None of which is saying you shouldn't be talking to your sources, and questioning what you're told, and trying to find other means of finding stuff out from people. But nowadays, computers are a sort of primary source too. You've got to learn to interrogate them effectively - and quote them meaningfully - too." [via migurski]

"...asking users to input their email address and password from a third-party site like GMail or Yahoo Mail is completely unacceptable." This is still so true, and I'm surprised sites like Facebook haven't been shamed into changing their "Find People" features.

More photography in unusual environments: "When it thinks it's falling, the hard drive heads park themselves to prevent damage upon impact. Unfortunately, in zero gravity, the camcorder always thinks it's falling." [via waxy]

The hazards of commercial photography: "The doorway was about 12 feet away from the unit, so although I would be in the magnetic field, it wasn't strong enough to pull the camera off of my tripod."

A way of measuring the difference, or "edit distance" between two strings.

Polls got you down? Sullivan offers a pep-talk: "We can only tell the truth as fearlessly and as relentlessly and as continuously as we can until November 4. We must do our duty. And if the American people want to re-elect the machine that has helped destroy this country's national security, global reputation and economic health, then that is their choice. But I am not so depressed to think that they will."

One question that Ed misses: do we want to have a group of people whose job is to sit around and solve captchas all day? If raising transaction costs works, move it to the world of money by charging a fee instead of relying on outsourced human attention.

Jason's Twitter-killer: plain text file on a server. Someone write an aggregator and we've got the distributed holy Twitter grail.

Eclipse plugin for ColdFusion development.

Fun web app for creating tiled backgrounds. [via MeFi]

The trouble with attention-focused modal overlays such as lightbox, and why asynchronous trays and sliders are better. [via migurski]

I want one of these orchard ladders for cherry-picking in a couple weeks.

Looks like a good place to find information and ask questions about fruit trees.

from wikipedia

Andy Baio interviews Alan Taylor about his amazing new blog The Big Picture. I'm surprised there wasn't more resistance at The Globe.

Ben Nadel provides an overview of some new Perl-ish array stuff in CF 8.