onfocus

I find myself referring to this classic by Eric Raymond frequently. I can't believe I haven't bookmarked it already.

If you wonder why people care about Net Neutrality, take a look at this image. It's going to give me nightmares. [via torrez]

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.

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.

Need to type an extended character? Just point and click the symbol you need at this single serving site.

as advertised.

Eric Raymond on asking questions.

"COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews."

"Few men dare ask the question 'What is toffee, exactly?' All those who have investigated this substance are now either dead or insane." [via schampeo]

This animated gif shows the change from the Greek alphabet to the Latin alphabet over time.

Nice JavaScript for assembling del.icio.us links HTML by hand for manual posting. I think I'll turn off auto-posts and switch to this too. [via anil]

borges, the internet, and our future problems.

John Battelle has a great idea about storing data in info-privacy friendly countries. But I'd go a step further and say that big data stores should also store data in an encrypted format, so only someone with a key can make the data useful.

put in some text, and see if this script can guess the author's gender based on word usage. (I was looking for a Perl module that does this, but no luck.)

15 ideas for saving newspapers. (hint: it's not about 'reenergizing readers'.) [via mathowie]

Not that I would have a need for this or anything. But if I did, these would be great instructions.