links for 2009-05-22

"A 72-year-old insurance adjuster who was linked by the police to as many as 30 murders from the 1970s and ’80s has been charged with only two killings so far because DNA evidence in other cases is damaged, police officials said." We might want to try being a little sure about this.

Twitter search is a pile of pain.

"While I think basic unit testing can complement formal beta testing, I tend to agree with Wil: the real and best testing occurs when you ship your software to beta testers. If unit test coding is cutting into your beta testing schedule, you're making a very serious mistake." I agree.

"So, what can we do to solve this problem? It’s necessary to review all of the user base of Firefox and find alternative routes to ensure a clean workspace (and possibly full-screen) without sacrificing comfort of dozens of open tabs. Let us return then to the debate on mozilla labs." Redesigning Firefox.

"Browser makers Mozilla and Opera accused Microsoft yesterday of force feeding Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) to users with Windows Update and silently changing the default browser on PCs." This is just stupid and awful.

Okay you have to read this if you want to look at either of these frameworks.

"More than 70 percent voted to oust the five board members of the Big Oak Flat-Groveland Unified School District." First time this has happened in California.

"Five US police officers in Birmingham, Alabama have been fired for beating an unconscious suspect who had crashed his car in a police pursuit." Thank goodness, the officers were beating a guy who had been flung out of his car and was lying unconscious in a ditch.

"The four men arrested Wednesday night in what the authorities said was a plot to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, N.Y. were petty criminals who appeared to be acting alone, not in concert with any terrorist organization, the New York City police commissioner said Thursday." Amazing this hasn't been hyped up more yet.

"Sri Lanka says it will resettle most of the 280,000 Tamils displaced by the recently ended war within six months." Good news for the citizens.

"Bolivian President Evo Morales has called for a complete overhaul of his country's strained ties with the US." Interesting.

" The House unanimously approved legislation on Thursday to alter the way the Pentagon buys weapons, sending it to President Obama to be signed into law. The legislation would create a Pentagon office responsible for estimating the cost of new programs, led by a director who reports to the secretary of defense."

Have a problem where a column jumps in IE6. This here could fix it: "overflow: hidden and zoom: 1"

"A former US soldier convicted of rape and murder in Iraq has been spared the death penalty. Steven Green, 24, will now be sentenced to life in prison, after jurors in the state of Kentucky could not agree unanimously on his punishment."

"Unless Microsoft or perhaps Yahoo comes in and bids very aggressively, MySpace is going to get slaughtered in the negotiations. " Good riddance, MySpace destroys just about every good rule of design and user interaction in it's business.

To take over on the web become a default behavior.

Think of the worst thing you have done to get a job, now make it a whole lot worse and you might get this site.

Easily the 25 best programmer comics, xkcd heavily listed in there.

Crazy thought Apple will build an iPhone with a more powerful processor and include video, who would have thunk.

"The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has proposed that the copyright licensing terms on the wikis operated by the WMF — including Wikipedia — be changed to include the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license in addition to the current GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). This will affect all text and rich media (images, sound, video, etc.) currently licensed under "GFDL 1.2 or later versions"." And it passed sucker.

Tech IT Division decides to blame the end user rather than their poorly secured system.