links for 2009-07-08

"Writing code is trivial. And fun. And something I continue to love doing. But if you really want your code to be successful, you'll stop coding long enough to do all that other, even more trivial stuff around the code that's necessary to make it successful." The code is trivial compared to the user experience.

"Users aren’t giving any money directly to StackOverflow, but Jeff knows he has to build a killer end user experience because that experience pays off in other ways. Your career has the same goals. Even though the developers, project managers and end users may not pay your salary, they do have political capital with your boss. They can make or break your career in an instant."

"Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has defended his June re-election as the world's "most free" despite ongoing opposition claims that it was rigged."

"
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve."

"Chrome, of course, isn't an operating system, but a quick-booting OS built around a single application like Chrome would be a natural fit for a netbook. With such an OS, Google could obviously make it extra easy for users to access the full range of Google cloud applications through the browser—Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, etc."

"In a direct challenge to Microsoft, Google is expected to announce on Wednesday that it is developing an operating system for a personal computer based on its Chrome browser, according to two people briefed on Google’s plans."

"Chinese police have arrested 1,434 people over rioting in Xinjiang province, official state media say."

"US President Barack Obama has urged Russia to turn from the past, emphasising the common goals the US shares with its former Cold War rival."

"The Iraqi government has banned all organised visits to the grave of former leader Saddam Hussein."

"A report into how British police handled April protests against the G-20 summit in London said Tuesday the force's tactics were inadequate and should be reviewed. The report by a government-backed watchdog said police had focused too much on tackling violence and not enough on allowing peaceful protest." You think.

"The American Civil Liberties Union filed a friend-of-the-court brief today urging a federal appeals court to uphold an earlier decision requiring Louisiana to issue a birth certificate with the names of both parents to a boy who was adopted by a gay couple in New York."

"Former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis cited the case of Rangzieb Ahmed, from Rochdale, who was jailed for life for being an al-Qaeda planner. Mr Davis told the House of Commons that intelligence services had allowed Ahmed to go to Pakistan. Once there, they alerted Pakistani authorities who arrested him and tortured him, parliament was told. Mr Davis is calling for a judicial inquiry into at least 15 cases where torture of terrorist suspects has been alleged. Using the legal protection afforded to MPs, he told the Commons there was a chain of evidence of complicity in torture and passive rendition." To use a British phrase "bloody hell".

"No one argues that the staggering deficits run up by the American government in a bid to rescue the economy are desirable, healthy or even sustainable — not if the national debt continues to swell at its current pace. But considerable debate centers on when and how vigorously to start easing off Washington’s borrowing habit, with substantial risks at both extremes." How do we cut down the national debt?

"For the second time in three years, Mike Hutchins, a laid-off automotive engineer, is preparing to enroll in job retraining at a local community college, this time to become a civil engineering technician. But he has no idea if he has chosen the right path." Higher education may not always lead to a job.

"Dion and I both have some corporate IT experience under the belt, and because of that we just couldn’t bring ourselves to write yet another typical table-based database CRUD app; hence, the space theme and gratuitous canvas-based UI. So the Tools Directory is our second canvas-centric web application released this year, but we promise to use the DOM API more for the next one. ;-)"

"I have some good news to announce: Microsoft will be applying the Community Promise to the ECMA 334 and ECMA 335 specs. ECMA 334 specifies the form and establishes the interpretation of programs written in the C# programming language, while the ECMA 335 standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in which applications written in multiple high-level languages can be executed in different system environments without the need to rewrite those applications to take into consideration the unique characteristics of those environments." Awesome news for the open source version of C# in Mono.

"Just like it is the law of the land that phone numbers are portable from carrier to carrier, it should be the law of the land that phones should be portable from carrier to carrier. Anything else is anti-competitive."

"Dr. Finkel and Mr. Eastwick write that this does not mean men were just as selective as women. But the scientists suggest that the explanation for the gap lies in social conditioning rather than evolution." Social conditioning could play an important role in dating, crazy though.

"The end result (many visible and invisible changes later) is that today, beta is a thing of the past. Not just for Gmail, but for all of Google Apps — Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Talk."

"The level of people falling behind with consumer loans in the US hit a new high in the first three months of 2009, the American Bankers Association said." Ouch.

"Community colleges could become a tool to help economic recovery in the United States and a model for developing countries debating how to improve their education systems, Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a longtime teacher, said Tuesday." Cheaper education leads to a more educated society.

"Now, citizens will have the opportunity to send letters and messages to elected officials directly from Facebook. Bi-partisan Political and digital strategy firm Grassroots Enterprise has launched an technology, called “Actions,” that organizations can use on Facebook to allow supporters and visitors to send messages and letters to elected officials or other targets directly from Facebook." Pretty cool.

"It's more just another indication that voters won't have an infinite amount of patience with Obama on the economy, and if by 2012 the economy still hasn't improved (in which case, we'll be referring to the recession as "GD2"), or has double-dipped, or has improved sluggishly at the cost of a huge run-up in the national debt, Obama is going to be in trouble in Ohio as well as most of the other 49 states." Regarding Obama's weak polling in Ohio.

"Maybe you heard that a new Facebook iPhone application is almost complete. Maybe you’ve also heard that probably the best feature is that it will allow you to upload video right from your iPhone 3GS to the social network. Well you don’t actually have to wait for the new app to do that — there’s one that does it already. And it’s really, really fast." Cool.

Extrapolating is fun.

"trying to evolve! failing miserably!"

"CSS sprites are a huge time sink. They waste my time, they waste your time, and they also waste the time of millions of other front-end developers. It's about time to do something about it." I like this.

"The US has "absolutely not" given Israel a green light to attack Iran over its nuclear programme, President Barack Obama has said. His remarks followed weekend comments by Vice-President Joe Biden that the US would not stand in the way of Israel's response to Iran's nuclear ambitions. Meanwhile, US military chief Adm Mike Mullen said Washington should keep military options on the table." Biden please just stop talking.

"Over the past 24 hours we've had a number of readers tell us that there is an OpenSSH exploit in active use. We cannot confirm its existence, other than a DOS exploit for OpenSSH that is on Milw0rm. If you have any concrete evidence of this (not rumors or URLs to blogs where people are discussing that there might be a problem) please let us know via our contact form. Again, no rumors and no links to discussions of rumors please. We need reports of active exploitation or other evidence that this a real issue."

"We’ve still got a ways to go before we start seeing glucose monitors and blood pressure pumps pop up with iPhone support, but some health and disability-related apps are already beginning to emerge. One of the first is a new application called soundAMP (iTunes Link), a hearing aid application that was just released on the App Store, and is available for $9.99."

One of the coolest bits done by Mozilla for web developers. A listing of web development tools.

"Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both enterprise and consumer versions — are now out of beta." Google is also now really pushing the paid versions of Google Apps.

"When you create an at-home good product, you may have to sacrifice a bit of in-store sizzle. A product that executes on the basics beautifully may not seem as sexy as competitors loaded with bells and whistles. Being great at a few things often doesn’t look all that flashy from afar. That’s ok. You’re aiming for a long-term relationship, not a one-night stand." Though I think some companies (Apple) do well at both the in store and in home experience.

"Three months after a jury ruled that Ward L. Churchill, a former University of Colorado professor, was wrongfully terminated for his political views, a judge on Tuesday refused to give him his job back. Chief Judge Larry J. Naves of Denver District Court ruled that the university’s regents were effectively acting as judicial officers when they voted to dismiss Mr. Churchill in 2007 after a faculty committee concluded that he had committed academic fraud. As a result, Judge Naves found, the regents were legally protected from Mr. Churchill’s effort to reverse their ruling." Huh that ruling doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

"Just to follow up on a story from last month, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa has now officially dropped his lawsuit against Twitter. La Russa had been suing the service for someone who was pretending to be him and was seeking ““unspecified damages.” He got none of those, nor will he get anything else from the startup." This was a stupid lawsuit.

“I want our site not only to have an up-to-date catalogue of our products available for free, but I think that we could figure out a way to have people order products and pay for them online as well. Think about it: we could be the first sporting-equipment supplier in the world to offer this service.” In 2007.

"Scientists in Newcastle claim to have created human sperm in the laboratory in what they say is a world first. The researchers believe the work could eventually help men with fertility problems to conceive. But other experts say they are not convinced that fully developed sperm have been created."

"For the second time in 8 days, a power outage interrupted service at one of its data centers. And again it was the Dallas center that was effected. This time however, Rackspace was able to get things up and running fairly quickly, and more importantly, communicated well through its blog and Twitter throughout the downtime." Again Rackspace?