links for 2009-07-27

"One interpretation, then, is that the Blue Dogs are basically following in Mr. Tauzin’s footsteps: if their position is incoherent, it’s because they’re nothing but corporate tools, defending special interests. And as the Center for Responsive Politics pointed out in a recent report, drug and insurance companies have lately been pouring money into Blue Dog coffers."

"This is the combined regex:
/^#([0-9a-fA-F]{3}$)|([0-9a-fA-F]{6}$)/
Note the alternate metacharacter, | for the three or six hexadecimal digits. Also note the parentheses that separate the alternate groups." In case you ever need t combine a regexes.

"A 15-year-old boy who was born to an unknown father using a donor sperm has succeeded in tracking down his father, using just the DNA test, genealogical records and some ingenious Internet searches."

"Google announced an interesting new feature yesterday allowing Gmail users to easily unsubscribe from email newsletters through a new button in the Gmail interface. As I mentioned earlier, this is certainly a step in the right direction from Google, and we'll be implementing the required change to the header of every email sent through Campaign Monitor." GMail allows you to auto-unsubscribe from mailing lists and Campaign Monitor will support it.

"To help protect your experience when using extensions, we recently enabled auto-update for extensions on the dev channel release. Like Chrome's auto-update mechanism, extensions will be updated using the Omaha protocol, giving developers the ability to push out bug fixes and new features rapidly to users of their extensions. This is an important step towards a v1 release of extensions for all users, so we're pretty excited. In addition, when we turn the extension system on, we plan to offer a gallery with ratings and comments that you can use to judge whether you want to install a particular extension. We will also have processes in place that, combined with reports from users, should help limit the number of malicious extensions that get uploaded and distributed to users."

"A jQuery plugin that adds a dynamically created configurable gradient to the background of an element without the use of images." Awesome.

"EA has a new way to annoy its own models: give out prizes for Comic Con attendees who commit acts of lust with their booth babes. Also, if you win, you get to take the lady out to dinner! This is going to end well for everyone involved." EA is a bunch of morons.

"Sweden's Ericsson has won an auction for the wireless assets of bankrupt Canadian telecoms firm Nortel Networks. Ericsson is paying $1.13bn (£688m) for the businesses, which analysts say will enable it to substantially increase its North American presence."

The Ensemble takes the lead, in the final day of the Netflix Prize.

"Let me repeat that one more time: the British Homeopathic Association and Faculty of Homeopathy? Let's see what Ms. Penrose is supposed to be doing for the Lymphoma Association:" That's smart let's put someone who denies modern medicine in charge of the Lymphoma Association.

"The United States has called for Syria's "full co-operation" in trying to achieve a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement. Speaking after talks in Damascus, Barack Obama's envoy George Mitchell said discussions with Syria's president had been "candid and positive"."

"So before we mock those who are documenting their memories through the crazy new technologies, let's also recognize that this is just one in a long line of recording and sharing tools. And, I would argue, not the most annoying one yet." I agree new technology is just new technology most of what people have done with technology has been done before.