links for 2009-09-08

"SimpleTabs is an unobtrusive tabs script"

"Three men have been found guilty of plotting to kill thousands of people by blowing up planes flying from London to America with home-made liquid bombs. A Woolwich Crown Court jury convicted Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28, Tanvir Hussain, 28, and Assad Sarwar, 29, of conspiring to activate bombs disguised as drinks. Four other men were found not guilty of involvement in the suicide bomb plot."

"France has repeated its accusation that the UN nuclear watchdog is hiding facts about Iran's atomic activity, just as the body's head issued a strong denial."

"At some point, a user had recommended I take a look at this paper by some people over at Google. They implement a captcha by having a slider bar with a randomly rotated image that the user then has to straighten out using the slider bar. This is really cool, and I use the basic idea but simplified yet further. As I am only trying to protect my game from being able to be played by a program, I don’t have to be quite as rigorous." Simple and easy captcha.

"On the occasions where I have reviewed the actual text of major legislation, I have been struck by the parallels between legislation and software, particularly in terms of the pitfalls and issues with architecture, design, implementation, testing, and deployment. Some of the tradeoffs are even the same, such as trading off the risk of “analysis paralysis” (never moving beyond the research and analysis phase) and the risks of unintended consequences from rushing ill-formed software into production. Yet another similarity is that both software and legislation tend to leverage off of, interact with, call upon, extend, and/or replace existing software and legislation. Finally, the more complex a given system or piece of legislation is, the less likely that it will achieve the original intent." Really interesting idea.

"When the Internal Revenue Service announced a deal last month that would force Switzerland to reveal the names of thousands of Americans suspected of offshore tax evasion, the agency called it a major step forward. But tax lawyers and former government officials have begun to question whether the deal might allow some large tax cheats to remain in hiding."

"What does this mean to you? Well probably not too much yet, there’s only one reader so far (River2) that supports RSS cloud, but we expect there to be more in the future. We’re also going to be supporting other ways for people to get push notifications (Jabber, email, Weblogs.com pings, SUP, pubsubhubbub, Twitter… who knows what else) so people will be able to find out about and visit your new blog posts as soon as possible, making blogging a more real-time experience. Since RSS Cloud is so easy to add to RSS, it seemed like a good place to start." Awesome.

Okay this is cool.

"This is going to be fun and awesome: Memories of the Future, Volume One, covers the first 13 episodes of TNG, so each week, I'm going choose something from one episode, and perform an excerpt for you." It is and will be.

"All blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud. There is currently only one RSS aggregator that supports RSSCloud, Dave Winer's brand-new reader River2. That will probably change very soon."

"Of course, just going “to an emergency room” is what drives up health care costs for all Americans. “Access to emergency room care is not the same as access to comprehensive, coordinated, and timely health care services—the kind of care that coverage facilitates.” And as the town hall attendee noted, without insurance, a hospital visit commonly leaves Americans bankrupt."

"Cats and dogs. Cain and Abel. Designers and developers. These are just a few of the great historical face-offs. Designers and developers often seem to come from different planets and have completely different brains. Developers want a website to work right, designers want it to look right. A few weeks ago, we explored the main pet peeves that web designers have with web developers, and suggested some solutions for them. Today, we will discuss the other side of the coin: the five most common gripes that developers have with designers."

"Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelism Interoperability team is introducing on Friday an open source project to bridge PHP and Microsoft's .Net programming model, Microsoft representatives said. The company's PHP Toolkit for ADO.Net Data Services uses REST as a bridge between Microsoft's software platform and the popular PHP scripting language, said Peter Galli, Microsoft open source community manager, in a blog entry. With the kit, developed by Persistent Systems, PHP developers can more easily take advantage of ADO.Net Data Services, which are a set of features in the .Net Framework for building and consuming data services from the Web." So you have to use REST to take advantage of web services which should be REST, umm yeah.

"Probably not, for this is a man who is attempting to do more than win a historical argument and poison any potential jury pool. He's seeking nothing less than a redefinition of the Constitution and the rule of law. The stakes are high. If the Cheney view prevails, it will give comfort to human-rights abusers everywhere, help terrorist recruitment, harm U.S. foreign policy, and set back the prosecution of terrorists by giving defense attorneys more grounds on which to get their clients acquitted." Cheney's desire is to throw away all laws in favor of trying to guarantee security, even committing acts that don't work.

"Mathematics, as presented by Clifford Pickover, is a palace filled with awe-inspiring curiosities. His Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics is a 500-page, full-color tour of mathematical highlights from 150 Million B.C. to 2007. " Looks interesting.

A depressed Computer Scientist.