Archive for May 2004

May 2004

May 19, 2004

Writing The Code is the Easy Bit. Why writing a CMS gets harder with experience.

# 1:27 am

Via Jeremy Zawodny,, Yahoo’s Anti-Spam Resource Center have published an explanation of their proposed Domain Keys spam fighting technique. At first glance it looks very promising. There’s no centralised authority, no requirements for changes to existing protocols and the central concept is extremely easy to understand. Essentially, mail servers generate a public/private key pair and sign outgoing messages with the private key, while publishing the public key as part of their DNS record. Because only they can publish to their public key in this way the signature can be used to confirm that the sender of the email has not been spoofed. The presence or lack of a signature can be used as part of the process of identifying spam.

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2:04 am

Curiosity is bliss: Video streaming over HTTP. VLC + DivX can jump to points in a file as well.

# 3:33 am

Design Eye for the Usability Guy. Jakob Nielsen gets the makeover of a life time.

# 3:31 pm / jakob-nielsen, usability

EU votes through software patent changes (via) There goes the neighbourhood.

# 6:58 pm

May 20, 2004

Creating colour palettes (via) Simple, smart trick for coming up with a colour palette.

# 12:39 am

Google Corporate Information: Software Principles (via) Don’t be evil.

# 12:45 am

RCDefaultApp (via) Useful app for disabling help:, disk: and disks: among other things.

# 6:45 pm

Girl Power! Cootie Catcher (via) On a .gov site? Watch out for the scary animated gif.

# 7:50 pm

May 22, 2004

Mac OS X helpviewer security flaw fixed. Hit Software Update. Not sure if this fixes the telnet: variety though.

# 5:08 am / osx, security

The Infinite Cat Project (via) Just keep hitting “Next Cat”

# 5:08 am

Attacked by Thugs (via) Hilarious tale of Warsaw’s Finest.

# 5:48 am

SICP Lectures (via) Available in DivX and MPEG.

# 5:52 am

Implantable RFIDs for nightclub VIPs. Whoa, clubbers will do anything!

# 6:10 am

TBL on TLDs

Tim Berners Lee (how many TLA celebrities is that now?): New Top Level Domains Considered Harmful. Read the whole thing—Tim blows the .xxx and .mobi proposals out of the water and takes a neat swipe at for-profit registrars in the process. Reading this, the main thing that struck me is how incredibly forward thinking TBL really is. People complain about the long duration of W3C processes and the futuristic nature of the semantic web but the W3C are trying to build technologies that will still be relevant ten or twenty years from now. When you consider the longevity of TCP/IP, this is a really smart strategy. It’s a shame so many people involved with the web have trouble thinking past the next few months.

6:23 am / domains, tim-berners-lee, urls, w3c

What are these “Threading Models” and why do I care? (via) I’ve promised myself that some day I will read this.

# 6:26 am

Random Destructive Acts via Focused Solar Radiation (via) I want a Giant Fresnel Lens

# 6:33 am

Design Issues for the World Wide Web. A collection of TBL’s thoughts on web architecture.

# 6:47 am

Agency: Chalabi group was front for Iran (via) Claims the Iranians were feeding misinformation to the US government via Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.

# 7:36 pm / misinformation

Transcript of Bruce Sterling at Microsoft Corporation (via) Bruce Sterling on scaling up his annual SxSW party. I can’t believe I missed it htis year.

# 8:35 pm / microsoft, scaling, sxsw, bruce-sterling

Ticked Off? Visited Links How-To (via) Neat checkbox styling for visited links.

# 8:38 pm

WordPress 1.2. It’s here.

# 8:44 pm