Posts
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The Bikeshed plugin
Here's a wish for a plugin to all the worlds' email writing software: Implement the self-policing functionality outlined by Poul-Henning Kamp in his brilliant
A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass...
. The post is well worth the read, but I'll summarize the ideas: -
Email client reviews
Considering the age of email as a technology, and the plethora of clients available, the situation is tragic. Here is a line-up of the clients I've used the last few years, and the reason I stopped using each and every one of them. Some simplifications are made, such as in the use of words like "cannot". Yes, there are often hacks to circumvent the limitations. No, I won't go into why using a closed source, 4 year old, unmaintained, 3rd party plugin is a bad idea.
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Digg 3.0 problems
After using Digg for a few months, I'm hooked. So hooked, in fact, that the following problems have been ignored until Digg 3.0 made them almost insufferable. For the record, I exclusively read the "All Recently Popular" RSS feed via Bloglines (Update: sorry, the link is dead) in Firefox 1.5.0.4 on Windows XP SP2, on a dual 2.8 GHz PC with 512 MB RAM, with a 10 Mbps line.
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Dvorak in rdesktop
This article is for anyone who is using the Dvorak keyboard layout on Linux, and having problems getting the same to work when connecting to a Windows machine using rdesktop.
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Re: Guns don't kill people, people kill people
This humungous over-simplification of a complex problem (entropy vs. optimism) seems to crop up whenever there is talk about banning something which has both practical and malicious uses. The latest example is the discussion about a stupid, frightening, or just weird proposal (Update: sorry, the link is dead) to criminalize "mak[ing] network monitoring tools publicly available [...]".
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To simplify or disambiguate, that is the question
In "Creeping featurism and the ratchet effect", Mark Dominus discusses (among other things) how adding parentheses to an expression to disambiguate the operator precedence is a Bad Thing™. Of course, in the example where there are no operators in the parentheses -
next if !($file =~ (/txt/));- he's right:(x)will never be more clear thanx. -
KittenAuth follow-up
KittenAuth is a really good subject for brainstorming about how to get a secure, usable, and accessible system for keeping bots out of public forums. I'll describe some of my ideas and the stuff people presented in the KittenAuth comments (I can't find the page any more), and then look for security, usability, and accessibility flaws in the different approaches.
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Job trends in web development
The job search service Indeed has an interesting "trends" search engine (Update: sorry, the link is dead): It visualizes the amount of job postings matching your keywords the last year. Let's see if there is some interesting information for modern web technologies there...
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Re: KittenAuth Test
The KittenAuth Test (Update: sorry, the link is dead), a very cute and brilliant Turing test which could possibly replace CAPTCHA, deserves attention for two reasons: It is much more user friendly than CAPTCHAs, and it can easily be extended with a textual variant, for anyone using a non-graphical browser.
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Re: Profiting From Your Passions
The "Lazy Way" blog recently outlined the idea of combining your passions to build yourself projects which you will enjoy working on. Several of the comments are disputing this idea, so I'd like to put in my 2 cents.