Twitter tells third-party devs to stop making Twitter client apps I would almost certainly not be using twitter today were it not for Twitterific. Regardless of the commerical thinking behind it, even if it turns out to be good for users in the long run, right now, this feels like a dick move, to use the vernacular. Will be interested to see the fall out from this.
The Back Story | Thanks for Trumpet Winsock The reason I am a web developer now is that in 1995, I was able to use Trumpet Winsock to connect to the internet, and then run Mosaic to browse the then-very-nascent web. I have therefore donated a couple of quid to this campaign. If you used it like I did, then I strongly suggest you kick in a couple of quid, too.
BBC News – New net rules set to make cookies crumble So there's going to be a new law about what websites need to do around setting cookies, and getting the user's permission to do so, that will probably change how a low of UK and European websites have to work. But at the time the law comes into force, the government will not have spelled out what websites need to do to comply with that law. Someone phone Terry Gilliam and tell him that he's won?
Anatomy of a Crushing (Pinboard Blog) Probably only of interest to the webdev monkeys in the audience, this is the story of how the demise of del.icio.us completely spiked pinboard.in (the service I am now using for bookmarks, and that powers these link posts) and how pinboard.in coped. I should say that I was one of the people switching during the period he described, and I've got to say that it I was impressed with the way the service coped.
Creepy Girl In Hotel Hallway Gag This is superb. And I'm pretty certain that if I turned a corner in a badly-lit hotel corridor, and saw a creepy small child standing there, I'd find another way to get where I was going as well. Start watching from about 45 seconds in.
Terminally Geeky: use automatic login more securely Need to set this up on my machines. It's a trivial enough thing, but the articles exactly right about why it's good – if I'm rebooting my machine for some reason, I can disenage from it until I'm 100% ready to come back, instead of having to reboot, wait, relogin and wait again.
YouTube – Chain of Fools : Upgrading through every version of windows (HQ) This sounds criminally dull, and while I wouldn't claim it as the most interesting thing I've ever watched, it's still more fun than you might think. If nothing else, it's a clear demonstration that while Windows might suck in lots of ways, if you care about backwards compatibility, they're pretty much the kings. Supporting software written by third parties 23 years ago is no mean feat – I have trouble supporting software I wrote myself five years ago…
Pattern | CLiPS Python module for datamining and data visualisation. Just in case/
Tory council to make homelessness illegal « Labour Uncut While Dangerous Dave Cameron talks about the Big Society, and tells us that we must all hel[ one another, because the government would just as soon see us die in the gutter, another group of his friends are attempting to make it illegal for us to help one another, presumably because the Tories have nothing but contempt for anyone who wasn't born into wealth, and wish to see us all die in a gutter.
Notes From The Zeitgeist: Get Your Sugar Some absolutely beautiful prints of unlikely chracters done as calaveras. Particularly like the Pacman and Spy vs Spy ones.