Alasdair Watson – Page 64 – Unreliable information since 1972

Links for Wednesday March 30th 2011

3eanuts
Peanuts was a 4 panel strip. The gag was in the fourth panel. (I know you know this.) 3eanuts reveals the bleak despair of it all, by removing the 4the panel.
Thorn Dice Set with Decader
Very tempted by a set of D10s in this style. Same chap makes a number of styles of dice, all lovely and interesting in different ways.

The source blog will get auto-linkposted later today, but for now, I just had to share this little bit of comic genius.

the fate of woodstock

Data Science Toolkit
Get your own virtual server with tools for a variety of common data extraction tasks. Very, very neat.

danah boyd | apophenia » The Politics of Queering Anything
Interesting thought on the merits and flaws of having expressly LGBTQI identified panels at conferences, versus just making sure that identity politics and queer theory have a role to play in the discourse of every panel.

Gadget Daily News – Home – Apple Creating a Magazine Publishing Tool for Developers?
I am very, very interested in this. As, I imagine, a number of folks of my acquaintance will be.
Inventables: Find new materials
I have no immediate use for most of the things this site sells, and yet, I want them all. Masses of fascinating stuff that the future will be made out of.

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.

Behold: The Nicolas Cage Matrix
A guide to Nicolas Cage movies. Really must get round to watching Bad Lieutenant.
insane asylum plans
This is what is says on the tin. Kind of fascinating.

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?
HOWTO: Native iPhone/iPad apps in JavaScript
How to make an web app look and feel like an iphone native app. This could be very useful at work.

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Alasdair

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.

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Alasdair

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.
Skulls Direct – Skull Film Props, Human Skull Models, Gothic and Vampire Skulls and Bespoke Horror Film Props
Very specific prop shop. But funny.
IE6 Countdown
Even Microsoft want people to stop using IE 6. I'm just saying…