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But here's the thing: Regular people on the web love Snap previews. I know you don't believe it - I didn't want to believe it. But it's completely true. In the testing and feedback I've seen, it's some emotional pull about the fact that links "do something" now, instead of just being on the page.

Anil Dash

# 2nd November 2007, 6:49 am / anil-dash, annoyances, usability, snap, snappreviews, livejournal

The Web Application Scale of Stupidity goes from OGF (One Giant Function) to OOP (Object Oriented Programming), like this: OGF ——– sanity ——— OOP

Cal Henderson, paraphrased

# 2nd November 2007, 6:23 am / object-oriented-programming, onegiantfunction, ogf, cal-henderson, peter-van-dijck, php, programming

"The web is fundamentally better when it's social, and we're only just starting to see what's possible when you bring social information into different contexts on the web," said XXXX.

Google's unreleased OpenSocial Press Release

# 31st October 2007, 6:39 pm / funny, google, opensocial, pr

A school in the UK is using RFID chips in school uniforms to track attendance. So now it's easy to cut class; just ask someone to carry your shirt around the building while you're elsewhere.

Bruce Schneier

# 24th October 2007, 8:36 pm / security, uk, rfid, schools, bruce-schneier

Django may be built for the Web, but CouchDB is built of the Web. I've never seen software that so completely embraces the philosophies behind HTTP. CouchDB makes Django look old-school in the same way that Django makes ASP look outdated.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss

# 20th October 2007, 1:46 pm / django, couchdb, asp, http, jacob-kaplan-moss, python

Historically, Internet companies have rarely encrypted passwords to aid customer service.

Fasthosts

# 18th October 2007, 5:27 pm / fasthosts, security, passwords, wtf

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February.

Steve Jobs

# 17th October 2007, 6:04 pm / apple, iphone, sdk, developers, steve-jobs, john-gruber

Yet when you look at the projects in the UK, these projects are failing. The more they fail, the more it drives [the UK government] down this weird behaviour of only selecting the biggest people - even though they've failed two or three times before.

John Powell

# 16th October 2007, 5:33 pm / alfresco, open-source, bigit, uk, ukgovernment

I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off.

Doris Lessing

# 12th October 2007, 7 pm / nobelprize, literature, doris-lessing

The larger question is why on earth, in 2007 and ten years after XML came out, we are still using text files that don't label their encoding?

Rick Jelliffe

# 8th October 2007, 12:27 pm / textfiles, rick-jeliffe, encoding, unicode, xml

SOA [...] is the generally held belief that when implementing systems one should expose system functionality for general consumption directly from the network, as well as or instead of burying it behind a user interface.

Pete Lacey

# 6th October 2007, 1:44 am / service-oriented-architecture, definitions, pete-lacey

The arc of TF2 is something that's probably familiar to a lot of amateur developers or designers. When we got here the first thing we built was overly complex, very hard core, almost impenetrable to anyone who wasn't familiar with FPSs in general. And as we found as we played it, wasn't more fun because of it.

Robin Walker

# 6th October 2007, 12:04 am / robin-walker, teamfortress2, game-design, tf2, valve, usability

Obviously, everyone knows that patration means "the freedom and portability to move from one service provider to another without hinderance or boundaries"

Simon Wardley

# 5th October 2007, 11:38 pm / patration, simon-wardley, coinage

I thought the big draw for Apple hardware was that "It Just Works." By breaking it, you must know you’re giving up the "Just Works" factor, so what’s left? Rounded corners?

Mark Pilgrim

# 5th October 2007, 4:32 pm / mark-pilgrim, apple

Right now Facebook's position on 3rd party developers is amazing and I'm sure they are genuine in their support. However, give Facebook two missed quarters as a public company and they might not have no choice but to squeeze every ounce of revenue out of Facebook. That squeeze might include competing with the current crop of Facebook developers.

Jason Calacanis

# 1st October 2007, 8:55 pm / facebook, jason-calacanis, facebookplatform, lockin

Currently WebRunner applications share cookies with other WebRunner applications, but not with Firefox. WebRunner uses its own profile, not Firefox's profile. There is a plan to allow WebRunner applications to create their own, private profiles as well.

Mark Finkle

# 30th September 2007, 4:08 pm / cookies, firefox, csrf, mark-finkle, webrunner, sitespecificbrowsers, security

Large codebases are the problem, not the language they're written in. Find a way to break/decompose big codebases into little ones.

Bill de hÓra

# 27th September 2007, 3:11 pm / bill-de-hora, programming, complexity, lesscode

I have another technique [...] that I'll be switching jQuery to. If you attempt to insert into the document.body before the document is fully loaded, an exception is thrown. I take advantage of that to determine when the document is fully loaded.

John Resig

# 26th September 2007, 12:21 pm / domcontentloaded, jquery, javascript, unobtrusive-javascript, internet-explorer

Your telco knows who you are, where you live and even your credit card number or bank account. It's their business to provide you physical access from a real location and identify you as a customer by sending you invoices and receiving money from you. This means that Orange OpenIDs are verified IDs of real people as a matter of principle.

Thomas Huhn

# 25th September 2007, 12:03 pm / strongidentity, orange, openid, identity, thomas-huhn

A typical phishing email will have a generic greeting, such as 'Dear User'. Note: All PayPal emails will greet you by your first and last name.

PayPal's Phishing Guide

# 22nd September 2007, 2:33 pm / phishing, email, paypal, doh, security

We're not acting as a block. Our key aim is to offer a similar experience on the mobile Web as the PC-based Web. In doing that there is a white list which people can apply for.

Vodafone UK Spokesperson

# 21st September 2007, 2:58 pm / mobileweb, contradiction, vodafone

Apparently if you try to remove/destroy/trash a FORM dom node in IE6, it won't delete it, instead creating a bizarre orphaned node stuck sucking up memory until the browser window is refreshed.

Jon Sykes

# 20th September 2007, 1:04 pm / ie6, javascript, memoryleaks, jon-sykes

All the big guns want an iPhone killer. Even I, mad for all things Apple as I am, want an iPhone killer. I want smart digital devices to be as good as mankind’s ingenuity can make them. I want us eternally to strive to improve and surprise. Bring on the iPhone killers. Bring them on.

Stephen Fry

# 19th September 2007, 7:15 pm / stephen-fry, gadgets, iphone

My own favorites were Cuba voting "yes" to the fast-tracking of OOXML, even though Microsoft is prohibited by the US Government from selling any software on the island that might even be able to read and write the new format, and Azerbaijan's "yes" vote, even though OOXML as defined isn't able to express a Web URL address in Azeri, their official language.

Jeremy Allison

# 15th September 2007, 10:40 am / ooxml, iso, standards, microsoft, jeremy-allison, odf, cuba, azerbaijan

For any song you already own on CD, Apple is asking you to pay three times for it in order to use it as a ringtone on your iPhone: once for the CD you’ve already purchased, again to buy a needless duplicate of the track from the iTunes Store, and a third time to generate the ringtone.

John Gruber

# 14th September 2007, 8:15 am / apple, iphone, ringtones, music, john-gruber, ripoff

REST plays the same role as open source and open APIs: It eliminates tooling and vendoring as artificial barriers to adoption.

Assaf Arkin

# 10th September 2007, 10:58 am / assaf-arkin, rest

Spend 10 minutes collecting everything you need to work on a problem, and unplug the internet for 2 hours. You'll finish in 30 minutes.

Matt Mullenweg

# 7th September 2007, 10:42 pm / matt-mullenweg, productivity

I've actually been using the latest version of JAWS recently, as part of my work on HTML5. From a usability point of view it is possibly the worst software I have ever used. I'm still horrified at how bad the accessibility situation is. All this time I've been hearing people worried about whether or not Web pages have longdesc attributes specified or whatnot, when in fact the biggest problems facing blind users are so much more fundamental as to make image-related issues seem almost trivial in comparison.

Ian Hickson

# 4th September 2007, 12:27 pm / accessibility, usability, jaws, screen-readers, hixie, ian-hickson

Ideas rot if you don't do something with them. I used to try to hoard them, but they rotted. Now I just blog them or tell people about them. Sometimes they still rot, but sometimes someone finds them useful in one way or another.

Edd Dumbill

# 4th September 2007, 12:21 am / edddumbill, cory-doctorow, ideas, blogging

If it wasn't for the Enlightenment, you wouldn't be reading this right now. You'd be standing in a smock throwing turnips at a witch.

Charlie Brooker

# 3rd September 2007, 2:11 am / charlie-brooker, enlightenment