Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

The Great Hall of Hams – Boing Boing
Hall of noms, more like. Prosciutto ftw.

gradient text?: Apple Support Communities
Hackish workaround for getting gradient text in Keynote.

NASA releases “most amazing high-definition” photo of earth, from space – Boing Boing
Blue Marble 2.0.

New High-Quality Free Fonts (2012 Edition) – Smashing Magazine | Smashing Magazine
I like free, and some of these are really nice.

» A value-based approach to Customer Satisfaction and Product Metrics On Product Management
Interesting collection of metrics for measuring customer value.

Apple to announce tools, platform to “digitally destroy” textbook publishing
I hope this rumor is true. I think that there is a real opportunity to disrupt the book production value chain here by enabling authors to go direct.

IHTFP Hack Gallery: Invasion MIT
ILTFP.

On the Veracode blog (where I now post from time to time), we had a retrospective on the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing memo, which had its ten year anniversary on the 15th. The retrospective spanned two posts and I’m quoted in the second:

On January 15, 2002, I was in business school and had just accepted a job offer from Microsoft. At the time it was a very different company–hip deep in the fallout from the antitrust suit and the consent decree; having just launched Windows XP; figuring out where it was going on the web (remember Passport)? And the taking of a deep breath that the Trustworthy Computing memo signaled was the biggest sign that things were different at Microsoft.

And yet not. It’s important to remember that a big part of the context of TWC was the launch of .NET and the services around it (remember Passport)? Microsoft was positioning Passport (fka Hailstorm) as the solution for the Privacy component of their Availability, Security, Privacy triad, so TWC was at least partly a positioning memo for that new technology. And it’s pretty clear that they hadn’t thought through all the implications of the stance they were taking: witness BillG’s declaration that “Visual Studio .NET is the first multi-language tool that is optimized for the creation of secure code”. While .NET may have eliminated or mitigated the security issues related to memory management that Microsoft was drowning in at the time, it didn’t do anything fundamentally different with respect to web vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting or SQL injection.

But there was one thing about the TWC memo that was different and new and that did signal a significant shift at Microsoft: Gates’ assertion that “when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security.” As an emerging product manager, that was an important principle for me to absorb–security needs to be considered as a requirement alongside user facing features and needs to be prioritized accordingly. It’s a lesson that the rest of the industry is still learning.

To which I’ll add: it’s interesting what I blogged about this at the time and what I didn’t. As an independent developer I was very suspicious of Hailstorm (later Passport.NET) but hadn’t thought that much about its security implications.

MPAA Blog | Standing Against Those Who Trumpet the Economic Value of Theft
Dear MPAA, how’s that hating your customers thing working out for you? If Ars Technica is a known mouthpiece for theft, then you guys must be the nadir of the lying pits of hell for pushing the total breakage of the Internet in return for restricting free speech.

Should The New York Times tell you when politicians are lying? – Boing Boing
Dear New York Times: Not only do I want you to tell us when politicians and other interview subjects are lying, I expect you to.

Pete Brown’s Beer Blog: Some thoughts on writing about beer history
Great writing on the challenges of historical research.

Ringing iPhone stops New York Philharmonic – Boing Boing
The ringing phone of mortality earns a glare from Alan Gilbert.

Static analysis for detecting taint-style vulnerabilities
Flow-sensitive taint-style analysis for PHP.

Dan Savage and Rick Santorum’s Google Trouble : The New Yorker
More color, less detail, on the effect of Dan Savage’s long bet on Google-bombing Santorum.

Copy Text from Quick Look Previews with a Terminal Command
Works like a champ.

Scripting News: The bosses do everything better
What to do when someone says “I could write that faster than you can if I had the source code.”

The Restart Page – Free unlimited rebooting experience from vintage operating systems
Pick a legacy OS and reboot it. Best in fullscreen.

How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? – NYTimes.com
Indepth exploration of the genius that is Colbert.

Sound it Out #12: Spoek Mathambo “Put Some Red On It” – Boing Boing
To check out–post-apartheid “township tech.”

Technical Web Typography: Guidelines and Techniques – Smashing Coding
An astonishingly detailed article and set of guidelines about CSS typography.

For The 5th Year In A Row, Apple Wins CES. Before It Starts. Without Showing Up. | TechCrunch
If the goal is to generate product coverage and mindshare, Apple not exhibiting at CES and still getting acres of coverage out of the event is one of the smartest marketing things anyone’s ever done.

Veracode Blog » Vulnerability Response Done Right
It really can be that quick.

Cisco Webex Utilities
A bunch of useful Webex tools including the tracer and uninstaller for Mac.

Baseline – a designer framework by ProjetUrbain.com
If you are a grid designer, this CSS framework is like porn. Take a look at the pages on the site for a sample in action.

Why Nerds are Unpopular
Because they’re distracted from single-mindedly pursuing popularity? Interesting argument.

Barry White’s sperm quality: Why are deep-voiced men attractive? – Boing Boing
Or, why you should date a tenor and not a bass.

The best American wall map: David Imus’ “The Essential Geography of the United States of America” – Slate Magazine
Astonishingly detailed map of the US.

So here we are, on the eve of the last Virginia football game of 2011. At the beginning of the season, I had no hopes for a bowl game, in only the second season of the Mike London era. And yet here we are, in the Peach Bowl (now called the Chik-Fil-A Bowl) against Auburn.

As the historian of the Virginia Glee Club Alumni and Friends Association, I’ve had a special place in my heart for the football songs of the University, and I’ve written many posts about the origins of the songs. In honor of the game tonight, here’s all the posts in one convenient list. Enjoy!

• The Good Old Song: I wrote most of the article on Wikipedia, and have written a bit about the credited author of the song, E. A. Craighill.
• The Cavalier Song: The official fight song of the University, with words by Joe McCarthy sympathizer Fulton Lewis Jr.
• Vir-ir-gini-i-a: A lesser known song with connections to early and modern Glee Club history (words by Arthur Kyle Davis Jr., who sang in the 1916-17 season, harmonization by long time Glee Club conductor Donald Loach)–and indirectly to Bob Dylan!
• Hike, Virginia: written by a man who had a major impact on Cavaliers abroad during World War I, Lewis D. Crenshaw, with Glee Club member Charles S. McVeigh.
• Virginia Yell Song: written by the second ever Jewish professor at the University of Virginia, and the first in the 20th century, Linwood Lehman.
• Oh, Carolina: One of Virginia’s few songs about a specific rival.
• Just Another Touchdown for U-Va: Another Virginia football song sung about many different rivals.
• From Rugby Road to Vinegar Hill: Virginia’s most notorious football song, with words you won’t want to sing along with in front of your family.
• Virginia, Hail, All Hail: Virginia’s official alma mater, written by Glee Club member J.A. Morrow.

Marvel’s lawyers get into fanboy flamewar with IRS about human-status of its mutants – Boing Boing
…But… but what would Professor X say?

Boston ranks No. 1 on ‘drunkest city’ list
Would it be inappropriate for me to say, “WOOOO! YEAAAAAAH!”