Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

Measure the impact of product changes (How To Be A Good Product Manager)
Under agile, making every user story measurable is a tall order. Maybe the right translation is to make every epic measurable…
(tags: agile productmanagement)

Met Opera — A New Act (Ben Rosen)
An interesting inside look at the considerations of arts marketing.
(tags: music opera marketing)

Security updates [...]

Courtesy the Boston Globe, here’s Amanda Palmer’s opening number from her performance at last night’s EdgeFest. I’m very envious of the TFC members who sang behind her for one of the numbers, though I am curious if she had them wear makeup…

Flickr: Smithsonian Institution’s Photostream
Good mine of photos for Wikipedia articles among others.
(tags: photo flickr wikiresearch smithsonian)

Who are the “Media Bloggers Association” and what gives them to right to negotiate copyright with the Associated Press? - Boing Boing
Triangulating the “Media Bloggers Association.”
(tags: copyright mediabloggersassociation fraudulentmisrepresentation)

XPath Injection (0×000000 # The Hacker Webzine)
A proposal for detecting XPath injection [...]

As I’ve been getting myself up to speed in learning about application security, a few resources have been extremely helpful.
A good general background on application security issues, unsurprisingly, is contained in The Art of Software Security Testing, co-authored by Veracode cofounder Chris Wysopal. The book goes beyond the basic description of classes of application security [...]

Slashdot is reporting a new escalation of privilege vulnerability in Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. The details are a little sparse, but it appears that calling the Apple Remote Desktop Agent (ARDAgent) from AppleScript allows execution of arbitrary code with root privilege. Bad, for sure.
The mitigation is that it requires execution as the currently [...]

Hacking Coffee Makers (BugTraq)
I pwn your networked coffee maker!
(tags: security omgwtfbbq)

The “Bad Boys” of Collegiate A Capella (UVA Magazine)
I think the VGs ought to get a new press agent. The B’Hoos are eating their lunch.
(tags: acappella hullabahoos uva)

My aunt Marie passed away Monday afternoon. This one hurts. Unlike my grandfather, who had been in ill health for quite a few years before his death in January, we didn’t even know how sick she was until two months ago.
My aunt was one of the strongest people I know. Stricken with juvenile arthritis at [...]

Army Overseer Tells of Ouster Over KBR Stir - NYTimes.com
If the fish stinks, must we put it under a microscope to verify that it’s rotten?
(tags: kbr halliburton procurement army iraq)

New LEGO Deathstar is Like a Starwars Dollhouse of Cool | Geekdad from Wired.com
Ah, to be a kid again.
(tags: starwars lego deathstar)

How to nap - Boston.com
See. [...]

Courtesy a little bird, it’s possible to download Firefox 3.0 already, though it hasn’t been announced yet.
The latest public download is RC3:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0rc3&os=win〈=en-US
but if you remove rc3 from the URL, you get:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=win〈=en-US
which is a valid URL. (So much for security by obscurity.) Enjoy your early start on Download Day! (Tip o’ the hat to Dil.)
Update: Or [...]

The Last Campaign: Briefly Noted: The New Yorker
Book review of a flawed hagiography of RFK. Are there any definitive books on the last campaign that are a little less one-sided?
(tags: books politics)

Exhillaration: Comment: The New Yorker
A review of the ending of Hillary’s campaign and its implication on the vote in the fall.
(tags: 2008 election hillaryclinton [...]

Steve Johnson at Pragmatic Marketing points to an interesting article on five different types of betas. One of Steve’s commenters suggests there is a sixth kind, the SaaS beta:
…ratchet up your release cycles to monthly, then you can call it a ‘release’ or a ‘beta.’ Either way customers get their hands on the new functionality. [...]

While I was in Pennsylvania, I helped my uncle move some junk out of the storage unit where we put some of my grandfather’s things. A few items held memories for me (I never could get comfortable on that fold-up metal cot, and was glad to see it go), but others were remnants: the boxes [...]

I came home from Pennsylvania on Saturday, which stands as one of the harder things that I’ve had to do. My aunt’s condition has been up and down. While I was there she was lucid, eating and drinking a little, watching the Phillies beat up St. Louis, and ornery (she complained to the nurses that [...]

Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard » Blog Archive » AP sends takedown letters to Drudge Retort: Do excerpts and links infringe?
Do excerpts infringe?
(tags: internet dmca)

2,002 Honest Fonts
Are free fonts worth what you pay for them?
(tags: typography omgwtfbbq)

Gardner Music Whiz, Off To Cleveland - Exhibitionist
A former TFC member heads west.
(tags: tfc podcast)

An Unlikely Story | [...]

Font Bureau Fonts | ITC Franklin
Nice new revision of Franklin Gothic. No pricing as yet. I like the way the compressed medium weight looks.
(tags: typography)

Verizon Time Warner Cable and Sprint To Block Usenet - Webmonkey
I guess there’s no mourning Usenet. This is a really sad day.
(tags: internet usenet)

Chief Judge in Obscenity Case Caught Posting Porn [...]