Yostivanich

Some sam­ple demon­stra­tions of Wol­fram Alpha.

Cory Doctorow’s rea­soned response to sexting.

“And so it begins: Ran­dom House has switched off Kin­dle Text-to-speech by default, anger­ing edu­ca­tors and advo­cates for the blind in the process.” Stu­pid, stu­pid, stupid.

“One of the algo­rith­mic changes is aimed at mak­ing sure the home page clus­ters reward the fresh­est and most author­i­ta­tive blog con­tent. Within any clus­ter, Google wants to find the posts that peo­ple are talk­ing about the most.”

It looks like it could become impres­sive, but today it isn’t. Lots of out­dated data and the search engine is still rel­a­tively incomplete.

“Early Tues­day morn­ing, the 19-year-old Dubuque woman gave birth behind bars.Keil claims guards ignored her pleas for help and left her to deliver her son alone. Jail offi­cials say the mother never showed signs she was in labor.” Pretty much com­pletely messed up.

“Houston-based DJ Shu Latif reg­is­tered Crackho.com ages ago (accord­ing to a Whois search, 1998), but decided to give the site a fresh face in 2008 after Gov­er­nor Palin was cho­sen as the Repub­li­can Vice Pres­i­dent nom­i­nee. She changed the DNS set­tings so that all traf­fic to Crackho.com would go directly to Sarah Palin’s offi­cial web­site. The change appar­ently flew under the radar until ear­lier this month, when Alaska’s Attor­ney Gen­eral Michael Barn­hill sent a let­ter (PDF) to Latif demand­ing that she knock it off. Clearly, Barn­hill and gang have no real under­stand­ing of DNS and URL redi­rects in gen­eral, because the let­ter asserts that Crackho.com made ille­gal use of the offi­cial seal of the State of Alaska with­out per­mis­sion, and that Latif was in vio­la­tion of the fed­eral Copy­right Act. Nev­er­mind that the seal was on Palin’s own site.” Not ille­gal, kinda mean, but not illegal.

“Zappos.com appears to have con­structed what it likes to call a Zeta site – and is prepar­ing to move into electronics.”

“The swine flu virus did not result from a lab­o­ra­tory acci­dent, the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion said Thurs­day, work­ing to debunk rumors started by an Aus­tralian virol­o­gist and cir­cu­lated by news out­lets all over the world.” Oh rumors.

Should peo­ple be allowed to hide work that they aren’t proud of from Google?

“Google had $209,624 in profit per employee in 2008, which beats all the other large tech com­pa­nies we looked at, includ­ing big hit­ters like Microsoft, Apple, Intel and IBM.” Good going Google.

“Gen­eral Motors (GM) has announced plans to close up to 1,100 of its deal­er­ships in the US as it des­per­ately tries to cut costs and stave off bank­ruptcy. It also plans to cut ties with another 470 Sat­urn, Hum­mer and Saab deal­ers.” More cuts will be coming.

“The Okla­homa state House approved a bill known as the Sta­tis­ti­cal Report­ing of Abor­tion Act on Wednes­day in an 88 to 6 vote that bans sex-selective abor­tions and increases report­ing require­ments by doc­tors who per­form the pro­ce­dure. Accord­ing to Tulsa World, the ques­tion­naires would per­son­ally iden­tify patients, list the source of funds for the pro­ce­dure, and the rea­son for the pro­ce­dure.” Because you know those crazy women get­ting abor­tions left and right.

“An Alger­ian man held for seven years by the US has arrived in France after being set free from Guan­tanamo Bay.” Held for another year after he was declared safe to be released.

“The next iPod refresh is set for Sep­tem­ber and will see the addi­tion of a cam­era to the iPod Touch, accord­ing to a recent report from Hard­mac. Recent reports sug­gest that the next iPhone will sport a 3.2 megapixel cam­era with aut­o­fo­cus and we can only assume that the iPod Touch will get the same treat­ment. Inter­est­ingly, the report also notes that the iPod Nano will include a cam­era as well. Lastly, the report notes that all upcom­ing iPhone mod­els will sport the exact same dimen­sions and screen size as the cur­rent iPhone 3G.” See me being extremely skeptical.

“Being a good devel­oper is like being any other good pro­fes­sional, it’s all it’s about doing as much qual­ity work as pos­si­ble. There is a pop­u­lar sen­tence that sum­marises it: “Do it. Do it right. Do it right now”.”

Some­times the Inter­net is wrong.

Could we see back­ground apps, poten­tially just one run­ning in the background.

A school with just CS students.

Proac­tive cus­tomer ser­vice really works.

Kari Byron get’s a short inter­view dis­cussing her preg­nancy and some preg­nancy related myths.

“Microsoft plans to for­mally ban­ish the pop­u­lar pro­gram­ming func­tion that’s been respon­si­ble for an untold num­ber of secu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties over the years, not just in Win­dows but in count­less other appli­ca­tions based on the C lan­guage. Effec­tive later this year, Microsoft will add mem­cpy(), Copy­Mem­ory(), and Rtl­Copy­Mem­ory() to its list of func­tion calls banned under its secure devel­op­ment lifecycle.”

Twitter’s pos­si­bly final post regard­ing the reply situation.

“US indus­trial pro­duc­tion fell in April for the sixth month in a row, but at the slow­est rate seen in that time.”

“Lead­ing US retail­ers have been hit as con­sumers con­tinue to tighten their belts, send­ing quar­terly prof­its lower.”

John Scalzi talks with a stick of but­ter, why? Because he can.