Yostivanich

“Jaxer is a strange new hybrid appli­ca­tion com­ing from the folks at Aptana (the mak­ers of the quite-excellent web IDE). Lit­er­ally, they took the Mozilla plat­form (which pow­ers Fire­fox, Camino, etc.) and built a state­ful plat­form on top of it. You can imag­ine it as a browser that’s able to ren­der pages, mod­ify them dynam­i­cally with JavaScript and the DOM, and even use JavaScript libraries with great ease — with the excep­tion that it’s liv­ing as a stand­alone server-side process, un-associated with the typ­i­cal brows­ing expe­ri­ence.” The idea of JavaScript on the server side is cool, but to me uninteresting.

“Instead, let’s lay out some prin­ci­ples for a strong pub­lic health insur­ance option. If any pro­posal meets these prin­ci­ples, no mat­ter what you call it, it is wor­thy of sup­port.” What are the guide­lines for those look­ing at the pub­lic health insur­ance option look­ing at?

“Native Client, called NaCl for short, is a mech­a­nism to run soft­ware down­loaded over the Web directly on x86 proces­sors such as Intel’s Core line.” The next step in web apps tak­ing over desk­top apps.

“In the future, Amazon.com’s Kin­dle e-book reader will dis­play more book for­mats beyond its own. And you should also expect to see Kin­dle books on a lot more devices.” Woot.

“The US mil­i­tary has abruptly ended an infor­mal arrange­ment that allowed sci­en­tists access to data on incom­ing mete­ors from clas­si­fied sur­veil­lance satel­lites. The change is a blow to the astronomers and plan­e­tary sci­en­tists who used the infor­ma­tion to track space rocks, espe­cially those that burn up over the oceans or in other remote loca­tions. ” This seems really weird, what up with that Air Force?

“What­ever it’s called — pub­lic option or chopped liver — it has to be able to squeeze Pharma, Insur­ance, and the rest of the medical-industrial com­plex. And the more likely it is to squeeze them, the more they’ll fight it. And the greater the oppo­si­tion from Repub­li­cans, and from Dems who either believe any bill has to have some Repub­li­can sup­port or who have sold them­selves out to the med­ical biggies.”

“The Top Gear boys are deeply offended by a fan let­ter claim­ing that they don’t review cars prop­erly any­more. To com­pen­sate, Jeremy Clark­son takes the new Ford Fiesta for an extra­or­di­nary road test includ­ing a car chase inside a shop­ping cen­tre, and a Royal Marine assisted beach assault. Bril­liant high qual­ity video from BBC motor­ing show, Top Gear.” Because why not.

“Senior secured lenders to G.M., unlike their coun­ter­parts at Chrysler, are rightly being paid off in full. Chrysler’s senior cred­i­tors were forced to accept less than the full face value of their loans. But G.M.’s reor­ga­ni­za­tion plan calls for it to make its senior secured lenders whole on the approx­i­mately $6 bil­lion they are owed.”

“Face­book Chat usage has increased steadily since its launch last year, and this week we reached 1 bil­lion mes­sages sent per day” Good job Facebook.

“But in a rare break from a long his­tory of cau­tious moves, he rushed to bless Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad for win­ning the elec­tion, call­ing on Ira­ni­ans to line up behind the incum­bent even before the stan­dard three days required to cer­tify the results had passed. Then angry crowds swelled in cities around Iran, and he backpedaled, announc­ing Mon­day that the 12-member Coun­cil of Guardians, which vets elec­tions and new laws, would inves­ti­gate the vote.” Could the Iran­ian leader be los­ing his power over the masses of Iran?

“Accused al-Qaeda mas­ter­mind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has said he was tor­tured into lying while in CIA cus­tody, newly-released doc­u­ments show.” Uncov­ered thanks to work of the ACLU.

“Oppo­si­tion par­ties and cam­paign­ers have con­demned Gor­don Brown’s deci­sion to hold an inde­pen­dent inquiry into the Iraq war behind closed doors.” All this demon­strates to the UK peo­ple is that they have some­thing to hide, which they prob­a­bly do.

“Iran­ian state radio says seven peo­ple were killed dur­ing Monday’s protests in Tehran over the re-election of Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad. The reports said the deaths came after “thugs” attacked a mil­i­tary post. The BBC’s Jon Leyne says that in light of what he saw of the vast and largely peace­ful protests this seems an unlikely ver­sion of events.” This is becom­ing a big­ger story every day.

“The num­ber of “soft­ware pub­lish­ers,” defined as oper­a­tions nec­es­sary for pro­duc­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing soft­ware, has dipped slightly in the United States through 2009, accord­ing to the U.S. Depart­ment of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics. In Jan­u­ary, there were 262,100 pub­lish­ers in the U.S., accord­ing to the bureau. That num­ber decreased to 260,500 in Feb­ru­ary, 259,300 in March, and 258,100 in April.” I’m not shocked.

“Shots have been fired dur­ing a mas­sive rally in Iran against last week’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion results, with reports say­ing one per­son was killed. Hun­dreds of thou­sands ral­lied to sup­port can­di­date Mir Hos­sein Mousavi, but a group of them was fired on from a mili­tia base they had sur­rounded.” Not good.

“The Fox Nation sug­gested that Iran’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and its after­math indi­cate that “[Pres­i­dent] Obama’s ‘Apol­ogy For­eign Pol­icy’ ” is “fail­ing.”” Fox News it’s unbaised if only we say it.

“You might be won­der­ing what, exactly, you would learn at a Uni­ver­sity Of Meta­phys­i­cal Sci­ences.” I’m so drop­ping my degree at TTU for this.

“NASA has decided: Endeav­our will attempt a launch Wednes­day June 17, at — get this — 05:40 East­ern time (09:40 GMT). So I won’t be watch­ing, as that’s 3:40 a.m. my time.” Good news.

How do geeks com­ment code?

“A crit­i­cal net­work upgrade must be per­formed to ensure con­tin­ued oper­a­tion of Twit­ter. In coor­di­na­tion with Twit­ter, our net­work host had planned this upgrade for tonight. How­ever, our net­work part­ners at NTT Amer­ica rec­og­nize the role Twit­ter is cur­rently play­ing as an impor­tant com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned main­te­nance has been resched­uled to tomor­row between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).” Awe­some job Twitter.

“Fixes for a num­ber of seri­ous vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in the ver­sion of Java in Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 were released by Apple today — about six months after Sun Microsys­tems released updated pack­ages for all other plat­forms that Sun sup­ports, includ­ing Win­dows. Apple releases its own updated ver­sions of Java for Mac OS X.” Why, just because.

“As they con­front unprece­dented num­bers of trou­bled cus­tomers, credit card com­pa­nies are increas­ingly doing some­thing they have his­tor­i­cally scorned: set­tling delin­quent accounts for sub­stan­tially less than the amount owed.” Com­pa­nies in this time frame want more money today than money tomorrow.

NOW high­lights the misog­yny so preva­lent in the media, con­ser­v­a­tive and lib­eral alike.

“The Obama admin­is­tra­tion will order the Navy to hail and request per­mis­sion to inspect North Korean ships at sea sus­pected of car­ry­ing arms or nuclear tech­nol­ogy, but will not board them by force, senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials said Mon­day.” I’m some­what suprised we weren’t doing that previously.

“Microsoft filed the civil com­plaint on Mon­day in United States Dis­trict Court in Seat­tle against Eric Lam, Gor­don Lam and Melanie Suen, of Van­cou­ver, British Colum­bia, along with sev­eral cor­po­ra­tion names they were believed to have used, and sev­eral unnamed par­ties.” Happy days, MS is look­ing for $750,000 in damage.

“As the embat­tled gov­ern­ment of Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad appears to be try­ing to limit Inter­net access and com­mu­ni­ca­tions in Iran, new kinds of social media are chal­leng­ing those tra­di­tional levers of state media con­trol and allow­ing Ira­ni­ans to find novel ways around the restric­tions.” Like I’ve told peo­ple before imag­ine if the Timanean protests had social media, how dif­fer­ent it would be.