Yostivanich

“The easy single-handed oper­a­tion of the iPhone1 is not one of its obvi­ous sell­ing points but is one of those lit­tle fea­tures that grows on you and becomes nearly indis­pens­able. A portable net­worked com­put­ing and gam­ing device that can be eas­ily oper­ated with one hand can be used in a sur­pris­ing vari­ety of sit­u­a­tions.” If I had an iPhone I would have to agree.

“For new apps, there’s now lit­tle rea­son to make sep­a­rate free and paid ver­sions — it now makes sense in many cases to have what I’ll call a “free+” app until some­one else thinks of a bet­ter short­hand term: free for a lim­ited or ad-supported ver­sion, with in-app pur­chase for pre­mium fea­tures or con­tent. But this doesn’t com­pletely solve the separate-app prob­lem for every­one:” I agree totally.

“A rul­ing from the Ari­zona Supreme Court yes­ter­day means that from now on the meta­data of pub­lic records is now part of that record, and has to be handed over in response to a pub­lic infor­ma­tion request. The orig­i­nal Ari­zona case con­cerns a police whis­tle blower, who sus­pected that bad per­for­mance reviews had been cre­ated after the fact in the dig­i­tal per­son­nel files to jus­tify his demo­tion. The depart­ment refused to hand over the data about the cre­ation of those records, but now the court has ruled that they must.” Very impor­tant ruling.

“Almost 40 per­cent of the nation’s 18– to 24-year-olds in 2008 were enrolled in col­lege, a record num­ber, accord­ing to a Pew Research Cen­ter report released on Thurs­day. The rise was dri­ven almost entirely by a surge in stu­dents attend­ing com­mu­nity colleges.”

“So 70 per­cent of Amer­i­cans may indeed sup­port a pub­lic option. As long as they hear the word “choice” when they’re asked about it.”

“The US is to end its 22-year ban on peo­ple with HIV enter­ing the coun­try, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama has confirmed.”

“Ear­lier this week the Nuclear Energy Insti­tute (NEI), the nuclear power industry’s prin­ci­pal trade orga­ni­za­tion, released a pro­posal ask­ing for bil­lions of dol­lars in tax­payer sub­si­dies and rad­i­cal changes to the fed­eral reg­u­la­tory process that would shift even more risks and costs from the indus­try to the public.”

“I under­stand the need for jour­nal­ists to not be biased. But to sug­gest that there are two sides to this story and that they deserve equal time is ridicu­lous. Euge­nie Scott knows her sci­ence. Com­fort doesn’t know his.” The more I think about this issue, the more I agree.

” 1. Set a max­i­mum height to the drop­downs
2. On hover, reveal the sub­menu
3. Cal­cu­late a speed mul­ti­plier based on the height of the sub­menu
4. Watch for mouse move­ment in the menu
5. Scroll the menu with the mouse move­ment, based on the mul­ti­plier
6. On mouse out, close the menu” Very neat trick.

Awe­some.

“In treat­ing user myopia, it’s not enough to place impor­tant stuff directly in the user’s eye­point. You also need to ensure that you’ve placed the absolute most impor­tant stuff at the top of the page — and haven’t cre­ated any acci­den­tal bar­ri­ers to scrolling, so they can find the rest of it. The fold is far less impor­tant than it used to be, but it isn’t quite as myth­i­cal as Big­foot and the Loch Ness Mon­ster quite yet.”

“It’s tough to see the mighty fine dis­tinc­tion between the two. But this is hardly a new seman­tics bat­tle for both Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans. While it would be mis­lead­ing to say that Pelosi and the Democ­rats are imple­ment­ing this tax hike or cre­at­ing it – the cuts are sched­uled to expire at the end of 2010 under the law passed by Repub­li­cans – those who ben­e­fited from the cuts would indeed see their taxes go up if they expire. And those tax­pay­ers, we sus­pect, would call that an increase.”

“Now CBO has revised its opin­ion, based on new evi­dence. Cit­ing recent stud­ies, includ­ing two new eco­nomic papers pub­lished only last month, CBO con­cludes that lim­it­ing mal­prac­tice lia­bil­ity would reduce total national health care spend­ing by about one-half of 1 per­cent, or about $11 bil­lion this year. That would save tax­pay­ers about $41 bil­lion over the next decade in lower Medicare, Med­ic­aid and other fed­eral spend­ing for health care. That’s still not close to what Bush claimed five years ago, and what some Repub­li­cans are still claim­ing. But it’s a sig­nif­i­cant point in favor of a health care pro­posal that is gen­er­ally opposed by Democrats.”

“Exec­u­tive sum­mary: Since I infa­mously rage-quit the iPhone (due to the appar­ent rejec­tion of the offi­cial Google Voice app, and ongo­ing frus­trat­ing app store pol­icy deci­sions) and came crawl­ing back a month later, it remains my pri­mary phone. I’m still very wary of the app store as single-source of soft­ware. But over the long term, I couldn’t con­tinue to throw the baby out with the bath­wa­ter. And it is a big, beau­ti­ful baby to be sure.” Too many good points to talk about them all in this post.

“Font choice is not the most import­ant deci­sion you make when design­ing with type. On the web, cur­rently, it is way down on the list because of the con­straints of the medium. With com­mer­cial font embed­ding just around the cor­ner, we stand on the edge of an incred­ibly excit­ing time for the typo­graphic web. In eight­een months time, I think the web will be start­ing to look very dif­fer­ent. And about time too, but let’s not get dis­trac­ted by the shiny.” I’m with this.

“If you think that your cur­rent plan options will con­tinue to be this bad for the next 10 years or more, and you don’t think you’ll leave your com­pany before then, then it may indeed be bet­ter to just invest out­side a 401k plan. (Keep up the IRA con­tri­bu­tions!) How­ever, I think that soon 401k plans will be more tightly reg­u­lated, and the trend is for plans to at least offer a few low-cost options. I know my plan seems to get a lit­tle bet­ter every year. If it were me, I’d prob­a­bly suck it up and still tuck money away in the 401k in the hopes of a brighter future.”

“In my hum­ble opin­ion, $200 — $300 for a SSD is eas­ily the most cost effec­tive per­for­mance increase you can buy for a com­puter of any­thing remotely resem­bling recent vin­tage. Whether you pre­fer the 80 GB X25-M SSD or the 128 GB Cru­cial SSD, it’s money well invested for peo­ple like us who are obses­sive about how their com­puter performs.”

“A Sen­ate bill would allow the pres­i­dent to restrict access to gov­ern­ment or “crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture” net­works in case of a “cyber­se­cu­rity emer­gency.” But it has bipar­ti­san sup­port, and even crit­ics admit it would not allow him to shut down all pri­vate Inter­net traffic.”

“One way to really see this is when peo­ple on Twit­ter auto-update their Face­book (guilty as charged). The expe­ri­ences and feed­back on Twit­ter feel very dif­fer­ent than the expe­ri­ences and feed­back on Face­book. On Twit­ter, I feel like I’m part of an ocean of peo­ple, catch­ing cer­tain waves and cre­at­ing my own. Things whirl past and I add stuff to the mix. When I post the same mes­sages to Face­book, I’m con­sis­tently shocked by the peo­ple who take the time to leave com­ments about them, to favorite them, to ask ques­tions in response, to start a con­ver­sa­tion. (Note: I’m ter­ri­ble about using social media for con­ver­sa­tion and so I’m a ter­ri­ble respon­dent on Face­book.) Many of the peo­ple fol­low­ing me are the same, but the entire expe­ri­ence is different.”

“For Palin to show up in Iowa look­ing for a check, rather than bear­ing one from SarahPAC–which brought in three-quarters of a mil­lion dol­lars in the first half of this year and has already drawn scrutiny from FEC–means that she is either the most dim-witted pres­i­den­tial aspi­rant ever, which I seri­ously doubt, or her inter­ests clearly tilt toward cash­ing in on her star-power. Although one might ask for a $100,000 speak­ing fee from a giant cor­po­ra­tion or trade asso­ci­a­tion, request­ing it from a non-profit 501©3 group–no less one that pro­motes con­ser­v­a­tive fam­ily val­ues and is based in Iowa–is about as stu­pid as it gets.”

“In a col­umn on the Chris­t­ian Broad­cast­ing Network’s Web site, writer Kim­berly Daniels asserts that “demons” sneak into bags of Hal­loween candy at gro­cery stores.” Okay then.

“A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF USER INTELLECT BASED ON ANTI-PRODUCTIVITY APPLICATIONS INCLUDED IN OPERATING SYSTEMS”

“I’m not sure what could rea­son­ably be done at this point to give the Wii bet­ter longevity and game­play depth. Nearly every third-party title is awful. Nintendo’s games trickle out at a snail’s pace, and many of them are just as shal­low, or more so, than Wii Sports.”