Yostivanich

“It had been 20 years since a pres­i­dent was elected with a major­ity of the pop­u­lar vote and no seri­ous debate about his Elec­toral Col­lege major­ity. While Democ­rats delighted in remind­ing Repub­li­cans that George Bush’s 2000 “vic­tory” was imposed by a Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court and that his 2004 “vic­tory” relied upon a shaky “man­date” of Ohio’s dis­puted result, Repub­li­cans noted that (because of the inter­ven­tions of Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996) Bill Clin­ton “vic­to­ries” were attained with less than 50 per­cent of the vote. But Obama, always a more cau­tious man than his cam­paign sug­gested, has not gov­erned big.” A reminder of just how his­tor­i­cal the elec­tion was and how much has been accomplished.

“But this is dif­fer­ent — here he’s charged not only with abus­ing the pow­ers of his office to go after mar­ginal groups like unau­tho­rized immi­grants, but cit­i­zens who dare crit­i­cize his actions, includ­ing polit­i­cal oppo­nents and the media — influ­en­tial mem­bers of the com­mu­nity. As such, this might not end as well for the sher­iff as his ear­lier controversies.”

“The Vat­i­can announced Tues­day it was mak­ing it eas­ier for Angli­cans to con­vert to Roman Catholi­cism — a sur­prise move designed to entice tra­di­tion­al­ists opposed to women priests, openly gay clergy and the bless­ing of same-sex unions. The change means con­ser­v­a­tive Angli­cans from around the world will be able to join the Catholic Church while retain­ing aspects of their Angli­can liturgy and iden­tity, includ­ing mar­ried priests.”

“Let’s be hon­est, a lot of stan­dards are writ­ten for pur­poses other than pro­mot­ing inter­op­er­abil­ity. Some exist to pro­tect legacy advan­tages or to cre­ate an oppor­tu­nity to profit from pro­pri­etary intel­lec­tual prop­erty. Oth­ers seem to take on a life of their own and seem to exist solely to jus­tify the con­tin­ued exis­tence of the stan­dards body itself or to cre­ate an oppor­tu­nity for the authors to col­lect on juicy con­sul­tant fees explain­ing how the stan­dard is meant to work to the poor saps who have to imple­ment it. I think we can agree that, what­ever they are, those are usu­ally not good stan­dards. Health data inter­op­er­abil­ity is far too impor­tant an issue to let fall vic­tim to such an approach.”

“We wanted to make the wed­ding rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the insti­tu­tion we’d like mar­riage to be, and I think we did a good job. Does any of this change the fact that mar­riage is a his­tor­i­cally sex­ist insti­tu­tion or make it okay that mil­lions of peo­ple are denied the right to be mar­ried? Of course not. But it made the cel­e­bra­tion one that made sense to us, one that re-imagined what mar­riage as an insti­tu­tion should be about — love, equal part­ner­ship and com­mu­nity. (And seri­ously, to the some of the more con­ser­v­a­tive rel­a­tives at our wed­ding, hear­ing these sort of things at a wed­ding absolutely made an impact.)”

“For 12 days, not bad! The rescid­ing of the Mex­ico City pol­icy, rejec­tion of tor­ture, nam­ing of the cli­mate change envoy, and clos­ing of Guan­tanamo all seem like ban­ner moments. Hardly equal to, say, nego­ti­at­ing peace between the Israelis and Pales­tini­ans or being will­ing to give up your life to end apartheid. But, not bad.”

“White House offi­cials say Mr. Obama took advan­tage of a rare polit­i­cal moment to break through one of Washington’s most pow­er­ful lob­bies and trim more weapons sys­tems than any pres­i­dent had in decades. Mr. Obama has said that he does not intend to reduce mil­i­tary spend­ing while the nation is engaged in two wars. But Mr. Gates also wants to cut more futur­is­tic pro­grams to free money for sim­pler sys­tems like heli­copters and unmanned spy planes that can help the troops now.”

“A ton of tech­nolo­gies are ripe for fur­ther devel­op­ment in the com­ing few years. Social media and related apps are def­i­nitely going to be at the fore­front of the Web for a long time. But plenty of other tech­nolo­gies are on the verge of becom­ing main­stream, either because of more social accep­tance or because of advance­ments in hard­ware and appli­ca­tions. Read on for 15 pre­dic­tions about the future of the Web.”

“But none of this answers the orig­i­nal ques­tion: why do we have an <img> ele­ment? Why not an <icon> ele­ment? Or an <include> ele­ment? Why not a hyper­link with an include attribute, or some com­bi­na­tion of rel val­ues? Why an <img> ele­ment? Quite sim­ply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and ship­ping code wins.”

“The pack­age includes 30 PNG menu icons plus the addi­tional source files for fur­ther customization.”

“It’s not so much revenge as it is a smart busi­ness move. Intuit doesn’t need two dif­fer­ent online finan­cial plan­ning sites for con­sumers, and it bought Mint because it couldn’t beat it. Com­bin­ing the two is the obvi­ous move.” Good to hear, Mint is so much better.

“Basi­cally, we started out with a year that matched the Great Depres­sion, but have since pulled back a bit from the edge of the abyss.”

“So what’s the proper amount of risk? A lot of peo­ple would say, “Gosh, zero?” OK, that sounds safe and rea­son­able. You worked hard to build your busi­ness; you’re count­ing on it for your retire­ment and your kids’ col­lege and what­ever. But if you’re not tak­ing any risks, you’re pretty much guar­an­teed to fail. Some­where, there’s some­one out there who is tak­ing more risks than you, and that person’s busi­ness is grow­ing faster than yours, and that person’s busi­ness may one day come to dom­i­nate your indus­try while yours with­ers away.”

Very amus­ing.

“Phone­Gap is an open source devel­op­ment tool for build­ing fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web devel­oper who wants to build mobile appli­ca­tions in HTML and JavaScript while still tak­ing advan­tage of the core fea­tures in the iPhone, Android and Black­berry SDKs, Phone­Gap is for you.”

“Sim­ple­Modal is a light­weight jQuery Plu­gin which pro­vides a pow­er­ful inter­face for modal dia­log devel­op­ment. Think of it as a modal dia­log frame­work. Sim­ple­Modal gives you the flex­i­bil­ity to build what­ever you can envi­sion, while shield­ing you from related cross-browser issues inher­ent with UI development.”

“This page con­tains the 252 allowed enti­ties in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0, as out­lined in sec­tion 24 of the offi­cial HTML 4 spec­i­fi­ca­tions, pub­lished by the W3C.”

Neat site that has a ton of ajax spin­ners available.

“To com­pete with thou­sands of iPhone apps in the App Store, hav­ing a good app icon is not enough. A nicely designed web­site for the app is very impor­tant. A beau­ti­ful web­site helps to drive traf­fic in and also makes your app stand out from the crowd. This post show­cases a gallery of appeal­ing iPhone app sites and com­mon design trends that I see.”