Linked List: March 20, 2007

Tuesday, 20 March 2007

Naz Hamid lifts the curtain to reveal screenshots from the custom CMS powering the new AIGA web site.

Dan Benjamin Interviews Brent Simmons ★

Terrific interview. Their discussion on microformats made me think that microformats today are sort of like RSS was back in 2001 and 2002. People are producing them, but they’re out there waiting for the killer app to come along to make them useful in an obvious way, like NetNewsWire did for RSS.

The funny part is that NetNewsWire might be the app that does it for microformats, too.

James Duncan Davidson: Loading Down Lightroom ★

Multi-core processors, hard at work.

From the DF Archives: ‘Seriously, “Repair Permissions” Is Voodoo’ ★

Me, about a year ago:

Arguing that you (a) run Repair Permissions all the time and (b) have no permission problems, and then drawing the conclusion that there’s a cause-and-effect relationship there, is like arguing that your diligent avoidance of sidewalk cracks has a causal relationship to the fact that your mother’s back is doing just fine. Troubleshooting computers is science, not magic.

Valleywag on Alexa ★

Alexa’s stats are a joke. Given that many people apparently take them seriously, a bad joke.

A Conversation at the Grownup Table, as Imagined at the Kids’ Table ★

Simon Rich in The New Yorker:

MOM: Pass the wine, please. I want to become crazy.
DAD: O.K.
GRANDMOTHER: Did you see the politics? It made me angry.
DAD: Me, too. When it was over, I had sex.
UNCLE: I’m having sex right now.
DAD: We all are.

(Via Andy Baio.)

WWDC 2007 Sessions Announced ★

At a glance, the major themes seem to be new Leopard technologies (duh), developer tools, and a bunch of sessions on web development.

Nick Bradbury: Indie Tip #1: Build Something You Need ★

Nick Bradbury is offering tips to indie software developers:

Have you ever tried an application that looked great at first, but once you started using it, it just didn’t feel right? The UI was slick and the feature list looked perfect, but the workflow just wasn’t there?

I see this all the time, and quite often it’s due to developers not using their own applications. They built something they thought would sell instead of something they needed, so they don’t see their software the way an end user would.

Japanese Trailer for ‘Ratatouille’ ★

Japanese subtitles, but the audio is in English. Visually astounding — the atmosphere is tangible, and Pixar is getting really good at animating cartoony humans. (Thanks to Scott Stevenson.)

Beast — Ruby on Rails Forum Software ★

Beast:

A small, light-weight forum in Rails with a scary name and a goal of around 500 lines of code when we’re done.

I hadn’t heard of it before, but 37signals is using it for their Highrise forum.

SpamSieve 2.6 ★

If you get spam, you should use SpamSieve. It’s that simple.

Letterbox — Widescreen Hack for Apple Mail ★

Freeware plugin for Apple Mail that switches the viewer window to a widescreen layout.