By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: August 29, 2005
Monday, 29 August 2005
- How Much Does iTunes Like My Five-Star Songs? ★
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Brian E. Hanson:
To test the option’s preference for 5-stars, I created a short playlist of six songs: one from each different star rating and a song left un-rated. The songs were from the same genre and artist and were changed to be only one second in duration. After resetting the play count to zero, I hit play and left my desk for the weekend. To satisfy a little more curiosity, I ran the same songs once more on a different weekend without selecting the option to play higher rated songs more often. Monday morning the play counts were as shown in Table 1.
(Via Nat Irons, via email.)
- Amputator 1.2 ★
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Updated version of Nat Irons’s nifty little plug-in for Movable Type that alleviates the burden of escaping ampersands in HTML. Now includes support for dynamic publishing.
- Esquivalience ★
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Henry Alford has a terrific little piece in this week’s New Yorker about the apparently-longstanding practice at dictionaries and encyclopedias of putting small fake entries into their books; the idea being that if the fake entries are spotted in other dictionaries / encyclopedias, they’ll know they were plagiarized.
Word spread that the New Oxford American Dictionary had a fake word that started with ‘e’, and lexicographers narrowed it down to esquivalience, a made-up word that supposedly means “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities”, and the word was later spotted on Dictionary.com.
The New Oxford American Dictionary, of course, is the dictionary behind Mac OS X 10.4’s new Dictionary application, and, indeed, there’s an entry for esquivalience, complete with usage examples and fake etymology. (Go ahead and look it up with a Command-Control-D.)
(Via Kottke.)
- When You Are Your Own Client, Who Are You Going to Make Fun of at the Bar? ★
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Jim Coudal, writing in the newly relaunched A List Apart:
At SXSW this year, I answered the question “should my business have a weblog?” like this. If you need to make copies of documents you should have a Xerox machine and if you have information about your product or service that needs to be updated regularly then you should have a blog. But the really interesting question is this, “Should my blog have a business?”
- Setting a Customized ‘From:’ Address on Outgoing Message From Gmail ★
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You can change the Reply-To: header, too.
- Tim Bray Gets His Mom a Mac Mini ★
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Her experience, good and bad, is pretty much exactly what I’d expect.