Linked List: August 3, 2007

Friday, 3 August 2007

Greasemonkey extension for Firefox that forces Gmail to use HTTPS. By Mark Pilgrim, of course.

Super-simple text-based to-do manager in the early stages of development, by Jesse Grosjean of Hog Bay Software, whose previous work includes Mori and WriteRoom. It’s a very simple, but intriguing and original concept. And when I say text-based, I mean it — the file format is a simple plain text file. (Via Merlin Mann.)

Merlin Mann’s ‘Inbox Zero’ Talk at Google ★

“Advanced common sense” approach to creating a simple, manageable system for dealing with large amounts of email. One of several clever observations, which certainly applies to me, is that those of us who started using email in the early 1990s (or earlier) developed habits and conceptions — based on the then-available email clients and very different number of messages received in a typical day — that no longer apply today.

For those who don’t want video, Merlin has an MP3 of the audio.

Joe Kissell on Microsoft’s Announcement of the Office 2008 Delay ★

Joe Kissell:

What I do care very much about, though, as someone who uses words for a living, is the language Microsoft chose to use in the press release they sent out announcing this delay. It is, truly, a delay: a difference of (depending on how you interpreted “second half of 2007″) anywhere from two weeks to six months and two weeks. And most of the news sites that reported on the delay described it as such. But Microsoft themselves did not use the word “delay.” They didn’t mention that they’d previously announced an earlier date. They didn’t say they were sorry. Instead, they used standard weaselly marketing language to make it sound like they were announcing a virtual non-event, and perhaps even to subtly suggest that anyone who wanted to think about it differently doesn’t care about quality.

Weaselly indeed.

Inventaholism ★

Why do we use the suffix -aholic to make up words implying addiction (chocoholic, workaholic), when the “ahol” originates specifically from alcoholic, where the suffix is simply -ic?

Again, speakers tend to make novel utterances predictable, not necessarily logical. It’s correlation, not causation, that produces meaning.

Update: Reader Hunt Anderson emailed with an apt quote from Homer Simpson: “It’s true… I’m a rageaholic! I just can’t live without rageahol!”

(Via Magnetbox.)

The Official Apple Paperclip ★

Replacement iPhones ship with a paperclip to open the SIM card slot.

Hazel 2.0 ★

Major update to Noodlesoft’s clever $22 utility for automating file clean-up and organization based on a rule system similar to Mail’s.

Point and Click Gmail Hacking at Black Hat ★

Gmail username and password authentication takes place over HTTPS, but then you get a session cookie and the rest of your session takes place over unencrypted HTTP. Robert Graham’s demo at Black Hat showed that by sniffing the cookie over an open network, the Gmail session can be hijacked.

Gmail supports HTTPS, but the only way to get it is to specificy ‘https:’ in the URL when you load the site. Google should redirect all HTTP Gmail traffic to HTTPS by default.

Our Precious Bodily Fluids ★

Jim Coudal:

A quick Friday contest for no reason. Send in links about Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and we’ll post the most interesting ones and send the contributors a special and highly confidential prize.

Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.

Tagamac ★

New weblog by Ian Beck dedicated to the intersection of tagging and Mac software. A bunch of good links and articles in the first week. His “Tagging Best Practices” is a fine example (although I disagree with his specific advice — I use title capitalization and default to plural tag names — I agree that it’s essential to be consistent).

Mac OS X’s Mouse Acceleration Problem ★

Another good TidBITS article; this one by Parrish S. Knight back in March. I have never found the mouse acceleration on the Mac to be fast enough for my liking; without USB Overdrive cranked up to a very fast acceleration curve, my wrist starts hurting within minutes. Knights links to a few other utilities that can be used to adjust the mouse acceleration curve.

Liz Danzico: The Broken Windows Theory of Instant Messaging ★

File under: Funny Because It’s True.

Emma Story on W3C Validator Changes ★

The trick with the favicons is particularly clever.

Stewing Over Safe Sleep ★

Excellent article in TidBITS by Joe Kissell on Mac OS X’s recent on-by-default no-UI-to-turn-it-off “Safe Sleep” feature:

It takes more than a “moment” for your computer to write this hibernation file to disk and go to sleep. The length of time it takes is proportional to the amount of RAM you have installed. On my new MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM, it takes 49 seconds for the computer to sleep when Safe Sleep is active; with Safe Sleep turned off, it takes only 4 seconds. That’s an enormous, and enormously annoying, difference.

Kissell really nails this one. But it’s even worse than the annoyance of having to wait nearly a minute for sleep to kick in, and that you lose as much disk space as you have RAM.

My wife’s MacBook was suffering from a problem where, once or twice a week, the machine would just shut down completely when she put it to sleep. She’d close the lid, and a few seconds later, the machine would just turn off or restart. The solution? Disable Safe Sleep. It hasn’t happened again even once.

Unprofessional in Black ★

Tim Bray on his black MacBook.

William Gibson’s Weblog ★

I was subscribed to this a while back, but forgot about it when Gibson stopped updating for a period while working on a novel. (Thanks to Steve Kalkwarf for the reminder.)

Chinese Video Game Allows Players to ‘Execute’ Supposedly-Corrupt Government Officials ★

The Sydney Morning Herald:

To advance to a new level, the player must enter an “Anti-Corruption College” to be lectured in more detail about ancient cases, the Southeast Business newspaper said.

Along the way internet vigilantes are rewarded for the capture, torture and killing of not just corrupt officials, but also their sons and daughters.

Next up: a game where you get to torture the guy in the Chinese factory who leaked the news and pictures of the new Apple keyboard.

(Thanks to Daniel Bogan.)

The Difference Between Times and Times New Roman ★

Given my strong feelings in the matter of Helvetica v. Arial, a couple of readers have asked whether I have any opinion on Times v. Times New Roman. Both are included in Mac OS X; only Times New Roman is included on the iPhone. In short, no, I don’t care, because I can’t tell them apart. Unlike Helvetica and Arial, Times and Times New Roman are simply different digitalizations of the same original typeface.

This article posted to comp.fonts in 1994 by Charles Bigelow has a bunch of additional details on the history of Times Roman’s various digital incarnations.