Linked List: December 2, 2009

Wednesday, 2 December 2009

Justin Williams:

I believe that with the current crop of Web technologies available in MobileSafari, apps like Hahlo, PocketTweets and Showtime could thrive as an alternative to their native counterparts if Apple allowed developers to adjust the scrolling/drag coefficient of Mobile WebKit. If you compare the scrolling speed of your Twitter timeline in Hahlo and Tweetie, the results are drastically different. Tweetie feels like it effortlessly scrolls based on how much momentum you exert in the scroll action, while Hahlo is being constrained by a fifty pound weight on its back.

Amen.

Anatomy of a Fireballing ★

Jared Earle:

To put it simply, if you’re running a WordPress blog, you need to be using wp-super-cache. One day, someone will tell people about stuff you’re saying and you want your site to still be there when the people that listen to them turn up on your doorstep.

Parcycle: A Particle System With HTML5 Canvas ★

JavaScript/Canvas particle system by Mr Speaker. Works — albeit slowly — on the iPhone too. (Via Geoffrey Grosenbach.)

Times Skimmer ★

I like this new interface to the NYT online. The Times’s PR announcement describes it as more like a newspaper, but I’d say that’s true only in spirit. It’s far less cluttered than the regular Times web site layout, and it feels faster.

Cutting-edge on the tech side, too: in Safari it displays headlines and sub-heads using the same fonts as the print edition, thanks to the new CSS @font-face property and TypeKit.

Whither ‘Barry Lyndon’ in HD? ★

One more Lyndon-related link to complete the daily trifecta. There’s an OK standard-def transfer from 2001, but still no Blu-ray or HD version on iTunes. Nick Kostopoulos reports on The Auteurs that we just need to sit tight — Warner Brothers is working on it and wants to get it right.

If it’s as good as the Blu-ray transfer of 2001, I’ll be happy.

Update: Ends up iTunes does have an HD version, but it’s only for rent, and only available on Apple TV (which is why I didn’t see it when I checked iTunes on my Mac). No idea how good a transfer it is.

Venn Diagram of the Day ★

Perhaps better suited to Easter than Christmas.

8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight ★

Eye-opening research by Christopher Soghoian on government surveillance requests received by ISPs and phone companies in the U.S.:

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

(You may recall Soghoian’s name from his Northwest Airlines boarding pass generator three years ago.)

More Lyndon ★

Wonderful collection of Lyndon imagery and promotional material, including comparisons of stills from the film and 18th century paintings. (Via Jim Coudal, of course.)

‘Going West’ ★

Splendid stop-motion animation for the New Zealand Book Council.

Against Camel Case ★

Caleb Crain:

Word spaces should not be taken for granted. Ancient Greek, the first alphabet to feature vowels, could be deciphered without word spaces if you sounded it out, and did without them. Spaces or centered points divide words on early Roman monuments, but Latin, too, ceased to separate words by the second century. The loss is puzzling, because the eye has to work much harder to read unseparated text.

Lars von Trier on Kubrick’s ‘Barry Lyndon’ ★

I cry like a baby every time I watch Lyndon. Last time, a few months ago, I went upstairs afterward to hold my boy while he slept.