Linked List: March 10, 2010

Wednesday, 10 March 2010

Mozilla’s next-generation JavaScript engine is based partly on WebKit’s, and sounds like a very clever design overall.

Chained Up in the Dungeon of Emperor Xing ★

If you’re not hooked by the end of the second paragraph you might as well stop there.

Birdfeed, Buzz Andersen’s outstanding iPhone Twitter client, has been purchased by Brizzly, updated, and rebranded as Brizzly for iPhone — and is now available from the App Store as a free download. There are some nice additions (such as the addictive pull-down-to-refresh gesture introduced by Tweetie), but a few steps back as well, including the loss of Birdfeed’s visual charm.

My main gripe is that it’s not a direct Twitter client any longer. Rather than sign in to Twitter, you sign in with an account at Brizzly. If you have multiple Twitter accounts, you must hook them up to your Brizzly account. I don’t see any benefit to this, but I do see an extra potential point of failure. The deal breaker for me, alas, is that they seem to have eliminated Birdfeed’s Instapaper support.

On the upside: our long national nightmare of conflating Birdfeed and Birdhouse is now over.

Amazon’s One-Click Patent Confirmed Following Re-Exam ★

Four years.

‘If You Were to See a Viking Today, It’s Best That You Go Some Other Way’ ★

“What’s in the David Foster Wallace Archive?”, from Meredith Blake at The New Yorker:

For Wallace scholars, the real jewel in the crown might be a battered, taped-together copy of Pam Cook’s “The Cinema Book,” used as research for “Infinite Jest.” His handwritten notes include multiple references to “IJ” and, according to a blog post by Scwartzburg, display a “particular interest in sections on the idea of the auteur, the technology of deep focus cinematography, new wave cinema, the Hollywood star system, and most film genres (with the notable exception of the ‘gangster/crime film’).”

Great slide show at the end, too.

The Secret Origin of Windows ★

First-hand report from Tandy Trower, the product manager at Microsoft who shipped Windows 1.0 and 2.0. Great stuff.

Blue Marble ★

Jeff Richardson on the story behind the photo that serves as the iPhone’s default wallpaper.

Unearthed Rolling Stones Tracks Set to Debut on ‘Exile on Main Street’ Reissue ★

My pick as the greatest rock album ever made. Don’t miss: Andy Greene interviews Mick and Keith on the new release. Keith:

Also, it’s the first album with no particular single on it, you know? There was no “Brown Sugar” or whatever. We made it as an album, rather than looking for a hit single.

‘No Other Distribution Authorized Under This Agreement’ ★

Wolf Rentzsch:

I hope section 7.3 comes back to bite Apple during their Department of Justice investigation.

Wired Reread ★

New weblog by Theis Søndergaard, featuring scanned pages from old issues of Wired:

This blog is not intended to be just a point-and-laugh central, picking apart the mistakes of the past and ridiculing those who got it wrong. You won’t have to look long for posts that do that, of course… but the main purpose of this blog is to put the past into perspective. In the fast paced world of tech, we often lure ourselves into believing that everything is different now, and old rules don’t apply. Well, quite often they do (if not always) and checking out our collective tech-past can help us get a perspective on the present.

So good.

Mozilla JetPack Rips Off Design and Graphics From MetaLab ★

Andrew Wilkinson:

I don’t understand why companies think that they can get away with doing this. The internet is a surprisingly small place, and we were notified almost immediately. We’ve all had a good chuckle about this, but we’ve contacted Mozilla and demanded that they take the design down.

Really does seem bizarre that anyone thought this wouldn’t be noticed.

Update: Mozilla apologizes, and is “actively investigating how this happened to ensure that it does not happen again.”

Colosseo ★

New from Cameron Moll: the Roman Coliseum rendered in type.

Marco Arment on Advertising, Entitlement, and Voting With Attention ★

Hyper-rational take on the situation.