Stupidfool.org

Unsubscribe

Over the last two months, I've been doing an experiment and I'm happy to say it actually seems to be working. I have been clicking on the "unsubscribe me" link in every piece of unsolicited (or possibly solicited but no longer wanted) email I receive. As of the last week, I've noticed a marked decrease in the amount of such mail.

via www.quid.pro

I started doing this today on every piece of unwanted marketing email I received. We'll see how it goes.

(Incidentally, it's kind of interesting to see the number of different interfaces that email marketing companies have created for unsubscribing from an email list. There wasn't a common interface among the 15-20 lists that I unsubscribed from.)

TypePad Blog It and Chrome

Google Chrome is a great new browser from Google for Mac, Windows and Linux. The TypePad team loves it because it's speedy, stable and has a bunch of great features that are great for bloggers. If you're a Google Chrome user, we've made it easy for you to blog from Chrome, by making Blog It available as a Google Chrome Extension. You can install the extension with one click from the Google Chrome Extensions gallery, and once you do you'll have a TypePad icon in your browser toolbar, which acts just like the Blog It Bookmarklet.

via everything.typepad.com

I've been a faithful Safari user for years, now, and until this week, I'd resisted the advances of Chrome, aside from one or two attempts to use it before it was in beta.

But yesterday, I decided to mix it up, people! I'm a Chrome user now, for the next six days; and if I like it, I'll probably stay a Chrome user.

First impression: it's really good. And as a bonus, it supports Blog It as an extension, which is a huge bonus for me, since something like 95% of my posts--like this one--are composed using Blog It.

The Panic Status Board

via Matt Jacobs, the Panic Status Board:

Cabel writes:

Our support turnaround time is faster than it’s ever been. Just the simple act of “publicizing” those numbers — not in a cruel way, but a “where are we at as a group?” way — has kept the support process on-task and, I think, made it a bit more like a video game. (It helps that when all the boxes are at “zero”, a virtual bottle of champagne appears on-screen, and a physical one is likely removed from the fridge.)

This is brilliant.

Pagination in Instapaper

Instapaper Pro 2.2 is now available, and it supports pagination (in addition to the existing scrolling interface):

After the previous version’s release, I took a break from reading on the iPhone and read everything on the Kindle. I learned that I much preferred pagination to scrolling — even tilt scrolling — and that pagination is part of what makes the Kindle reading experience so great. So I spent a long time experimenting with different methods to bring pagination to the iPhone, and I finally found a solution that, while simplistic, allows any mix of pagination and scrolling in the dynamic web content that Instapaper is ideal for reading. I now prefer pagination to tilt scrolling. You can toggle between them with the Pagination switch in the Settings screen.

I like this. I've been reading a lot of books on the iPhone Kindle app, so I've gotten really used to its pagination interface vs the scrolling interface that Instapaper's historically had. A couple of days ago while reading an article in Instapaper, I realized that I'm constantly trying to scroll exactly one page's worth at a time. Which is... distracting.

So, yes: pagination.

A free Kindle

via Andrew at quid.pro:

Michael Arrington writes this morning that Amazon is looking for ways to give free Kindles to all Amazon prime users:

In January Amazon offered select customers a free Kindle of sorts – they had to pay for it, but if they didn’t like it they could get a full refund and keep the device. It turns out that was just a test run for a much more ambitious program. A reliable source tells us Amazon wants to give a free Kindle to every subscriber.

Of the last nine books I've read, I've read eight of them on my iPhone using the Kindle app. As a matter of convenience, it's been pretty much perfect, compared to lugging books around.

But I don't think I'd necessarily want a free Kindle device; the marginal improvement to reading just doesn't seem worth it, and I'm not sure I'd want to lug it around, either. What I would love is a better experience for finding books to read (which, I think, is what Michael was also saying).

Why I'm loving Plack and PSGI

Tatsuhiko Miyagawa's PSGI/Plack have been on my mind a lot, lately, as a great example of taking a common problem and solving it in the simplest possible way.

I used Plack today, actually; here was my use case:

• I'd written a 15-line Perl script that, run from the command line, produced JSON output with the coordinates of some photos.
• I wanted to plot those photos on a Google map, and in fact had already written the Javascript to do so, given a copy/paste JSON dump of the output of my script.
• I wanted to connect the Perl script and the Javascript using something other than copy/paste of the JSON output.

Here's what I did: I converted my Perl script into a PSGI app by adding around, oh, 4 lines of Perl code. I then ran that script as a webserver using plackup, and converted my Javascript to pull the JSON data via Ajax (using jQuery) from that webserver.

This was something like 10x easier than writing a CGI script, and probably 100x easier than writing an Apache/mod_perl app. And here's the amazing part: by writing it with PSGI, I wrote both a CGI and Apache/mod_perl app, as well as an app that'd run cleanly in a non-blocking server like Perlbal, since it does no I/O.

This is really good.

I'm putting on my bulletproof vest.

Oh, this is wonderful: some physicists have suggested that the Large Hadron Collider was broken intentionally by a subatomic particle sent back from the future. Or... something.

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Unicorns and Unixes

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that fork(2) is bad. Thirty years from now, there will still be a fork(2) and a pipe(2) and a exec(2) and smart people will still be using them to solve hard problems reliably and predictably, just like they were thirty years ago.

via tomayko.com

Network programming is fun. I also wish it were a little less painful, at times, but that comes more when you try to get tricky with event loops, non-blocking connects, &c.

Unboxed

Steven Frank's 3GS unboxing video is absolutely brilliant.

Architecture

Lovely essay from Julian Browne about (the death of) architecture (via Evan Weaver).

My son doesn't believe in the future. When he says he wants ice cream and I reply "later", he just hears "something that isn't relevant to right now". He holds this view because he is two years old and hasn't experienced enough time, or ice cream, to understand that patience and faith in your father's promises can help develop a more considered attitude to life.