A public safety message: Do you know how to casually record audio on your cell phone or mp3 player?
Last year, a Bronx teenager took down a corrupt detective by surreptitiously recording his interrogation on an mp3 player.
Recently, a Colombian immigrant caught an USCIS agent demanding sex in exchange for a green card. She recorded the 16 minute conversation on her cell phone.
Please take a few moments to see if you can—quietly—record several minutes of audio on your phone or portable music player. Evidence may some day be your best defense against abuse of power.
Jeff Atwood advises globally-aware developers to make sure their applications work well for Turkish users. Because Turkish date and number formats differ significantly from American and British (and because Unicode support is a must), he says localizing to “tr” is a good test of your overall localization strategy.
There is also the infamous lowercase i problem.
Right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew seem to pose a much bigger challenge. Besides, Hebrew localization involves date conversion to/from a different calendar, as do other locales.
As many of the comments to Atwood’s article point out, there is a staggering amount of diversity in terms of sorting, stemming, and formatting various values. Relatively speaking, Turkish localization should be a snap.
A colleague just asked me if I think Apple will dominate the next generation of computing.
I said they’re certainly going to sell A LOT of iPhones in the next few years. I’m not sure why anyone would buy anything else at this point, unless you really can’t stand the smell of AT&T or you have a vested interest in some other platform.
I think this is less about Apple than it is about a long-awaited paradigm shift in personal computing, which is the emergence of cheap, ultra-portable, always-connected devices. The Internet is free of the desktop and laptop now, and it’s free in full color and with a 3-axis accelerometer. Whether Apple makes it, or ASUS, or Google doesn’t really matter in the long run.
I think we’ll look back on this in 10 years and boggle that more people didn’t see it coming.
My new copy of Civilization is dead on arrival. No empire-building for me this weekend.
Case-sensitive HFS+ is an unsupported configuration. No simple plist edits here, I need to reformat my laptop if I want it to work. Payback for being a geek.
I want a case-sensitive, Unicode-friendly filesystem. And I want Macintosh Applications to work on it. Is that so wrong?
Maybe the pirated version works…
Reports of a “Serious Vulnerability in Firefox 2.0.0.12“ are greatly exaggerated, to say the least.
It seems that someone discovered the “view source” feature, that allows you to see the source code of Firefox from within Firefox (handy for developers) and decided to claim that it could be used to discover private information. It can’t. The only files you can see are, yes, the files in the Firefox application directory, which is what you downloaded from the interwebs when you installed Firefox.
Your stored passwords and cookies and other cruft are stored separately, and are not accessible using this technique.
This is so hot that I’m gonna post without even trying it out (must maintain plausible deniability): TrueCrypt is now available to the rest of us.
“Free, open-source, on-the-fly encryption” means that you can create encrypted disk images, including hidden ones. Portability between OSX, Windows, and Linux means that you can share them with other people.
It just got a lot easier to centralize privacy- and security-sensitive information.
Update (2008-04-05): I recommend using Camino for security-sensitive applications like email, shopping, or banking. Fluid is a little too integrated with other WebKit apps like Mail, Saftari and Dashboard.
Fluid.app lets you create site-specific web browsers in OSX.
Why would you want to do this? So you can alt-tab between your web browser and your weblog. Or between your web browser and GMail.
It’s one of those simple things that really makes a big usability difference.
A site-specific browser can also increase the overall security of the web applications you use, by preventing cross-site scripting exploits. In other words, lolcatzworld.com can’t access your GMail contacts, no matter how l33t they are.
Mad props to Todd Ditchendorf for figuring this out, and making it free. Hey Todd, can we audit the source code soon? ;-)
As for that eternal life and women throwing themselves at you, we’ve already given you healthy diets and pheromones. Why not try meeting us half-way?
