Attaboy Media

"A Kindle book, on the other hand, comes on like a lap dancer 10 minutes before closing time. It..."

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:28:00 -0500

“A Kindle book, on the other hand, comes on like a lap dancer 10 minutes before closing time. It barely says hello.”

- Ian Brown savages the Kindle in the Globe and Mail

A pretty clever video for the curious layperson: “What is...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:43:24 -0500

A pretty clever video for the curious layperson: “What is Google Chrome OS?”

Who knew scrollbars could be art?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:42:19 -0500

Who knew scrollbars could be art?

Don't forget the cannoli!

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:10:13 -0500

Don't forget the cannoli!

Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:45:08 -0500

Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment:

Nifty bookmarklet that changes a webpage on the fly to look like a book with nice, large type, proper margins, and no distractions. Very cool. (via David Pogue)

Sports fan stencil wars

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:59:08 -0500

Sports fan stencil wars

City slickers and the legend of Canada as an urban nation

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:25:00 -0500

City slickers and the legend of Canada as an urban nation:

Roy MacGregor reveals the lie behind a myth: Canadian media often cite that Canada is the most urbanized country on earth, with 80% of the population living in a city. Statistics Canada, however, considers any settlement of more than 1,000 people “urban”, so this is entirely false given any, more reasonable definition of the word. With a cut-off of 100,000, McGregor claims that only half the population lives in urban areas, although in my opinion, this is very cloudy given the absurd dimensions of some Canadian cities like Halifax and Ottawa.

Lieutenant-Governor of Newfoundland offers his middle finger to the eyes of the E.U.

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:37:28 -0500

Lieutenant-Governor of Newfoundland offers his middle finger to the eyes of the E.U.

Toronto joins the open data movement

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:26:00 -0500

Toronto joins the open data movement:

Not a lot of data yet, but it’s a good start. I’d love to see the TTC open their data so someone can improve on their lousy online presence.

Update: Well that was fast. TTC data is now online.

Letters of Note: Einstein's One Great Mistake

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:40:36 -0400

Letters of Note: Einstein's One Great Mistake:

Has the strong odour of retrospect on it: “A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.”

On Internet Explorer 7, cookies, iframes and privacy settings

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:08:04 -0400

With Dabble DB, one of the recommend techniques that people use is to embed database pages into their websites using an iframe tag. This presented a weird problem, however, when combined with access control: on Internet Explorer 7, logging in to such pages didn’t work. Instead, people would simply be redirected to the login page.

Initially I was unable to reproduce the problem, but then I noticed that my Privacy options were set to “allow all cookies”, which is not the default setting. The default, aka “Medium” privacy, triggered the problem. So: IE7 doesn’t allow cookies to be set by webpages in an iframe. As the Brits like to say, oh pants.

After some googling, I found this comment on the Facebook developers’ forum which outlined the solution: create a “P3P” policy and include a compact version of it in an HTTP header. What’s P3P, you ask? Turns out it’s an ignored standard for communicating data privacy intentions that only Microsoft ever bothered to implement. They’ve since abandoned it for IE8. At its default settings, IE7 doesn’t trust iframe pages to set cookies unless they announce their intentions with the P3P header.

So I diligently downloaded this P3P policy program, created a policy, and then added the compact policy in a header in our Apache configuration:

BrowserMatch MSIE IS_MSIE
Header set P3P "policyref=\"http://dabbledb.com/legal/p3p.xml\", CP=\"NOI CURa ADMa DEVa TAIa OUR BUS IND UNI COM NAV INT\"" env=IS_MSIE

Note that you need mod_headers enabled in Apache to use the Header command. The XML file referenced in the header is optional as far as I can tell, but I thought I’d include it for good measure.

For what it’s worth, Facebook themselves seemed to settle on a somewhat simpler approach. They added only CP=HONK to the P3P header. What’s HONK mean? Who knows. I suspect it’s Facebook’s cheeky way of saying they don’t respect this whole P3P business. But it works anyway. Yep, that’s some tight security there, Microsoft.

BogoJoker » Improving the Web Inspector

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:37:21 -0400

BogoJoker » Improving the Web Inspector:

This blog post was weeks ago, but I just noticed it — outstanding work by Joseph Pecoraro on the WebKit Inspector.

Zoom in from a coffee bean to a carbon atom

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:12:06 -0400

Zoom in from a coffee bean to a carbon atom

Scientists warn of Fido's big ecological paw print

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:15:38 -0400

Scientists warn of Fido's big ecological paw print:

There’s no word, however, on how much academic hot air contributes to global warming.

Macworld's Magic Mouse Review

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:19:16 -0400

Macworld's Magic Mouse Review:

Early returns on Apple’s new mouse aren’t that encouraging. Expensive; only two buttons; rough movement. Uh. No thanks.

55 CD anthology “111 Years of Deutsche Grammophon” is $9.99 on Canadian iTunes store

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:22:34 -0400

55 CD anthology “111 Years of Deutsche Grammophon” is $9.99 on Canadian iTunes store:

If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to expand your classical music collection, then here it is.

GitHub Flavored Markdown

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:59:48 -0400

GitHub Flavored Markdown:

This sounds great. Markdown is fabulous, but the little things GitHub has changed make a lot more sense for people who aren’t familiar with Markdown’s rules.

Mr Eaves

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:50:13 -0400

Mr Eaves:

New typefaces, Mr Eaves Sans and Mr Eaves Modern, designed to complement one of Emigre’s most popular faces, Mrs Eaves.

Raphaël—JavaScript Library

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:11:09 -0400

Raphaël—JavaScript Library:

A small vector graphics library for JS with support for all major browsers.

Patching war-damaged buildings with Lego

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:20:46 -0400

Patching war-damaged buildings with Lego