Undoubtedly libraries are a good thing. The access and training that we provide for technology isn't offered by any other public service (largely because public services are rapidly becoming a dirty word in this gilded age of decadence and austerity), and without our services it wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would be a significant dimming.

If you can take yourself out of your first world techie social media smart-shoes for a second then imagine this: you're 53 years old, you've been in prison from 20 to 26, you didn't finish high school, and you have a grandson who you're now supporting because your daughter is in jail. You're lucky, you have a job at the local Wendy's. You have to fill out a renewal form for government assistance which has just been moved online as a cost saving measure (this isn't hypothetical, more and more municipalities are doing this now). You have a very limited idea of how to use a computer, you don't have Internet access, and your survival (and the survival of your grandson) is contingent upon this form being filled out correctly.

Do you go to the local social services office? No, you don't. The overworked staff there says that due to budget cuts they can no longer do walk-in advising, and that there's a 2 week waiting list to get assistance with filling out forms. You call them up on the by-the-minute phone you're borrowing from your cousin (wasting 15 of her minutes on hold) and they say that they can't help, but you can go to your public library. OK, so you go to your public library after work (you ask your other cousin to watch your grandson for the day since wasting those minutes has temporarily burned some bridges). Due to budget cuts the library no longer has evening hours, sorry, try again (and you also don't get back the bus-fare or money you spent on a hack to get across town to the nearest branch, since other budget cuts closed the one in your neighborhood). OK, so you come back on the weekend. You ask the overworked librarian at the desk to sign up for a computer. She testily tells you that you're at the wrong desk, and that sign-ups are at circulation. You feel foolish and go over to the circulation desk, who tells you that you need to sign up for a library card to use the computer. After filling out the forms the librarian starts to make your card for you, and informs you that she can't process a card, since you have fines from 2 years ago that total fifty dollars. It's an emergency, you say, you need to use the computer. She sighs heavily, informs you that it's against policy, and then prints a guest pass anyway. You get 30 minutes at a time for a total of 2 hours per day. Computers are on the second floor.

I love Django’s documentation. It clocks in at about 700 pages printed, and most of it is clear, concise, and helpful. I think Django’s among the best documented open source projects, and nothing makes me prouder.

If any part of Django endures, I hope it’ll be a sort of “documentation culture” — an ethos that values great, well-written documentation. To that end, I’m writing a series of articles laying out the tools, tips, and techniques I’ve learned over the years I’ve spent helping to write Django’s docs.

This advice will mostly be targeted towards those documenting libraries or frameworks intended for use by other developers, but much of it probably applies to any for of technical documentation.

JavaScript is a Gestalt language.

One's sentiment toward JavaScript flips between elegance and disgust without transiting intermediate states.

The key to seeing JavaScript as elegant is understanding its warts, and knowing how to avoid, work around or even exploit them.

I adopted this avoid/fix/exploit approach after reading Doug Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts.

Doug has a slightly different and more elaborate take on the bad parts and awful parts, so I'm sharing my perspective on the four issues that have caused me the most grief in the past:

how to fix broken block scope with with;
the four (not three!) meanings of this;
promoting arguments to an array; and
avoiding truthiness.

This is too shady, especially for a company that you’re supposed to trust your family to. My vehicle’s location is my life, it’s where I go on a daily basis. It’s private. It’s mine. I shouldn’t have to have a company like OnStar steal my personal and private life just to purchase an emergency response service. Taking my private life and selling it to third party advertisers, law enforcement, and God knows who else is morally inept. Shame on you, OnStar, for even giving yourselves the right to do this.

To make matters even more insulting, it was difficult to ensure the data connection was shut down after canceling. I still have no guarantee OnStar did what they were supposed to. I had to request the data connection be shut down repeatedly, after the OnStar rep attempted to leave it on and ignore my requests.

When will our congress pass legislation that stops the American people’s privacy from being raped by large data warehousing interests? Companies like OnStar, Google, Apple, and the other large abusive data warehousing companies desperately need to be investigated.

We are a boutique digital agency that gets excited about unique ideas, projects and the passionate people behind them.

good overview for beginners

This is my view of management as administration—as a service corps that helps the talented individuals that build and sell products do their jobs better. Attempting to see management as the ultimate decision makers demotivates the smart people in the organization who, without the authority to do what they know is right, will grow frustrated and leave. And if this happens, you won’t notice it, but you’ll be left with a bunch of yes-men, who don’t particularly care (or know) how things should work, and the company will only have one brain – the CEO’s. See what I mean about “it doesn’t scale?”

Over the last few years we've developed a number of techniques that allow a database design to evolve as an application develops. This is a very important capability for agile methodologies. The techniques rely on applying continuous integration and automated refactoring to database development, together with a close collaboration between DBAs and application developers. The techniques work in both pre-production and released systems.

The message is pretty obvious: Apple won’t ship anything that’s licensed under GPL v3 on OS X. Now, why is that?

There are two big changes in GPL v3. The first is that it explicitly prohibits patent lawsuits against people for actually using the GPL-licensed software you ship. The second is that it carefully prevents TiVoization, locking down hardware so that people can’t actually run the software they want.

So, which of those things are they planning for OS X, eh?

The Lost Type Co-op is a collaboration between Tyler Galpin and Riley Cran. It was founded with the intention of providing unique and quality fonts based on a pay-what-you-want model. All designers get 100% of the donations their font receives.

Designers and developers have been burned before by not knowing what the Content is, how long it is, what style it is and when the hell it’s actually going to be delivered, in internet eons past. Warily, they ask clients for it. But clients don’t know what to make, or what is good, because no one taught them this in business school. Designers struggle to describe what they need and when, so the conversation gets put off until it’s almost too late, and then everyone is relieved that they can take the cop-out of putting up a blog and maybe some product descriptions from the brochure.

I follow a style of development that greatly reduces the risk of big projects like Storm. I call this style "suffering-oriented programming." Suffering-oriented programming can be summarized like so: don't build technology unless you feel the pain of not having it. It applies to the big, architectural decisions as well as the smaller everyday programming decisions. Suffering-oriented programming greatly reduces risk by ensuring that you're always working on something important, and it ensures that you are well-versed in a problem space before attempting a large investment.

I have a mantra for suffering-oriented programming: "First make it possible. Then make it beautiful. Then make it fast."

"Digs that I've participated in have produced information that is now digitally gone because the platforms and the storage mechanisms became obsolete, and that's in the space of ten years," he said. "When we look down the road and ask, 'What will we leave for people 25 years from now, 100 years from now?' we're faced with a huge issue that people are just starting to confront."

Over the course of 16 years, researchers have developed a rich dataset related to research in the urban center and agricultural territory of Chersonesos, a Greek colony on the Crimean peninsula that thrived through the Byzantine age. Thanks to support from the Packard Humanities Institute, the Institute of Classical Archeology was able to use increasingly sophisticated digital methodologies to document its excavations. But by 2008, some of the systems that organized the digital data sat on a single portable server that the team carried back and forth to Ukraine and that, say the researchers, "could have blown up at any time."

Pears are common patterns of markup & style

I propose a simple set of rules and requirements that dictate how version numbers are assigned and incremented. For this system to work, you first need to declare a public API. This may consist of documentation or be enforced by the code itself. Regardless, it is important that this API be clear and precise. Once you identify your public API, you communicate changes to it with specific increments to your version number. Consider a version format of X.Y.Z (Major.Minor.Patch). Bug fixes not affecting the API increment the patch version, backwards compatible API additions/changes increment the minor version, and backwards incompatible API changes increment the major version.

I call this system "Semantic Versioning." Under this scheme, version numbers and the way they change convey meaning about the underlying code and what has been modified from one version to the next.

Look up HTML5, CSS3, etc features, know if they are ready for use, and if so find out how you should use them – with polyfills, fallbacks or as they are.

By all accounts, especially Abraham's and Horowitz's, a season devoted to politically incorrect visions of "the Jew" is risky, challenging and exciting. Fagin, Shylock and Barabas embody some of the worst of Jewish stereotypes, negative characteristics that have become deeply embedded in contemporary culture. "I studied to be an actor in London and had a roommate from Oxford," Horowitz recalls, explaining some of his own personal encounters with anti-Semitic prejudice. "One night he asked me if he could touch my head. He said, 'You don't have horns.' He'd always been told that Jews had horns, and he wondered if there was something in the physiognomy of my skull."

Findings
The global abortion rate was stable between 2003 and 2008, with rates of 29 and 28 abortions per 1000 women aged 15—44 years, respectively, following a period of decline from 35 abortions per 1000 women in 1995. The average annual percent change in the rate was nearly 2·4% between 1995 and 2003 and 0·3% between 2003 and 2008. Worldwide, 49% of abortions were unsafe in 2008, compared to 44% in 1995. About one in five pregnancies ended in abortion in 2008. The abortion rate was lower in subregions where more women live under liberal abortion laws (p<0·05).
Interpretation
The substantial decline in the abortion rate observed earlier has stalled, and the proportion of all abortions that are unsafe has increased. Restrictive abortion laws are not associated with lower abortion rates. Measures to reduce the incidence of unintended pregnancy and unsafe abortion, including investments in family planning services and safe abortion care, are crucial steps toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

Dealing with grids in Photoshop is a pain

With GuideGuide, it doesn’t have to be. Pixel accurate columns, rows, midpoints, and baselines can be created based on your document or marquee with the click of a button. Frequently used guide sets can be saved for repeat use. Grids can use multiple types of measurements. Best of all it’s free.

letterheady
–adjective
1. overcome by a strong emotion due to a letterhead design.

The blog format relieves publishers from the tiresome duty of producing covers and front pages and things to make their content more attractive and attract readers. In some cases, it enables publishers to surrender any responsibility for making content attractive in the first place.

There is a prophetic scene in the magnificent movie "Wall-E" where, after having floated in space for centuries in a self-contained shopping mall, the remains of the human race return to Earth. There, upon realizing that food once grew on trees and that trees must be cared for, the people ponder for the first time in their lives just how the pizza and ice cream sprouted forth from these stem-like thingies.

Such seemingly innocuous uses beget a generation of start-ups that are looking for new uses for this technology—not all of them innocuous but many of them foreseen by its critics. By the time the general public wakes up, of course, this technology becomes so deeply embedded in our culture that it is too late to do anything.

I wrote this book really quick as a way to bootstrap students for my other books. Many students don't know how to use the basics of the command line interface, and it was getting in the way of their learning. This books is designed to be something they can complete in about a day to a week and then get enough skill at the command line to then go on to other books.

This book isn't a book about master wizardry system administration. It's just a quick introduction to get newbies going.

I love the font Inconsolata. At bigger sizes and higher resolutions, it looks incredibly smooth and clear, and avoids the messy sort of feeling that Monaco gains as text density increases.

One thing that bothered me about Inconsolata, however, was the fact that its single and double quotes were slightly slanted or curly. It especially bothered me when using single quotes and commas, as the two looked visually similar, and my eye kept jumping levels.

As such, I made my own modification using the Font Forge source script, and named it: Inconsolata-dz

After 20 years of living in Iowa, local academic Stephen Bloom has written a magnum opus on the troubled state. I hope Iowans everywhere can submit photos from our state, to help bring attention to our plight. If you do not have access to a digital camera, perhaps you can borrow one from the libraries in Minneapolis or Chicago, which are only 10 hours away by tractor. These are also a good place to get access to the internet, though I believe Des Moines also has internet now. Here's the article in question:

Observations from 20 years of Iowa Life

Color Oracle is a colorblindness simulator for Window, Mac and Linux. It takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see.

Color Oracle applies a full screen color filter to art you are designing – independently of the software in use. Eight percent of all males are affected by color vision impairment – make sure that your graphical work is readable by the widest possible audience.

In case it helps, I hereby declare the following iron law of “free” internet services:

If you’re not paying for something, you have no reason to expect it to be there tomorrow.

This is an important corollary to the law “If you’re not paying for something, you’re not a customer; you’re the product being sold”. Everyone ought to understand that any data you store on a “free” internet service isn’t yours as ownership has hitherto been understood; it’s what you’re giving to the company as disguised payment for the service it’s offering. If the company lets you access that data from one day to the next, that’s awfully nice of them; if they stop doing so, what the hell did you expect? It was “free”. Whatever made you think it was your data anyway?

There's no way to take a time-out from our social life and describe it to a computer without social consequences. At the very least, the fact that I have an exquisitely maintained and categorized contact list telegraphs the fact that I'm the kind of schlub who would spend hours gardening a contact list, instead of going out and being an awesome guy. The social graph wants to turn us back into third graders, laboriously spelling out just who is our fifth-best-friend. But there's a reason we stopped doing that kind of thing in third grade!

You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.

Incarceration in America is a failure by almost any measure. But what if the prisons could be turned inside out, with convicts released into society under constant electronic surveillance? Radical though it may seem, early experiments suggest that such a science-fiction scenario might cut crime, reduce costs, and even prove more just.

Before the Tar Sands protests and before Occupy Wall Street, a young activist named Tim DeChristopher disrupted a federal oil- and gas-lease auction. The act made him a martyr for a newly radicalized environmental movement—and landed him in prison. This is his story.

Korma is a domain specific language for Clojure that takes the pain out of working with your favorite RDBMS. Built for speed and designed for flexibility, Korma provides a simple and intuitive interface to your data that won't leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Your mission is simple: achieve pleasant and readable text by distributing the space between letters. Typographers call this activity kerning. Your solution will be compared to typographer's solution, and you will be given a score depending on how close you nailed it. Good luck!

etflix, Twitter, and Google make unasked-for, unanticipated, and unstoppable change in their products, which also happen to be our work and play spaces. Whether or not people like what the change did, they don't like how it happened. Facebook notoriously pushes changes out, most recently the new News Feed and Timeline profile pages. While they think of it as improving their product, in effect, they redesign what has become the default Internet startup screen for millions without asking.

So, of course people howl their protests. They remind us that we're all just children in the eyes of the cloud services provider and as long as we're under their roof, we play by their rules. At a time when trust in all kinds of civic institutions is at an all-time low, we place a lot of faith in our cloud services to do what is goodly and just. We get so upset with Facebook changes because they spark cognitive dissonance: I believe I do not trust Facebook but I act as if I trust Facebook by giving them my data. The changes let you feel how Mark Zuckerberg's crew has hacked your social brain. Zuckerberg believes Facebook is creating "a more open and connected" society. In other words, he's doing it all for your own good.

Dr Bartels and Dr Pizarro knew from previous research that around 90% of people refuse the utilitarian act of killing one individual to save five. What no one had previously inquired about, though, was the nature of the remaining 10%.

Do you need some text for your website or whatever? *sigh* Okay…

Ranking employees at Microsoft - yikes

Simplify dynamic JavaScript UIs by applying the Model-View-View Model (MVVM) pattern

Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein handed a sheaf of papers in January 2006 to lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing smoking-gun evidence that the National Security Agency, with the cooperation of AT&T, was illegally sucking up American citizens’ internet usage and funneling it into a database.

The documents became the heart of civil liberties lawsuits against the government and AT&T. But Congress, including then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois), voted in July 2008 to override the rights of American citizens to petition for a redress of grievances.

Congress passed a law that absolved AT&T of any legal liability for cooperating with the warrantless spying. The bill, signed quickly into law by President George W. Bush, also largely legalized the government’s secret domestic-wiretapping program.

Obama pledged to revisit and roll back those increased powers if he became president. But, he did not.

Mark Klein faded into history without a single congressional committee asking him to testify. And with that, the government won the battle to turn the net into a permanent spying apparatus immune to oversight from the nation’s courts.

Covering: Mobile First approach & Responsive web design mainly

Sometimes Newton's Law of Inertia is just as applicable to the digital world as to the physical. All too often our files sit around never to be filed. Downloads and other sundry files pile up never to leave. Fortunately, an uncluttered desktop can be a reality.

Meet Hazel, your personal housekeeper.