Andrew Leonard, writing for Salon, unmasks a blatantly corrupt Wikipedia editor:

The mind boggles. After years of styling himself as someone who specializes in scrubbing Wikipedia pages clean of “conflicts of interest,” Qworty/Young admitted to editing “the Wikipedia articles of writers with whom I have feuded.” How can Wikipedia possibly allow this man to keep his editing privileges? And how are we, the general public, supposed to trust Wikipedia, when Qworty’s record shows how easy it is to work out personal grudges and real-world vendettas in this great online encyclopedia for years without anyone taking action?

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Source: Daring Fireball

“What could be more natural than staring at something to select it, nodding to approve something?… For privacy, you’ll be able to use imperceptible movements, or even hidden ones such as flicking your tongue across your teeth.”

These designers think that the difference between effortless tongue-flicking and Glass’s crude chin-snapping is simply one of refinement. I’m not so sure. To me they both seem equally alienating–I don’t think we want our bodies to be UIs. 

Now that I have worked on this team for a while, I have come to realize it is anything but silly or cute; in fact, it’s quite brilliant. The impact of having this title is subtle but powerful. The Happiness Engineers truly do an incredible job helping WordPress users with every problem they report, even ones not related to WordPress. There is an infectious helpfulness that permeates the interaction between team members that can best be described as the exact opposite of the “not my problem” attitude. Your problem is their problem and they want to help resolve it.

Source:

A good development workflow is critical to producing a high-quality app, especially if there is more than one developer involved. At Day One our current team is comprised of four full time developers and one designer. The great majority of our work is focused on our Mac and iOS apps.

Aaron Swartz was not yet a legend when, almost two years ago, I asked him to build an open-source, anonymous in-box. His achievements were real and varied, but the events that would come to define him to the public were still in his future: his federal criminal indictment; his leadership organizing against the censorious Stop Online Piracy Act; his suicide in a Brooklyn apartment. I knew him as a programmer and an activist, a member of a fairly small tribe with the skills to turn ideas into code—another word for action—and the sensibility to understand instantly what I was looking for: a slightly safer way for journalists and their anonymous sources to communicate.

Matt Gemmell on skeuomorphism and intuitive design:

Matt, a programmer by trade, addresses the skeuomorphism debate more effectively than most designers I’ve heard arguing about it.

[Here's my pull quote:]

Children don’t seem to be having problems grasping those concepts, even if Jakob Neilsen thinks they should. They’re not confused by interactive data-surfaces; they’re frustrated when actual, printed content in the physical world doesn’t respond the way they now expect it to.

Intuitiveness has become unhelpfully conflated with familiarity. The reasoning is simple enough: things that are already familiar don’t have to be re-learned, so we assume that they’re more “intuitive”. That’s a big assumption, but we treat it as if it’s fact.

Sometimes, familiar things aren’t as intuitive as they could be, and a new, unfamiliar thing might be more so. Another possibility is that a new thing might be equally intuitive, but also have other benefits which justify its initial unfamiliarity. In either case, intuitiveness cannot be divorced from context.

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Source: Marco.org

Yet, from the vantage point of the social web, there was no apparent need for a third person to mediate. In the blatant first-person world of YouTube and Twitter, we all get to decide the meaning.

That concept strikes fear into the heart of those who believe there is eternal value in journalism. Even those of us who have mastered the tools of the social age have a deep ambivalence about where they are taking us.

On the night of the Boston bombings, my Twitter timeline was filled with the ambivalent cry of those who saw danger and opportunity around them. In the words of one angst-ridden tweep:

“Today reminds me how Twitter has become one of the greatest tools as well as one of greatest threats to true journalism”.

I share the sentiment. But I also despair at the failure of the guardians of ‘True Journalism’ to develop a coherent response to that contradiction. Perhaps the problem is that too many journalists still believe they are the rightful ‘owners’ of breaking news.

Cars were moving too fast through an intersection in the town of Poynton in England, so they took out the stoplights & walk signals and replaced the intersection with an unusual double roundel design. The result is a mixed-use space with slower moving car traffic and safer pedestrian traffic.

So that’s the end of our two week nightmare battling American Airlines. A bag lost to gross negligence of American Airlines and that asshole of a passenger who took it in the first place (who takes a wrong bag, filled with baby clothing and toys, fails to report it for almost a week, then doesn’t return it at all?).

Never did someone express a true emotion of empathy at American Airlines. Never an offer to put someone with authority and competence on the case to get to the bottom of it. No offers of even token gestures for our sour experience. No nothing.

American Airlines, you are a terrible company. I hope that your disdain for helping customers in trouble catches up to you one day and you go out of business.

There are now more than 2 trillion (2 x 1012) objects stored in Amazon S3 and that the service is regularly peaking at over 1.1 million requests per second.
If you added one S3 object every 60 hours starting at the Big Bang, you’d have accumulated almost two trillion of them by now.