afongen

Quick links:

• Eric Meyer argues cogently for gay marriage, addressing criticisms of his earlier lament. From there, links to interesting things like The Economist’s take on the matter. I love the first line from that essay: “SO AT last it is official: George Bush is in favour of unequal rights, big-government intrusiveness and federal power rather than devolution to the states.” I do not understand how it is that those who advocate smaller, less intrusive federal government fail to see that George Bush’s policies are often antithetical to that objective.
• The Homosexual Agenda. Well, now we know.
• How to Respond to Conservatives.
• Paul Krugman in the New York Times: There is no Social Security Crisis. (via)
• Some colleagues have started using Password Safe, a secure database for passwords. I tried it a while back, but because it’s Windows-only it turned out to be far less useful to me than a PGP-encrypted file. Still, worth noting.
• The Committee to Save Merry Christmas, boycotting Macy’s and Federated department stores because they don’t post signs saying “Merry Christmas.” What a fucking ridiculous waste of time.
• Accessibility: On a shoestring.
• Accessible & usable forms.
• Common symbols, with numeric and symbolic HTML character entities, for when you can’t quite remember how to encode an em dash (—), curly quotes (“ and ”) or euro (€).
• John Lim’s list of tools for building Rich Internet Applications.
• Jon Udell looks at streaming with Quicktime and Helix. I’d never even heard of the Darwin Streaming Server.
• I keep having to dig up this link to I put it here: Douglas Bowman’s presentation, Pushing Your Limits.
• Java web framework comparison.
• Session Replication in Tomcat 5 Clusters.
• Peter Merholz, Organization in the Way: How Decentralization Hobbles the User Experience:
  

  What we have seen is that small, multidisciplinary teams create the best products.

  These teams eschew departmental hand-offs and reviews. Instead, product managers, marketers, designers, engineers, and user advocates work closely on a single project. In order to succeed, it’s essential that, in this collaborative mold, the different parties are no longer bound to their departments’ distinct measures of success, but share a common goal.

  UCD can’t work as a silo department — it must be a company-wide approach. Instead of hiring UCD specialists, develop multidisciplinary teams in which every member is familiar with UCD principles.

• PureJPEG, a Win32 command line utility for filtering out unnecessary drek from JPEGs and reducing file size.