JD on EP

[NB: I try to quote a writer by name whenever possible, but don't have time for WHOIS searches on uncredited blogs any more.]

Daniel Solove of Concurring Opinions writes of "Google's Empire, Privacy, and Government Access to Personal Data". He notes that centralized data services (search engines, online stores, serverside aggregators, social networks, credit cards, etc) know a lot more about individuals than fifty years ago, but then falls flat by looking only at potential abuse by governments (specifically, the US government). Get real -- any criminal network has sufficient incentive to infiltrate staff to withdraw or insert data -- the risks lie in the rapid centralization itself, not just the advantage one particular faction might take of such centralization.

Pete Freitag has a quick intro to the universal UNIX text editor, vi.

I get a lot of weird comments in old items here -- most of these are from search engine visitors who need a place to spew, rather than from people actually interested in these rich networked technologies. An old weblog item about the webapp UI for the Entertainment Tonight website has attracted angry comments from people who saw TV shows they didn't like. Free Clue, folks: If you don't know where you're writing, then what you're writing may not be very useful... give my love to MSNSearch 'kay...? ;-)

M.Sippey offers a Web 2.0 Checklist, a smart fashion list of what the well-dressed Press Release will be wearing this season....

Fontographer was ported to Mac OS X and contains changes to match newer application, but no dramatic change to its drawing tools for typefaces. (Fontographer was actually the first PostScript drawing tool -- created for fonts, people used the Bezier Pen to draw vector artwork within a single character, then sized it up for printing. It was developed by Jim Von Ehr, Kevin Crowder and the initial group from Altsys in Texas -- marketed by Aldus in Seattle -- wrested free from Aldus when it merged with Adobe, with Altsys then fully joining Macromedia -- was spun off from Macromedia to Fontlab last year.) (And no, I haven't heard anything about FreeHand or other older applications yet... the company issues a fiscal outlook Dec15, and strategic outlook Jan31.)

Alex Bosworth writes "10 Places You Must Use Ajax", but I suspect this might have been more accurately titled "6 Places You Must Use Ajax (Or Better), And 6 Places to Choose HTML" -- some web tasks benefit from partial-data refreshes more than full-page refreshes, others are better handled simply. Good discussion of evaluating the user experience of various web tasks, recommended.

Jonathan Aquino synchs up three mapping UIs within a single web page: Google/JavaScript, Yahoo/JavaScript, Yahoo/Flash.

Dion Almaer lists some of the recent SVG and CANVAS examples possible within the Firefox 1.5 rendering engine. (More here.)

A data-fed mix of Avian Flu outbreak locations with Google's mapping imagery and JavaScript controls.

Odeo introduces a new interface for casual audio on websites.

Deployment of hand prosthetics with haptic feedback is expected by European researchers within two years.

Metrics of television viewers are about to add stats on whether a viewing has been time-shifted, and will then move to whether viewing has been shifted to other devices (computers, pocket video, etc).

"Interactive posters" are described as an ambient electronic display which can respond to passers-by: "When the user of a Windows Mobile phone or PDA in the vicinity of an interactive poster activates the Bluetooth or IrDA port of their device, a small electronic tag attached to the poster transmits some content to the mobile device. Examples include coupons or other promotional material, custom-branded games or ringtones, or even custom mobile phone applications, according to Remote Media."

Ben Forta shows how it's difficult to directly compare ColdFusion and .NET because they're at different logical levels, like comparing a supercharged fuel injected V-8 S10 engine to the Jaguar XK 2007 automobile.

Christian Cantrell forgets a necessary first implementation step, in a photo from the memorably incredible establishments at Yung Shue Wan. (More from Fegette, Cantrell, Church, others? Also of interest: This, but not this. ;-)

Another person gets hurt by specification validators -- people work hard to accommodate the specs, without stopping to check how hard the specs had tried to accommodate the world's existing browsers. (Summary, more.) Andrew Kirkpatrick has one of the best comparisons of various circuitous paths around OBJECT/EMBED, with a special set of tests of what happens to screenreaders when the browser's normal tag is shunned.