via @neiltyson. (i ❤ that man!!)

Rob Pike - 8:02 PM - Public I just heard that, after a long illness, Dennis Ritchie (dmr) died at home this weekend. I have no more information. I trust there are people here who will appreciate the reach of his contributions and mourn his passing appropriately. He was a quiet and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind.

Dennis was co-inventor of the C Programming Language, which all modern computer operating systems are based upon, with Brian Kernighan, and co-inventor of Unix, with Ken Thompson.

The C Programming Language book

Dennis Ritchie

Ritchie, Thompson and Kernighan were all big heroes and inspirations for me in my early career. Their influence is great; many, many people will not ever know how much influence these people have had on their daily lives.

RIP, Dennis. :’(

Edit: Or as my friend Joe put it:

dmr--; /* :-( */

October 12, 2011 3:04 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@joedecker

joedecker

google home page on October 12 (presented to me!)

This is a quick and dirty way of getting your web page to respond to a change in value of a non-form-enclosed <select> tag. This is useful for causing changes to happen based on some specific set of values that you want to offer the user. First I will give the general form, then offer a specific example from some recent work I have done.

via TamWiki Main/Quick Action On Select.

Drop Caps are pretty much what the name implies: the first letter of a paragraph is enlarged and dropped to the left of the first paragraph on the page. This is seen in books, newspapers, and magazines all over. It is a classic design trick that can be successfully brought to a web page to give it a bit of elegance.

via TamWiki Main/Drop Caps With CSS complete with an example.

Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles” | Video on TED.com.

Given what was mentioned in the last post, one can see the potential danger in having a 3rd party present information to us that may cause us to unconciously invoke our personal filters on top of the filtering and sorting the search site is giving us. One can be led to the conclusion that the search results present the most complete picture of what is out on the web as possible, where in fact they are giving us what they think we want to see based on our history.

While this may be a boon in some cases (perhaps many cases, I don’t know), it is a detriment in other cases, as we may want to gather information without this “personalization” that the search company is giving us. It can blind us to information we may, in fact, really want and need in order to be informed, make informed decisions, and so on.

As humans are wont to grasp onto initial meanings for what they perceive, and those meanings are hard to change once set, this can be a vital flaw for anyone conducting research on the web. It feeds our confirmation bias and existing prejudices.

A few modern browsers allow for an “icognito mode” — where the browser doesn’t reveal any history or information about the user. It may be interesting to conduct a side-by-side search to see if, in fact, you are getting different results back.

I am looking for a way to use command line mail tools that deal with mulitple e-mail accounts on different servers (incorporating mail from a remote server and routing outgoing mail to the appropriate SMTP gateway associated with the account).

I can probably cobble up something to handle incorporating mail using fetchmail and procmail, but figuring out the appropriate SMTP gateway is problematic.

via Mashable

via xkcd: Constructive.

At last, a great scheme for fixing the spam problem *and* the general comment problem on social sites. They should definitely implement this on YouTube!!