Joel Housman

Front-end Web Developer, iOS Developer, Man About Internet

Posts from the “Internet” Category

A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work

Posted on March 14th, 2012

Andy Baio, writing for Wired: Yahoo’s lawsuit against Facebook is an insult to the talented engineers who filed patents with the understanding they wouldn’t be used for evil. Betraying that trust won’t be forgotten, but I doubt it matters anymore. Nobody I know wants to work for a company like that. I’m embarrassed by the patents I filed, but I’ve learned from my mistake. I’ll never file a software patent again, and I urge you to do the same. For years, Yahoo was mostly harmless. Management foibles and executive shuffles only hurt shareholders and employee morale. But in the last few years, the company’s incompetence has begun to hurt the rest of us. First, with the wholesale destruction of internet history, and now by…

The Information Diet: You Are What You Read

Posted on March 7th, 2012

J. A. Ginsburg, writing on TrackerNews: It is not a pretty picture. And, yes, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the insidious practice of using keywords to game search results, is driving this race to the inane. The only metric that counts is popularity. “The problem is no one is searching for the Pentagon Papers,” notes Johnson, “No one is searching for high quality investigative reporting.” The next time someone asks me why I dislike SEO, I’m going to direct them to this piece.

Comments Still Off

Posted on January 4th, 2012

MG Siegler, writing on his blog ParisLemon: Here’s the thing: while some try to paint comments as a form of democracy, that’s bullshit. 99.9% of comments are bile. I’ve heard the counter arguments about how you need to curate and manage your comments — okay, I’m doing that by not allowing any. MG’s post is very short and therefore I do not want to quote the entire post here, verbatim, but the last paragraph is also important. He basically makes the same point that I’ve made here before. If you wish to comment on a post you see here, do so via Twitter, or your own blog, or your LiveJournal site…whatever, I don’t care. The vast majority of people do not read blog comments…

Huffduffer

Posted on December 22nd, 2011

Today I learned about a great new (to me) service that allows you to create your own personalized Podcast feed of audio you fine on the web. Perhaps I’m late to the game on this, but I had never heard of it before. The service, called Huffduffer, sports a tastefully designed site which I appreciate. The user interface is intuitive and simple. I first saw mention of Huffduffer over on the website of one of my new favorite podcasts, Roderick on the Line. Merlin Mann, one of the co-hosts of the podcast, has enabled a “Huffduff It” link at the bottom of each post. Curious as to just what Huffduffing was, I soon found out what Huffduffer did. I love it. I pass a…

How Facebook Tracks Users and Non-Users Alike

Posted on November 18th, 2011

Ben Brooks, writing on Brooks Review: Byron Acohido reporting on Facebook tracking cookies: Facebook thus compiles a running log of all your webpage visits for 90 days, continually deleting entries for the oldest day and adding the newest to this log. If you are logged-on to your Facebook account and surfing the Web, your session cookie conducts this logging. The session cookie additionally records your name, e-mail address, friends and all data associated with your profile to Facebook. If you are logged-off, or if you are a non-member, the browser cookie conducts the logging; it additionally reports a unique alphanumeric identifier, but no personal information. Later Arturo Bejar, Facebook’s engineering director, is quoted as saying: “But we’re not like ad networks at all in…

Which Is Mobile?

Posted on August 8th, 2011

Jen Simmons asks, “Which is Mobile?” This is the link that Jen points to in that last tweet. This has been something that has frustrated me more and more recently. I keep clicking on links in Twitter from someone I follow, while on my iPhone or iPad, only to have the destination site try to reload the webpage as their mobile version of the site, which breaks the link and just sends me to their homepage. So let me get this straight: You’ve decided to implement a special, mobile version of your Web site that is going to supposedly make it easier for me to use on my iPhone or iPad (which can browse “full” versions of sites just fine, thank you very much),…

Canceling Cable TV: Am I Ready?

Posted on July 27th, 2011

As a preface, I do not mean for this post to be comprehensive. I am not writing this to cover every option available, but only to state how my family current consumes media, the options I’ve tried, and the options I’ve considered but chosen not to do. Since January, I’ve had several conversations with friends and colleagues regarding, for lack of a better phrase, “home media consumption”. Should I keep my cable tv subscription or should I opt for HDTV over a VHF antennae? Should one have a Boxee box? What about an Apple TV? Some sort of media center PC? A Roku box? Do you still use a DVD player or have invested in a Blu-ray player? Perhaps Netflix or Hulu Plus subscription?…

Andy Rutledge Redesigns The New York Times

Posted on July 26th, 2011

Andy Rutledge, in a post called “News Redux”: Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days.

Adobe Admits Defeat: Shuts Down App Stores

Posted on July 25th, 2011

Sarah Perez, writing for ReadWriteWeb: Adobe is shutting down two of its app stores dedicated to mobile and desktop application distribution, Adobe InMarket and the Adobe AIR Marketplace. The decision, the company says, was based on developer feedback. Adobe says it will now focus its efforts on helping developers publish their apps on multiple platforms, including official app stores like Apple’s iTunes, Google’s Android Market, BlackBerry App World, Intel’s AppUp, Samsung Apps and Toshiba App Place. I had never heard of these two App stores until today.

The State of Twitter Spam

Posted on July 13th, 2011

A Running Count As many people have noticed, over the past year Twitter spam problem has become increasingly bad. I decided today that I am going to start a running count on Twitter of each and every spam Tweet I get. Starting today. There seems to be two types of spam tweets: replies and cold tweets. Replies With this type of Twitter spam, you only get spammed after you’ve recently tweeted. Send a tweet with many popular marketing-friendly words, such as iPad, iPhone, Apple, Mac, Loan, Money, Job, Bookstore, Cash, Gold, etc and you’ll probably get a spam reply back trying to get you to click a link to some type of marketing related spam. This has gotten progressively worse in the past year.…