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• Income Gap Up Over Two Decades, Data Show

Hardware edition:

• ATITool – w/ artifact scanner, neat. I just bought an MSI 9800 Pro that booted up recognizing as an XT and went up to 412/365 w/ zero problems. I’ll have to give it a push if I’m feeling bored
• Mike’s Hardware – this is a great site that has product roadmaps for all the latest PC hardware. If I upgrade soon, it looks like Q4 is good. A pair of Raptor HD’s, an NForce4 board, Athlon64 4000, and possibly NV48e. Too addictive.
• Antec Sonata Case Review – this looks like a nice quiet case (not a big deal for me now as all my noisy computers are in a separate room)
• Nvidia GeForce 6600 paper-launch – some pretty amazing performance out of a very reasonably priced card. Too bad it’ll be at least a month or two before you can get your hands on one (this helps my Doom 3 habit how?)

I finally picked up a WRT54G ($61 now, + $10 rebate). This is a v2 model (200MHz MIPS chip), and seems to load up firmware 3rd party firmware ok. The main thing I want is traffic shaping, but stats might be nice too.

• EWRT – a Sveasoft Samadhi2 fork; has NoCatSplash, Wondershaper+iproute2, power selection, RSSI stats reporting, remote syslogging
• OpenWRT – modular system that uses packages for features. Quagga, but no Wondershaper pacakge?
• Wifibox – nice installation, but no QoS
• LinksysWrt54g – might be fun to build my own package

• On CNBC’s Tim Russert, O’Reilly likened MMFA to the Ku Klux Klan, see Jim Gilligan’s clips for more of O’Reilly being a blustering asshole (along w/ facts and corrections to go along w/ his lies). Insightful mefi comment:
  

  I think one would have to concede that the casual observer would come away from this thinking O’Reilly had won decisively. That he did it through bluster, bullying and sophistry is beside the point — he was more effective. And Krugman, alas, looked like he was nervously eyeing the studio door, half-expecting O’Reilly to loose it all and take a swing at him. I don’t fault Krugman. That’s just the state of (what passes for) discourse.

  also:

  Anyone suggesting that O’Reilly somehow ‘won’ either have a different definition of the term than I do ar some pretty low standards for argument. Krugman can be faulted for ever deciding to debate this guy in the first place (especially because he is so soft-spoken), but at least he tried to provide arguments. The standard exchange went something like this:

  Krugman: tries to make a point, offer some form of evidence in support for the point. Cut off By O’Reilly after about two sentences.
  O’Reilly: offers some type of retort, generally in the form of ‘everyone knows that’s wrong. Your sources are all lying partisans.’ Then goes on to attack Krugman in the worst ad hominem fashion. Krugman passively waits for the child to finish or start debating like a reasonable person. Alas, this never happens.

  What’s funny to me is that O’Reilly himself seems tio distrust evidence on principle (and certainly cultivates this attitude among his viewers). If they are trying to offer sources to support their claims, they must be skirting on sophistry.

Some collected tweaks to Apple Mail.app:

• Force Mail to display plain text by default
• Apple KB: Mac OS X 10.3: Mail – About SSL, IMAP Accounts, and “Remember My Decision”
• Adding a custom SSL Certificate
• GPGMail – works great for me, does S/MIME, I use it with MacGPG for key management
• Apple Mail Resource Page – great list of add-ons

Doctor Unclear went offline from his old site a couple years ago but a Google search turned up his new (to me, at least) site. Dr Unclear was a favorite from a while back for his interactive JS/DOM demos. It’s one of those random, rarely touted and easy to miss sites that’s a complete gem. (I’d include Jeff Greenberg’s JavaScript Optimization page in that group)

TODO: gather good documentation, resources for JS/DOM/CSS

Now this is interesting, w3compiler, a self-proclaimed next-generation markup and javascript optimizer.

Unfortunately, it’s a Windows application. What I really want is a standalone compressor/script that will compress on check out from CVS/Subversion (would be nice if it automatically tracks updates to the publish tree). This would be stupendous for webapps. An Apache module to do the same might be interesting, although you’d probably want to cache the resulting JS optimizations.

As far as space saving goes, mod_gzip/mod_deflate probably has you 90% covered already, but it’d be interesting if someone wrote a JS compiler based on real-world JS-engine performance results. You could create different targets for each browser based on those profiles. Also, you could probably get some mean compression (and maybe some additional security) if you had distributions of lookup tables for compression/as pads.

Ahh, if only I had minions to do my bidding…

• Fiftyfoureleven.com – a great web development blog w/ an nice design and clean organization

This RIAA TP is a great idea. Maybe there should be a Bush version.