mrclay.rg

Chrome Frame

The idea of a plugin that replaces one browser’s rendering engine with another’s has been floating around for years. Google is going to give this crazy idea a shot with Chrome Frame. The idea is that an IE6+ user gets bugged that a site requires the Chrome Frame plugin. After she installs it, web pages

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Javascript files don’t auto-update

On a panel of 4 Javascript library developers at Ajax Experience 2008, a question came up about how their libraries use browser detection. When John Resig suggested that libraries should strive for full feature detection (hardly used at all at the time) instead of browser/object detection, the other developers reacted like he was crazy. They

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Morning Edition is not the O’Reilly Factor

NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep is often an excellent interviewer, but his behavior in this “interview” with Republican chairman Michael Steele was awful (and many commenters seem to agree). This morning I only heard the last 30 seconds or so and it was painful. I tried to listen again and could only stand a

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Why Our Government Shouldn’t Kill

From a comment on a Radley Balko post about Troy Davis: …the state can’t be trusted to sort the innocent from the guilty with the 100% accuracy necessary for executions to be morally defensible, even if death is a theoretically just punishment… From what I read everyday it’s abundantly clear that this is true. The

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Yes Yes Yes

Immediately after posting, I ran across this article that makes the case against insurance better than any other I’ve read. If you’re serious about the health care debate, you should read it.

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Cases for Competition, not Insurance

An Andrew Sullivan reader needed a (seemingly) straightforward outpatient procedure. Her bill was almost 300% of the estimate. She complains that “the price of health care procedures is nothing but a dart thrown at numbers on a dart board.” Of course the provider has acted in bad faith, but I think the entire insurance system

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Medical innovation is worth the cost

Here’s a pretty inspiring interview with inventor Dean Kamen, who says the focus on long term costs of the health care system (and fears of rationing) is all wrong, and that we should put more money into innovations that more than payoff later. I’m sure in 1920 if you asked actuaries to say what percentage

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On Cash for Clunkers

I have to agree with USA Today’s editorial on Cash for Clunkers (via), but they don’t even mention opportunity cost. Even with the minor fuel economy savings, “helping” people into loan payments further redirects money away from local economies and family savings. I feel for the auto workers, but the auto industry has enjoyed riding

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IE6 Lurches On

Despite popular demand, IE6 just won’t die. While I feel for front end developers who struggle with this daily, it was once much worse. RichInStyle.com maintained a comprehensive CSS bug guide (I can’t imagine the hours of work put into this) for the popular browsers around 2000 and the Navigator 4 list is two long,

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The Quickening of Facebook

If you’ve used Facebook in Opera and Firefox, you might have noticed that Facebook is several magnitudes faster in FF, but this has nothing to do with FF’s speed. For FF and IE users, Facebook uses a client-side architecture called “Quickening” that basically makes a few popular pages into full AJAX applications that stay loaded

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Locked Down

Yesterday morning the police put our neighborhood on “lockdown”. A squad car drove through with a loudspeaker (he was clearly audible inside with all our windows closed) announcing we should stay in our homes and secure all doors and windows. A bit later there were helicopters (not unusual in our hood).  Later Kathleen called GPD

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OK, Maybe markets could better control costs

I’m warming to some of the free market health care ideas. Even if we move towards more government sponsored coverage (which seems politically inevitable) it seems like some of these principles could help to increase competition and push costs down, regardless of who’s paying.

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Extreme libertarian Challenge

Radley Balko is a thoughtful libertarian blogger who provides particularly awesome coverage of criminal justice system misconduct. You should read it. In Reason magazine he’s issued a challenge for “lefty bloggers” to define their limits “on the size, cost, and influence of the federal government.” I think this has the potential to be an interesting

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Could drug licenses lead to saner overall policies?

For a few moments, imagine the year is 2109 and the U.S. government “grudgingly tolerates” the recreational use of psychoactive drugs, but requires users to take an education course and earn a license to buy and use (even alcohol).

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The Kind of Press Corrupt Governments Love

While we still have a functional press, journalists have a duty to bring the truth to the public. When evidence leads us to wonder if government officials committed serious crimes, and much of the public desires the truth, there’s just no excuse for the press to look the other way. Glenn Greenwald criticized NBC News

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CBS Classic report on Marijuana

Surprisingly, Mike Wallace’s 1968 TV report on Marijuana is probably the most reasonable, well-balanced, and well-researched report available on the drug.

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On Immigration

Radley Balko provides some good evidence toward debunking the myth that immigrant communities bring violent crime, but while these communities are safe, a report on identity theft makes a convincing case that there are serious costs unfairly imposed on the citizens whose identities are stolen to employ those communities (beyond the more distributed costs of

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Prisoners of Endless Wars

Most reasonable people can agree that Gitmo detainees not proven to be enemy combatants at all (e.g. persons pulled off the street on whom we’ve never had anything more than suspicion) should be freed. The tougher question is, what about those obviously working for the enemy, but who are acquitted of committing war crimes. Mark

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PDF readers: Help us read.

PDF articles are notorious usability disasters, with the worst being multi-column documents that require you to constantly scroll in opposite directions as you move through the columns. PDF readers should let us draw a simple path through the document (maybe zoomed out) to outline the flow of text through the article (better, it could try

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Minify 2.1.3 released

This is how I spend my time off? I squashed a few more bugs and got Minify 2.1.3 finally out the door. It fixes a few HTTP bugs, including working around a Safari/webkit bug that was preventing efficient cache usage. There’s also code to make it far easier to diagnose users’ URI rewriting problems when

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