Safari 3.0b Quick Review

Some nice improvements in the Public Beta of the new Safari. A mix of must-haves and nice-to-haves. I’m quite pleased by the following:

  1. Resizeable textareas
  2. Spotlight/Firefox-esque in-page Find
  3. Submit buttons now support CSS

Tolls, Feast, and Central Street

This past weekend was the second scheduled Chicago trip for this summer. Like previous trips, all my frustrations and annoyances with the city back. Immediately. As we sat for 20-minute in a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam behind the 85 cent toll booth at O’Hare.

What a horrible way to introduce visitors to the city. I strongly encourage the State of Illinois Dept of Tourism to sell $20 weekend Illinois Tollway I-Passes on the border. Hell, I strongly encourage the State of Wisconsin, Indiana, Missouri, and Iowa Depts. of Tourism to sell them. Illinois is damaging their tourist reputation by not making the program visitor-friendly ($50 & “Allow 7 to 10 days for processing and delivery” = not helping).

Sunday, we grabbed a pretty good brunch at Feast with Jon, Carolyn, Tesia, and Erin. As expected, the conversation, Feast’s outside seating, and the breakfast potatoes were delightful. While both the garbage omelet and service showed promise, they were awkwardly hesitant.

On the way out of town, we stopped by our old neighborhood on Evanston’s Central street. All our frustration melted away as we walked the sidewalk in and out of the storefronts. In front of the new independent coffee shop, we bumped in to Larry Maday, manager at the Video Adventure. One of the reason I’m disappointed on Netflix and Amazon recommendations is because of Larry’s ability to know exactly what we’re in the mood for. We chatted a little. Just like we did when we lived 2 block down.

Like we never left.

How To Decide Which Bloggers to Give Press Passes To?

I got a call today from a local organization asking for a list of blogger to extend press passes to. I was familiar with the organization and have a pretty good idea who would dig what they were doing. The criteria they were most interested in was size of readership.

From my email reply:

“In the blog world, who is reading (influence) is far more important than how many are (reach). With that in mind, I highly recommend reviewing the above blogs for the topics and perspectives they cover, and review their ‘Authority’ in Technorati (the number of blogs linking to them, higher is better) and base your invitations on that.”

Would you have recommended a different technique?

Carbon Trading in the US and Minnesota

If you caught the NPR/National Geographic segment on the European carbon trading efforts you may have gotten the impression that:

  1. the price of being carbon neutral is so low (+2%) that it’s irresponsible not to pay it.
  2. a market for carbon dioxide, mandatory or otherwise, didn’t exist stateside.

True on the former, false on the latter. First Crack 102 is a conversation about the Chicago Climate Exchange and the University of Minnesota.

baldguyshow calls it my best show to date.

How to Automatically Link URLs in Rails

Let’s say you have a Rails app and you’d like any URLs in any plain text string to be automatically hyperlinked. Well, then you’ll need this:
.gsub(/((http|https)://[a-z0-9]+([-.]{1}[a-z0-9]+)*.[a-z]{2,5}(([0-9]{1,5})?/.*)?)/, '<a href='1'>1</a>')

For example:
I blog at http://garrickvanburen.com

Through:
"I blog at http://garrickvanburen.com".description.gsub(/((http|https)://[a-z0-9]+([-.]{1}[a-z0-9]+)*.[a-z]{2,5}(([0-9]{1,5})?/.*)?)/, '<a href='1'>1</a>')

Results in:
I blog at http://garrickvanburen.com

Fishwrap Fear

First off, I commend law enforcement officials for their efforts over the past year to diffuse this movie-plot threat while it was still in the planning stage. This is proof investment in investigation pays off more than in airport screenings.

“Several law enforcement officials said, however, there have been no direct threat[s] to the airport and that the suspects had yet to obtain financing or explosives.”

That quote* – buried on A18 of today’s Sunday Strib – proves the story doesn’t belong on the front page. Especially since – also on A18 – a much shorter story (“A Snag in the Plot…”) confirms:

“…the level of catastrophe that may be created is much more limited that most people would expect..” –

Why?

“…jet fuel doesn’t easily explode.”

At startribune.com, the JFK movie-plot threat is the second headline (and falling) in the second section a couple screenviews down. In terms of priority, importance, and relevance, this is where the story belongs.

The asymmetry between the placement as lead story in the print edition and insignificance placement online betrays the actual news-worthiness of the story (none) and the differences between fishwrap news editors and online news editors (apparently, the easily frightened buy fishwrap while the more thoughtful read online).

Lastly, this is the second time in as many days and with as many newspapers where I’ve struggled to find a print-edition story in on a newspaper’s website. Just as I expect retail stores to have symmetrical catalogs between their online and offline offerings, I expect the same from publishers.

*Oddly, I couldn’t find this quote in the online version.