updates @ m.blog

My Nokia N95-3 has a deliciously fast HSDPA connection, and it is automatically recognized in Mac OS X 10.5 for syncing and tethering. Only one slight problem:

Apple’s included Nokia 3G modem script hasn’t been updated for 3.5G technologies such as HSDPA — if you use your phone in tethered mode via either Bluetooth [...]

I’ve always personally been fairly ambivalent about Gmail (and web-based email in general), but a new “minor” feature they rolled out (not even warranting mention in their official “What’s new” post) is absolutely brilliant.
Officially, the new feature is called Mute Thread, or “Mute” for short. Here’s how it works:
THE OLD WAY:
1) You’re reading some [...]

We’ve just posted the schedule for the “workshops portion” of Open Hack Day, part of the first of our HackDay events to be open to the public.
While the rest of the schedule hasn’t been posted yet, you can be assured it’s going to be fun. Really fun. (Well, it’ll help if you’re at [...]

Evan Williams recently posted a much-blogged article titled Pageviews Are Obsolete. This is something Cameron and I have been arguing for at Yahoo! for a long time now, but from an almost mostly different perspective (our interest is not advertising, but social metrics for measuring the success of a site in various areas). [...]

Random co-worker chimes in on a mailing list with a very accurate summation of Adobe (former Macromedia) Flash:
“Browsing without Flash is like going to the movies without ringing cell phones and crying babies. Every once in a while you miss out on a really cool ring tone, but it’s nothing to lose sleep over.”
When [...]

Prompted by Tom’s post, I’ve decided to also try out this Odeo voice message for the sake of amusement. Click the icon below to use your laptop’s built in microphone to record a private voice message for me (or in the popular vernacular, PODCAST TO THE BLOGOSPHERE OMG!!!). I won’t do anything with [...]

Big news from Yahoo! today: our very talented User Experience Design team is constantly slaving away to make all those fancy and complicated widgets that make building increasingly-complex web applications possible. In particular, there is one team that works on a standardized library available to all Yahoos to take advantage of when coding a [...]

Shopping for a new laptop today, I noticed this:
del.icio.us favicon/toolbar: /
lenovo.com favicon:
Say what?

What social bookmarking service should I use? I had originally started with del.icio.us, but when I started working at Yahoo! I decided to start using MyWeb2.0 beta, as part of the “eat your own dog food” philosophy. In doing so, I discovered I actually liked MyWeb quite a bit, and it had unique [...]

Recently, Matt McAlister made reference to a tangential conversation we had about interface and utility during a meeting about user interaction models. It’s something I’ve been thinking quite a bit about over the past year, so I figure its worth a bit more discussion. What I really see coming about on the WWW [...]

In a large company like Yahoo!, we get invited to many, many meetings via email lists (some of which occur in different time zones). The default behavior in Microsoft Outlook is to set a reminder for these meetings, even if the user doesn’t confirm attendance. Since these calendars are usually synced to whatever [...]

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Know thy audience, originally uploaded by mroth.

Diagram on one of my whiteboards at work, enlargement.

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing my good friend Jake Appelbaum speak at Webzine2005.
I met Jake at Defcon some years ago, and we eventually became close friends. When I moved to the Bay Area, Jake was the only friend I had who lived in the area, and he stepped up to [...]

Thanks to Judah Levine of NIST Boulder, we have an official explanation of the strange NTP messages:
Let me explain what you are seeing.
1. The first text is a pseudo-random text designed to confuse automated search engines (note the strategic colons). There are 16 poems and they are sent in a random sequence. The text is [...]

Here’s something strange and interesting to explore. time.nist.gov is a standard NTP server, used to synchronize the clock on your computer to the government’s atomic clock.
However, it also seems to have another strange service running on ports 78 and 79. Telnet in, and hit enter after connection is established, and you get [...]