24 Ways, domain squatters, and more

Drew McLellan has gifted us with the first article for 24 Ways, which is a sort of advent calendar for web developers — subscribe to the feed and learn something new every day until Christmas. Day 1 is a quick introduction to doing AJAX with my beloved prototype javascript library and PHP.

Joi Ito explains the methods of domain squatters. This is interesting. I did not know that there is a five day refund period when you purchase a domain name, something that allows squatters to collect ad metrics for free before buying, say, microsopft.com.

Bill Harris posts a summary of the MIT Emerging Technology Conference written by one of his readers. Topics include Negroponte’s hundred dollar laptop, nanoelectrics, the state of science education in the US (It’s not good — Dean Kamen laments here that more students graduate with degrees in sports management than engineering of any type.), and the obligatory wild-ass ideas about technology changing society from Ray Kurzweil and others.

This one is not like the others: Watch this nice goal from van Persie against Blackburn on Saturday. What a marvelous shot! However, before we begin calling him the next Dennis Bergkamp, Persie will have to have to make a play as good as what I call The Touch.

Crespo’s tap-in is worth watching as well.

Finally, this Goldeneye mod for Half-Life 2 is probably the most legal thing I’ve ever seen.

Gmail anti-virus coming, and a tip

Google is about to enable virus scanning for Gmail. I hadn’t noticed the lack of it because the spam filter is so good. Hopefully we’re only seeing the beginning of the batch of innovations promised a few weeks ago.

While I’m talking about Gmail, I thought I’d share two tips. First, there is a wonderful Greasemonkey script, Gmail Smart-Delete Button, that makes it easier to delete messages, which is something that Gmail discourages.

Second, if you’re a Michigan student it is easy to use your @umich.edu account with Gmail — follow these directions to verify for Google that the university address is yours, then follow these directions for forwarding your mail.

Firefox 1.5 released

The latest version of Firefox is available (you may need to reload a few times, as not all mirrors have updated). Improvements include drag and drop reordering of tabs, much faster back/forward button performance, SVG and canvas support, better pop-up blocking, and improved UI for options and error pages.

Update: 1.5 is the same as 1.5 Release Candidate 3.

Sufjan vinyl bonus track

Hopefully everyone reading had a good Thanksgiving break (yes, both of you). I’m back at school and enjoying bonus track “The Avalanche” from the Illinois vinyl while I suffer quantum mechanics at four in the morn. You can get the MP3 at YANP.

Tapes n’ Tapes, Weird Sisters, and Bowie

Tapes n’ Tapes sounds like a good band from the three tracks posted on their website (Insistor is an especially good track) but I’d like to hear more before I buy the album — if they never mix up the instrumentation, it could become pretty boring.

ANABlog has the Weird Sisters (Jarvis Cocker of Pulp fame with Johnny Greenwood and Phil Selway of Radiohead) tracks from the mostly excellent Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie. The songs don’t really fit the movie very well — I hope that Pulp doesn’t have singing like that — but you can hear the Radiohead influence in the guitar and the bandmembers’ kids must get a kick out of the whole thing.

Finally, you can hear the new Futureheads single, Area, at You Ain’t No Picasso. Like many Futureheads songs it has some rough edges, but some vocal heroics really save this one. Can’t wait to hear the rest of the EP.

Introduction to abstract math

Sets and Such (via MathForge) is a nice primer on some topics in theoretical mathematics. If you want to know about things like cardinality, group theory, and the incompleteness theorem this site is wonderful because it assumes little and yet goes beyond simple definitions.

Getting started

It seems that I’ve forgotten how to maintain a weblog after a few years of not having one. That I’ve been working with many equations and few words for three semesters can’t help, either.

I signed up for WordPress.com in order to see how the software has come along, but I think that writing could be a welcome release from the horror that is university these days. The service is a dream so far, and when the developers globally implement the customization that Scoble has, I think they’ll have everything I require.