Yet another product I had not heard of. Apparently there is some controversy about Google’s ranking of their own articles at Knol. I’ll crawl back under my rock now.

You think it’s a conspiracy by the networks to put bad shows on TV. But the shows are bad because that’s what people want. It’s not like Windows users don’t have any power. I think they are happy with Windows, and that’s an incredibly depressing thought. – Steve Jobs on “suck”

Imagine that you’ve got a disease that strikes one in a million people, and a test for the disease that’s 99% accurate. You administer the test to a million people, and it will be positive for around 10,000 of them – because for every hundred people, it will be wrong once (that’s what 99% accurate means). Yet, statistically, we know that there’s only one infected person in the entire sample. That means that your “99% accurate” test is wrong 9,999 times out of 10,000! – Cory Doctorow

I ran into a well-known, but odd IE6 caching bug this week. If caching is turned off for IE6 browsers, modifying DOM elements triggers the browser to reload any resources referenced by the changed elements. So if a script changes the class name of 5 elements and the CSS classes have a background image property, then the background image will be reloaded once for each DOM update. This sucks the performance out of a web application.

There are several work arounds, but the best I’ve found is a simple IE6 Javascipt toggle that turns off the behaviour.

Jeff Atwood on ‘XML: The Angle Bracket Tax‘ (via Yangman).

The Joyant blog talks about where they fall short. The funny thing is, when I first tried to read the article, it was Slashdotted. A funny/sad thing to happen to a cloud-computing company’s blog.

Remember a long time ago, at the dinner table, when your kid brother mashed together a bunch of food that really should not have been mashed together – chicken, jello, gravy, condiments, corn, milk, peas, pudding, all that stuff – and proceeded to eat it? –Ryan Tomayko, The Thing About Git

FWIW, the Google ads are gone again. They sucked. Again.

Replacing the STL talks about why the STL isn’t a great fit for certain people/projects. Sounds like a problem of NIH to me.

Dean Edwards has released a new version of his magic make-IE-suck-less script, which brings IE within reach of standards.