While Vista was originally touted by Microsoft as the operating system savior we’ve all been waiting for, it has turned out to be one of the biggest blunders in technology. With a host of issues that are inexcusable and features that are taken from the Mac OS X and Linux playbook, Microsoft has once again lost sight of what we really want.

Read the rest: “Why Microsoft must abandon Vista to save itself”

Tim has a little chunk of Javascript that checks your computer to see if you’re ready for the new and improved Daylight Savings Time. Check it out.

I’ve got a Mac, so no pain. My Palm is already letting me down: It only sent me an email about the issue this morning. Yet, according to Tim’s article, people have known of this for quite some time now.

We’ll see if the Palm update is lots of pain or relatively painless.

Ask me some other time why I think Daylight Savings should be abolished.

For a while, he said, he had lights programmed to flash when someone looked at his Web site (Mr. Bowen has a blog at DrBacchus.com), “but that got annoying very fast.”

Read the rest: The House on Autopilot – New York Times

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In this category for exactly the same reason is the “this page” or “this site” or “this post” link. It means, roughly, “click here.” Vacuous and useless.

Web authors, please stop. Tell me more information, so I know if that’s a web page I want to load before I activate your link. Also, this makes web search engines like Google work way better.

In a surprising move, the NYT uses the word “hacker” correctly in a sentence and gives a surprisingly accessible definition for it.

In related news, four horsemen were seen today in the Valley of Megiddo.

Stop. I know the answer, and I already feel like enough of a dweeb.

vikram writes that he wants to learn hacking. The link above is a good start.

I highly recommend hacking the bookmarklets of others to see what makes them tick. Good targets are Jesse Ruderman’s bookmarklets and Tim Powell’s.

I saw one article in my Googling that advised using “ugly variable names,” ie, random alphanumeric strings, to avoid namespace interference. Ick. Encapsulate your bookmarklet in a function to restrict the scope of your variables. This is also a helpful trick to dispense with void().

The new dashboard interface seems very nice, except that I must agree with DrBacchus: The new writing interface, which imitates Blogger by hiding the HTML from the user, leaves a lot to be desired. I understand simplifying, but multiply pop-ups when all I want is to add a bloody link is OUT OF CONTROL.