Events

Rebel forces in southeastern Ukraine appear to be responsible for downing a civilian plane with 295 passengers and crew aboard. The U.S. has confirmed someone shot the plane down with a Russian-supplied surface-to-air missile: An unnamed American official has confirmed that the Malaysian passenger jet that crashed in eastern Ukraine on Thursday was shot down, according to multiple media reports. The official told CNN that a radar spotted a surface-to-air missile track an aircraft right before Malaysia...

Via the Economist's Gulliver blog, Airbus has taken out a patent on the worst airplane seats imaginable: Airbus’s patent says that traditional seats cannot be narrowed any further, or the pitch reduced much more, in order to accommodate extra passengers. Therefore, carriers will have to redesign the seats if they want to cram in more flyers. Its suggestion is a fold-down saddle, a small backrest and a couple of retractable armrests. Certainly no tray-tables, underseat storage or pockets to keep your...

The Atlantic's CityLab blog, of course: For all the monorail enthusiasts out there just now learning that New York once had its own single-track wonder, put your excitement on hold. For on this date in 1910, during its inaugural journey, the monorail lurched over, sending scores of people to the hospital. The painful incident can be traced to the slick salesmanship of one Howard Tunis, who did so well demonstrating his novel design for an electric monorail at a 1907 exposition in Virginia that he gained...

Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains why Ctrl-F doesn't "find" in Outlook, like it does in every other modern application across the universe: It's a widespread convention that the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut initiates a Find operation. Word does it, Excel does it, Wordpad does it, Notepad does it, Internet Explorer does it. But Outlook doesn't. Why doesn't Outlook get with the program? Rewind to 1995. The mail team was hard at work on their mail client, known as Exchange (code name Capone, in keeping...

For once I'm not ranting about politics. No, check out these spite houses: About a century ago, a Bay Area man named Charles Froling was just learning that he wouldn't be able to build his dream house. An inheritance had gifted him a sizable chunk of land, but municipal elders in the City of Alameda had decided to appropriate most of it to extend a street. So Froling sadly rolled up his blueprints and murmured, "Ah well, that's life." No, of course he didn't do that. Having a constitution made from...

I didn't sleep terribly well last night because, let's face it, the Cleveland Airport Sheraton is neither my own house nor the Ritz-Carlton on Park Ave. It is, however, in Cleveland, where my current client is also. There are essentially two options for traveling: fly out the night before your meetings, or the morning of your meetings. And for me it comes down to one thing: Is the trade-off for one night at home going to be getting up at 4:30am to get a 7am flight from O'Hare? That's not a trade-off I'm...

On Friday, Paul Wildman at the Washington Post shot back at the President's critics: Both Republicans and the media have become obsessed with the question of whether President Obama should go to the border for a photo opportunity, with the accompanying and bizarre assertion that this is “Obama’s Katrina.” In fact, it’s just the opposite. In that case, it was Bush’s failure of competence and his inability to go beyond photo ops that resulted in so much destruction. In this case, the president’s critics...

I have to dash off to a meeting in a few minutes, then to Wrigley. So this is more of a note to myself. Lucene.NET will be coming to Weather Now, I hope in a few weeks. This will massively improve its piss-poor searching, and allow me to do a few other things as well given Lucene's amazing search capabilities. Unfortunately, Weather Now ranks third in development priorities behind my employer and my long-suffering freelance client. At least it kind of runs itself these days.

Imagine you're sitting on your front stoop, strumming your guitar, and Eric Clapton comes out of nowhere to give you some pointers. That's about what happened to me today. Earlier this week, Jon Skeet (described by Scott Hanselman as "the world's greatest living programmer) noticed something I posted on the IANA Time Zone list, and asked me about the Inner Drive Time Zone library. So I sent him the package. And this afternoon, he sent me a benchmark that he wrote for it. Just like that. Of course, the...

Tatiana Maslany, who plays Sarah Manning (and Alison, Cosima, Helena, Rachel, etc.) on BBCA's "Orphan Black," was not nominated for an Emmy award this morning. Before hearing from the critics why this pretty much invalidates the Best Actress category this year, take a look: The Toronto Sun leads the prosecution: Emmy Award voters must have broken their clickers. Had they been able to change the channel every once in a while, they might have run across a Canadian actress named Tatiana Maslany and a show...