links: Chronological entries

Link: Serif vs. Sans Serif Legibility

Which Are More Legible: Serif or Sans Serif Typefaces? by Alex Poole is a review and summary of a whole pile of writing about this. I'll cut to the conclusion (don't worry, it's not a spoiler since Alex Poole puts it in the first paragraph of the introduction):

To date, no one has managed to provide a conclusive answer to this issue.

Alas, none of this helps me configure liferea to improve its legibility on a 17" CRT monitor. (I would be happy if I could just clone a Firefox setup, but this is stupidly difficult and/or impossible for no good reason.)

(From someone I chat with online, when I was asking around about this.)

Link: Golden Rules for Bad User Interfaces

Golden Rules for Bad User Interfaces is more or less what it sounds like. I could wish that the sarcasm was more biting, but that would probably be ungracious and besides, it's from SAP.

(From Greg Wilson.)

Link: On Bots

On Bots is a fascinating report on a large scale experiment to see how web search bots would explore an almost limitless set of linked pages. Whether or not the results generalize (or are still applicable), it's got a bunch of pretty pictures.

(From Tim Bray, rather belatedly.)

Link: Pumas on Hoverbikes

Pumas on Hoverbikes is about managing system administrators, and it's funny. Here's a somewhat out of context quote:

This is because managers are usually people who proved that they were handy with a chaingun and were thus rewarded by having their thumbs cut off and their weapons handed to some punk college hire.

From this you should be able to figure out if you want to read the rest. There's other articles too, like Suck Factor, which is where I first dropped into the site.

(From comments on this.)

Link: Unicode Spaces

Presented without comment, the 18 spaces of Unicode.

(From Sam Ruby.)