- Joanna Smith Rakoff describes her experience as an assistant at Harold Ober Associates, JD. Salinger’s publisher. Ultimately one of her roles ended up being a gatekeeper of Salinger’s personal life by replying to the many letters addressed to the author.
- Opera 10.5 snapshot build 9240 re-adds support for the W3C Geolocation API, reenables Opera Unite and Spell checking, and (via site-patching) adds support for Google Wave.
- The Guardian’s new Zeitgeist is a “what’s popular right now on our site” page presented visually as a heat-map. The Guardian blog has an entry up describing with the behind-the-scenes introduction.
- William J. Rapaport, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Buffalo, provides a history of the sentence “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.” This is the sort thing that trips up folks working on any sort of natural language processing disambiguation task.
- Google Apps is phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 in 2010.
- Finally, if you still haven’t made time for it, Obama’s appearance at a Republican Retreat in Baltimore is one of the more fascinating moments in U.S. Presidential history. This sort of “question time” between elected head of state and elected representatives is apparently quite common in other countries.