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Progressive image rendering: Good or evil?

I’ve always thought that Progressive JPEGs should be used more often than they are. In my experience they usually end up being a tiny bit smaller than standard (though not enough to matter on today’s Internet), plus it really does seem like showing a low-res image that resolves into a sharper one would be more useful than slowly watching the image fill in from one edge. Well, it turns out that people really dislike those initially-blurry images. First impressions are important, and even when the sharpening is fast, it makes the viewer’s brain work harder to process the image because it has to do it twice.

Progressive image rendering: Good or evil? – Web Performance Today


Which offers a better user experience: baseline or progressive images? New neuroscientific research from Radware has the answer.

Introducing Universal SSL

This is pretty awesome: CloudFlare is rolling out SSL support to ALL its customers. Even the free accounts will get the bare minimum, which encrypts the connection between the browser and CloudFlare’s CDN, and uses SNI to avoid having to use up precious IPv4 addresses. (For full encryption including the connection from your server to CloudFlare, or unique IP to support older browsers *cough*WinXP*cough*Android 2*, you still need a paid plan.)

Introducing Universal SSL

The team at CloudFlare is excited to announce the release of Universal SSL™. Beginning today, we will support SSL connections to every CloudFlare customer, including the 2 million sites that have signed…

On the surface, it’s a brilliant prank: he found a way to create a…

The Ultimate Retaliation: Pranking My Roommate With Targeted Facebook Ads

On the surface, it's a brilliant prank: he found a way to create a custom targeted audience of just one person, about whom he knew more than Facebook's ad system did. But it shows the potential for online harassment, especially since it ties in with our fears about online privacy.

“We can’t choose a world where the US gets to spy and the Chinese don’t.”

Fake Cell Phone Towers Across the US

“We can’t choose a world where the US gets to spy and the Chinese don’t. We get to choose a world where everyone can spy, or a world where no one can spy.”

(Also, the “towers” referred to in the title are apparently not physical towers so much as interception devices that mimic a cell tower on the network. It’s imprecise language that has propagated through just about every article on the topic.)

On Facebook

Great photo: It’s rare to see a circular rainbow because usually we see them…

Ring Around the Rainbow

Great photo: It’s rare to see a circular rainbow because usually we see them from the ground, and there aren’t enough raindrops below the horizon to produce a lower arc. But from a high enough vantage point (say, in an airplane or helicopter), with the right rain and sun conditions, you can see a full circle.

Unintended consequences: Decades of suppressing fire in the Sierra Nevada mountains have led to…

Why More Trees in the Sierra Mean Less Water for California

Unintended consequences: Decades of suppressing fire in the Sierra Nevada mountains have led to overgrown forests, which reduces runoff into the rivers and reservoirs used by the rest of the state because the extra trees are using more water.

On Facebook

One of the ongoing questions about the rise in autism spectrum cases

Autism Prevalence Unchanged in 20 Years

Interesting: One of the ongoing questions about the rise in autism spectrum cases is how much is an increase in diagnosis (not to mention expanding definitions, but that’s easier to adjust for) and how much is an increase in actual prevalence. A new study looks at data worldwide from 1990 to 2010 and finds that the rate has actually remained constant across that time. That suggests that the rise in documented cases is almost entirely due to better diagnostics.