NASA’s unmanned spacecraft Stardust collected material from the tail of comet Wild 2 and brought that material back to Earth. After careful examination of that material, scientists working on the project discovered the amino acid glycine:

“The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare,” said Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which co-funded the research.

Proteins are the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes, the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions. Just as the 26 letters of the alphabet are arranged in limitless combinations to make words, life uses 20 different amino acids in a huge variety of arrangements to build millions of different proteins.

Campaign Monitor has updated its guide to CSS support in email clients:

Designing an HTML email that renders consistently across the major email clients can be very time consuming. Support for even simple CSS varies considerably between clients, and even different versions of the same client.

With all of the improved standards support in FireFox, Safari, Chrome and even (to some extent) Internet Explorer, it’s easy to forget just how woefully behind email clients can be, especially web-based clients. Chris Clark sums it all up rather neatly:

1. Modern desktop and mobile email clients are practically the same as modern web browsers.
2. Gmail and other webmail clients are practically the same as web browsers circa 1993.
3. Enjoy your fucking <table> tags. And remember most webmail clients don’t load images by default, either.

Of course, I can’t help but think that it was perhaps a mistake to shoehorn HTML into email in the first place. No, that doesn’t mean I think all email messages should be plain text. Rather, I think that email should have its own simpler, saner rich-text format, backed up by some standards organization. Failing that, I think the technology industry needs to at least decide on a standard way to adapt HTML for use in emails.

A new film from Doug Pray explores the advertising industry:

The frightening and most difficult thing about being what somebody calls a “creative person” is that you have absolutely no idea where any of your thoughts come from, really, and especially you don’t have any idea about where they’re gonna come from tomorrow.

Jon Stokes of Ars Technica reports on the findings of a new Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) survey:

If you think that your mobile phone bill is out of control, that’s apparently because it is. A new [OECD] survey has found that mobile users in the US, Canada, and Spain pay almost five times more for wireless service than their counterparts in the Netherlands, Finland, and Sweden, who pay the least.

For those of us frustrated with the tetrarchy’s delivery of the latest technologies, this report tells us something we already knew:

The report also takes note of a phenomenon that was starkly evident in this latest round of quarterly earnings releases: bandwidth providers across the industry, from Comcast to AT&T, saw profits jump, while network infrastructure makers from Cisco to D-Link saw huge revenue declines.

Clearly, service providers are extracting more money from the use of existing equipment. It’s good news for them, but equipment makers are getting whacked for the second time in a decade as infrastructure spending slows dramatically after a period of frenzied investment.

Michael Shermer in a conversation about skepticism:

What’s the danger in me believing in UFOs?

Well, it starts with just, “Are you willing to believe anything?” Because if you believe your astrology column, which admittedly is relatively harmless, what else are you willing to believe?

If you have no critical facilities at all, then you’ll go for the aliens and the ESP and stuff, but then maybe you’ll accept political or economic ideologies that are equally wacky.

It really does begin with the simplest stuff.

Brandon Walkin presents an excellent analysis of UI design:

Interface complexity is an issue every designer wrestles with when designing a reasonably sophisticated application. A complex interface can reduce user effectiveness, increase the learning curve of the application, and cause users to feel intimidated and overwhelmed.

I’ve spent the past year redesigning a particularly complex application with my primary focus being on reducing complexity. In this article, I’ll go over some of the issues surrounding complexity and techniques that can be used to manage it.

A surge in sales and reduced manufacturing costs of Tesla’s Roadster 2 sports car helped boost the company to $1 million in earnings and $20 million in revenue.

“There is strong demand for a car that is unique in offering high performance with a clean conscience,” said Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, in a prepared statement. “Customers know that in buying the Roadster they are helping fund development of our mass market electric cars.”

The genius of Tesla Motors lies not in the engineering—electric cars have been done before—but in the strategy. They first targeted the margin-rich high end in order to secure a revenue stream and to fund later entry into additional market segments.

Alex Payne writes about his occasional temptation to leave the House of Apple:

Once, maybe twice a year, I do this stupid thing. At least I’m not alone in it, as friends get the same itch, but I have to do it. I think about switching away from the Apple platform.

There is no shortage of reasons to consider leaving the House of Apple, especially for geeks technology enthusiasts. Of particular concern to many of us is Apple’s tyrannical mishandling of the iPhone’s application ecosystem and the lack of appealing alternatives:

The woeful performance and usability of Android is precisely the reason that Apple can treat developers (and consumers) however they like; it’s not even playing the same game, much less on the field with the iPhone. That Android is a mobile Linux platform is sadly apparent. Android suffers from the same issues that have plagued Linux on the desktop for years: the lack of integration between software and hardware, buggy and under-featured applications, a lack of attention paid to user experience issues. The encouraging openness and bits of innovation in Android are overshadowed by mediocrity.

Mac desktops/laptops are fortunately free of such despotism but many of us are nevertheless frustrated at the lack of (what we consider to be) viable competition:

Assuming I can justify the expense to myself, I could get a ThinkPad, familiar and homely and built like a tank. Then what? Run Ubuntu on it? Sure, Linux has evolved to the point that there’s not much tinkering required to have a functional laptop (if you do your research before purchasing), but it also boasts no marked improvement over OS X. I could run a tiling window manager and not have to fuss with manual software updates, but those niceties are traded for pervasive rough edges and inconsistencies, not to mention the loss of the near-seamless integration of the iPhone with iTunes, Address Book, and the rest of the Mac experience.

Having been denied a Mac at work, I’ve learned to make do with Ubuntu Linux on that computer. I’ve been very encouraged by how comfortable a computing platform I’ve been able to extract from the latest version of Ubuntu. I’m content to use it as a primary desktop operating system, which is not something I’ve been able to say about previous experiments with Linux.

In spite of the progress that Ubuntu has made, however, it still took considerable effort (much of it non-intuitive and requiring significant research) to get my Linux Laptop to a point where I could use it frequently. And even then, I still long for my Mac at home by the end of the day. I desperately want Linux to be a practical alternative in the desktop arena and while it is tantalizingly close, it is still so far away.

Switching Season is about a desire to tinker, to play, to explore other possibilities for the tools that dominate my life as technologist. That’s why it comes on, strong and regular, grabbing at my attention and pulling me away from more measurably productive pursuits. It takes me back to age 14, installing Linux on a terrible old PC for the first time, trying to get things working, learning something new in the process. It’s about computer usage as a creative act, something that becomes harder and harder to experience the more proficient one gets with a computer.

I can’t say that I experience a particular period when switching is especially tempting, but I do identify with many of the sentiments that Alex expresses.

In an message to the W3C’s HTML development mailing list, Adrian Bateman from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team provides feedback about the draft HTML5 specification that I can only describe as breathtakingly curmudgeonly and obstructionist.

One of simplest and seemingly least-controversial goals of the new HTML5 standard is to make the web more semantic. This has generally taken the form of adding tags such as <nav>, <section>, <aside>, <header> and <footer>. These new tags aren’t intended to improve the display of web pages; that was already accomplished with CSS and the more generic <div> and <span> tags. Instead, these tags are meant to aid the interpretation of web pages by software so that search engines and screen readers can better handle different types of content. Such noble sentiments, however, fail to impress Microsoft:

It’s not clear why these new elements in particular are necessary. Those that use HTMLElement for their interface provide no extra functionality beyond <div class="xxx"> or <span class="">.

Microsoft also displays remarkable institutional inertia and a general “we’d really rather not bother” attitude. For example, the HTML5 draft introduces a long-needed <datagrid> element for displaying data organized by tree or list. Microsoft, however, seems to prefer the existing hacks that try to circumnavigate this deficiency in the current standard:

There are a number of libraries providing support for databinding using script and HTML. We’re not sure this is the correct design and we will investigate further.

Microsoft even has the audacity to raise some security concerns:

We believe there is a risk in allowing an element of this nature to be manipulated by script because it could create a scenario where developers auto-select it as part of the onload page (to force their website to be accessed as an individual app) and the user would see a consent dialog without knowing why. This would remove the user from being in control of the experience.

It’s possible that there is a legitimate security concern here, but it’s just too hard for me to take seriously from the company that continues to support the notoriously insecure and dangerous ActiveX plugin system in its browser.

The good news is that HTML5 is gathering tremendous support from the other browser vendors and especially the web development community. So much so that even Microsoft can’t ignore it without risking its browser hegemony. The bad news is that Microsoft is still perfectly capable of doing what it has always done: implementing those parts of the standard that it doesn’t like so poorly that no one wishing to support Internet Explorer will bother with them.

Jack Shedd writes about supporting IE6:

Generally, about 10-25% of my hours spent working on markup are spent either testing, debugging or hacking around numerous IE6 deficiencies. For the cost to work out for the client, the revenue they’d receive from IE6 users has to at least cover my cost of development, and hopefully exceed it. Otherwise, even if the cost were covered, the time spent working on IE6 as opposed to adding additional features or perfecting an existing interaction to better compete is simply not worth it. […]

Just as most sites do not need to spend thousands per month on a server farm, the vast majority of sites do not need to worry about the one-quarter of internet users who continue to use IE6. They need to be more worried about attracting, impressing and retaining new users above all else.

To do that, sites must be able to quickly adapt, add new features, repair old ones, respond to feedback and improve at the fastest pace possible. Sites must consider that newer browsers generally offer better support of newer Web standards that allow their developers to create increasingly gorgeous, detailed and impressive experiences at a lower cost.

In a world where a majority of web users still use the world’s most broken and inept browser, Internet Explorer, good web development inevitably becomes a matter of balancing the pragmatic—supporting IE—and the aspirational—using features that IE doesn’t support well or at all in order to encourage IE users to upgrade to a real browser. This balance will be different for every website, but Jack’s most salient point is something that every web developer should keep in mind:

“Supporting IE6 costs you money” is true for every site. “Supporting IE6 will make you money” is true for only a handful.

I would only add that while this is especially true for IE6, it is also true for all versions of Internet Explorer.