As proof that sometimes randomly browsing the web while procrastinating from boring work (Saturday night year-end accounting and tax organizing, for instance) can sometimes be useful, a web trick:

Flickr engineer “schill” found out that in order to natively re-size images on the client side without making them look like 8-bit dog vomit in MSIE7, you can assign CSS property “-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;“. For MSIE6 you can use the good ol’ AlphaImageLoader filter (however he doesn’t mention this might kill your ability to use z-index, a minor detail which will no doubt drive someone batty nonetheless)

In good browsers the rendered image quality ranges from OK to pretty-good, without doing anything. So in those (rare) cases where “OK” is Good Enough ™, this will be a huge benefit to mankind.

The thumbnail here is 265×241 natively, but has these tricks applied to be 50×50, and they make a huge difference. And also, it is hilarious.

The proper CLI incantation to get mplayer/mencoder to clockwise rotate, apply an autolevels filter and re-sample an AVI video is:

mencoder dscf5432.avi -vf rotate=1,pp=al -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1:bitrate=687 -oac copy -o out.avi

I always knew there was something I didn’t like about obsessive logging

8 really scary predictions from FORTUNE

Marc Ambinder in Atlantic: It’s quite unsettling to talk to members of Barack Obama’s transition teams these days

Allow me to join the hordes who are saying “about time” to the announcement that Adobe will support Flash 10 for 64-bit Linux. Although it makes little practical difference it will be one less wart on the Linux desktop experience.

131.9 cents per litre is somewhere between surf rats and shipsterns

Some things this week:

Why’s Camping for quickie site

Git creative at github for quickie versioning

duplicity for quickie encrypted backups to S3

stackoverflow for quickie answers

Media Plugin for quickie embedding

hadoop for quickie figure-outing.

The minute waltz, non-prime and 120-harmonic-reversed are worth listening to for a few hours on end.

“The system of banking [is] a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction…

I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity… is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”

– Thomas Jefferson corr. John Taylor, May 28, 1816

Thomas Jefferson, it should be noted, died deeply in debt. He contracted to sell landholdings before the Revolutionary War - but the payments he received were given in paper money after the war, which due to hyperinflation (itself caused by massive issuance of debt by the Continental Congress), were worth nothing. Any similarity to events past or present is purely coincidental.

says a long time Wall St. trader. If only it were so. Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman for the last 14 years, has had to suffer such indignities as cashing only a $40million paycheck, and seeing his Florida home lose about $4million in value during this housing crisis. Did he even notice this change fall out of his pocket? Not likely. In an ideal world, nobody would give these guys any more money, as their own personal risk is essentially nil - they can simply shrug and go back to eating exotic food and complaining about the help. Meanwhile, will we continue trusting our life savings to them? it looks less and less likely that the patchwork plumbing (based on fragile absurdities like Fractional Reserve, and Bretton Woods II) will hold together long enough for us to ever get it back.