The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation

Jason is more than a stand-up guy, he’s one of the most genuinely thoughtful human beings I have the pleasure of calling a friend. He’s an incredible designer, you’d be lucky to have him. Not that you deserve him.

…men tend to focus on the youngest women in their already skewed preference pool, and, what’s more, they spend a significant amount of energy pursuing women even younger than their stated minimum. No matter what he’s telling himself on his setting page, a 30 year-old man spends as much time messaging 18 and 19 year-olds as he does women his own age. On the other hand, women only a few years older are largely neglected.

—Just one part of yet another detailed and brilliant look at the habits on online daters from OK Cupid, this one looking at the role age plays. The entire post, with some fantastic charts, is really worth a read and confirms some stereotypes – men tend to prefer younger women, even younger than they’ll admit to themselves, women tend to have little patience for younger men and are much more open about their preferences.

My pal Neven added some smart thoughts to my earlier bit about WebKit on mobile. I think he’s mostly right.

Mozilla has been dragging its feet when it comes to adding next-gen rendering features (the sort that may some day make Flash unnecessary), focusing instead on everything above the Gecko engine. They are also woefully unprepared to match, let alone exceed, WebKit’s embedded performance.

You could argue that Firefox is a better browser (if you love its extensions and location bar) but the engine is falling behind badly. Both users and developers stand to gain more by focusing on the engine that works great now and looks to have a bright future than by arguing hypotheticals.

I’ll admit I’m an informed but casual follower of the nuances of browser rendering engines, but I think it’s unfair to say that Gecko is falling behind, certainly not badly. Gecko has native support for HTML 5 proposals like video and audio tags. It supports anything you could want to do with CSS. The Javascript engine actually took a rather novel approach to improve performance pretty dramatically.

The albatross around Gecko’s neck is that it’s a pain for developers – application developers, not web developers – to embed it in their own apps, owing largely, as I understand it, to XUL. This is doubly so in the mobile space I would imagine, where WebKit’s portability is a huge boon. But that’s a developer issue, not an end-user or even web developer issue, Gecko itself has admirably kept up with the changing tides and made some waves of its own.

I am reasonably sure that development of WebKit is fueled by the desire to do amazing things using web technologies, and not by an urge to compete with anyone; as far as I can tell, the WebKit team isn’t paying too much attention to what Mozilla is up to.

Put another way, even if Firefox, IE, and Opera halted development today and added no new features, Apple and others on the WebKit team would be working their butts off to make the web richer - because they want it for themselves.

This is where I couldn’t agree more. I think Apple and Google, the two biggest contributors to WebKit, would continue to push WebKit forward even if Safari and Chrome were the only two browsers on earth. Those two companies have proven, for the most part, that they are driven to continue to do better, even when they’re already the best at what they do.

Maybe the world would be a better place if there were one agreed upon engine that was open source, rapidly developed and did what it was told. I doubt it since that’s not even the case for WebKit now so until then, I’ll keep rooting for Gecko to succeed.

Every major mobile platform is now either using WebKit or will be soon. Except for one.

—

John Gruber, on RIM’s new WebKit-based browser, the one obvious holdout being Windows Mobile. While I’m a huge fan of WebKit, both in my pants and on my desk, this strikes me as an odd thing to triumph. For one, replace “WebKit” with “Flash” and suddenly the iPhone is the holdout.

More importantly, though, with something like browser rendering engines, I’m philosophically opposed to a monoculture. A few years ago, Gecko was the best rendering engine available, then WebKit came out of nowhere to beat Gecko at its own game, and faster, to boot. Now Gecko and WebKit, on the desktop, anyway, are pushing each other to only get better. I’d love to see that kind of competition in the mobile space as well.

There is always a dream that you could write [a program] once and [have it] run anywhere and history has proven that that dream has not been fully realised and I am sceptical that it ever will be

—

Andy Rubin, VP of engineering at Google, on the recently announced Wholesale Applications Community, a “platform” being backed by pretty much every mobile carrier on the planet. The idea sounds like something akin to Apple’s iPhone app store, only it’s supposed to work across mobile operating systems, devices and carriers. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of computing has to see how dumb this idea is.

Also, it’s called WAC. Seriously.

I think I found the perfect Awkward Valentine to send @phillygirl

Consumers loudly campaigned for another Barbie® career. The winner of the popular vote is Computer Engineer. Computer Engineer Barbie®, debuting in Winter 2010, inspires a new generation of girls to explore this important high-tech industry, which continues to grow and need future female leaders.

—Nice, the next Barbie is going to be a nerd.

Whisky toothpaste! [Martin sent me this gem]

Heh [via squashed]