rc3.org

Adam Greenfield to Technorati: you suck. Honestly, I find Technorati close to useless. I hate to say that, because I know at least one person who works there, and I think they intend to provide a useful service, but they seem to have run into massive scaling problems. Their index is always way behind, [...]

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One thing lacking in both news coverage of the Presidential campaign and at the Democratic convention itself was substantive discussion of John Kerry’s policy proposals. Mother Jones as a nice rundown of a few of Kerry’s proposed policies.

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Civil libertarians are pissed that the Homeland Security department is using census data to figure out where Arabs live in America.

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Mark Hurst wonders what would happen if companies spent less on advertising and more on customer experience. He also has an example of a company that has done just that — you’ve probably heard of them.

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Greg Knauss does a nice job of deflating Paul Graham’s essay on hackers that I linked to the other day. When it comes to technical articles like Graham’s essay, my brain has a special filter that enables me to ignore the fatuous parts and mine the value from the useful parts, otherwise I couldn’t read [...]

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So last night I went to update one of my entries, and when I went to my admin page, no items showed up at all. There were no errors, but there was no content, either. So I went to the front page of the site — again, no entries displayed. How odd, I thought. If [...]

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Ed Felten describes Apple’s fight with Real over DRM:

See, Apple had this product called iPod that lets you listen to music. That sounds like a good idea. But Apple thought it would be better if the iPod could do less.

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In his rundown of the Perl Lightning Talks at OSCON, Danny O’Brien mentions a new web app framework for Perl written by Randal Schwartz, which sounds like a port of something you’d do in Java. You extend an existing class and just override the parts you need to in order to make your app work. [...]

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I think it’s time to look again at learning Python. It’s been on my to do list for ages, but I always seem to put it off. My latest rationale for learning is that on top of being a good general purpose scripting language, you can now write Python to target the two virtual machines [...]

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Paul Graham’s latest essay is on the topic of Great Hackers. In it, he talks about what motivates the best programmers. Here’s one of the points he makes, about tools:

When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you’re not just making a technical decision. You’re also making a social decision, and this may [...]

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