I am sorely tempted to start sending strongly worded emails to people who maintain Web sites that use Western (ISO-8859-1) encoding but lead my browser to believe they are encoded in Unicode. Is that wrong?

Adam Shostack predicts that phishing will kill online banking unless banks start using email more intelligently. His recommendations make sense for any business that uses email to communicate with its customers.

Steven A. Shaw argues in the New York Times that we should do away with tipping. Here’s the crux of the matter:

Customers believe in tipping because they think it makes economic sense. “Waiters know that they won’t get paid if they don’t do a good job,” is how most advocates of the system (meaning most everybody in America) would put it. To be sure, this is a seductive, apparently rational statement about economic theory, but it appears to have little applicability to the real world of restaurants.

I have a standard formula for calculating tips from which I rarely deviate, regardless of the quality of service. (I generally leave $1 in gratuity per $5 of the bill, rounding up.) If I’m eating at a nice restaurant, I will leave a larger than average tip if service was exceptional. Also, if I’m a regular at a restaurant I’ll often tip a bit more, especially if the place is inexpensive, just so the servers are happy to see me when I arrive.

Here’s what Miguel de Icaza has to say about MVC architecture for Web applications:

The development model in ASP.NET is lighter than the development model with J2EE. J2EE has taken this approach of Model-View-Controller, which is a beautiful thing from an academic perspective, but it does add a burden. At Ximian we consulted with a number of software companies. They said, “We can develop applications 20 to 25% faster than with ASP.NET than we can with J2EE.” Developers like ASP.NET because you don’t have these three layers of Model-View-Controller. Instead there is the presentation layer, and the model is the database. You don’t have this intermediate layer.

I take it as a positive that J2EE is inextricably linked with MVC architecture. I think it’s the biggest win in Web development since I started writing rudimentary CGI applications 10 years ago. Indeed, Ruby on Rails is the first really credible approach to building an MVC framework in a dynamic language (that I am aware of, anyway).

What I find interesting is that Miguel sees MVC as a burden rather than as a benefit. I think that there’s an inflection point. On one side, MVC lengthens the development cycle, and on the other, it shortens it. In my experience, very few applications ever stay on the side of the inflection point where MVC is a burden. They may start out that way, but as feature requests start coming in, a layered approach really makes things easier, especially when it comes to testing.

Last week I linked to Cory Doctorow’s rant against Apple supporting and utilizing the Trusted Computing platform in the version of Mac OS X for Intel processors. I’d be a fool not to link to John Gruber’s response as well.

Cory’s rant was a visceral shot across the bow, warning Apple away from a worst case scenario. John’s response takes a look at where Apple really is and how they’ve behaved historically. To me, both pieces are important.

As Cory points out, Trusted Computing is a loaded gun. He believes that if Apple leaves it laying around, computer users are going to get hurt. Gruber’s response is that right now, Apple is only using it to make sure that you don’t install and run Mac OS X on your Dell. Apple is going to use hardware to solve this problem, and Trusted Computing is the path of least resistance right now.

The question for any user is what action on Apple’s part ends the relationship? Do you buy a Mac if Apple provides an API to developers that enables them to use the Trusted Computing hardware in any way that they choose? Do you buy one if the iTunes Music Store uses Trusted Computing for its DRM? Do you buy one if the movies you make with iMovie can only be played if the computer you’re playing them on has a license purchased from Apple? Cory is giving Apple feedback in this regard and his position is zero tolerance.

Despite the hyperbole in Cory’s rant, he’s still providing important, useful feedback to Apple, and a starting point for us to think about where they stand on this issue. That’s useful. Don’t miss John’s response, either, because it’ll help you reach an informed conclusion.

On the subject of Google’s reprisal against CNet for publishing information found via Google about CEO Eric Schmidt in a news article, Jason Shellen says there’s a difference between public data and publicizing data, which I agree with. The point he seems to be missing is that search engines like Google exist to shorten the distance between information that’s public and information that’s publicized. The implications of the changes that search engines (and other searchable databases) are making to society are worth discussing, this spat between Cnet and Google aside.

Maciej Ceglowski’s article, A Rocket To Nowhere, is a must read. He explains the failings of the space shuttle program, starting with the initial design. It’s the kind of article you’d expect to read in the New Yorker, except that it’s freely available on a personal site. Amazing stuff.

My favorite quote:

There is no satisfactory answer for why all this commotion must take place in orbit. To the uneducated mind, it would seem we could accomplish our current manned space flight objectives more easily by not launching any astronauts into space at all – leaving the Shuttle and ISS on the ground would result in massive savings without the slighest impact on basic science, while also increasing mission safety by many orders of magnitude. It might even bring mission costs within the original 1970’s estimates, and allow us to continue the Shuttle program well into the middle of the century.

Ed Felten has a sumamry of the lawsuit filed by ISS and Cisco against Mike Lynn, the security researcher who gave a talk on a Cisco exploit at the BlackHat computer security conference. Jennifer Granick is representing Lynn, and a legal defense fund has been established. Bruce Schneier points out that Cisco has only compounded its problems by giving Lynn’s original presentation so much attention in the first place.

Yes, the amount of time President Bush spends on vacation still ticks me off.