As promised, Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin filibustered the extension to the PATRIOT Act today, and perhaps surprisingly, a cloture vote failed. That means that the bill goes back to the drawing board for revisions to satisfy Feingold and his allies. What I find more interesting, though, is that Senator Feingold has been blogging about his efforts against the PATRIOT Act all week over at TPM Cafe. Maybe I’m making too much of this, but it seems like something remarkable and new.

J. Alex Halderman at Freedom to Tinker has a helpful guide to creating your own copy protected audio CDs. You can be just like Sony only without the rootkit or public humiliation.

Nature, the leading scientific journal did a study comparing the accuracy of scientific articles in Wikipedia articles to those in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and found that Wikipedia is not substantially worse. Most of the problems people have with Wikipedia concern controversial topics that are in the news right now, and those are the hardest to cover in an encyclopedic fashion anyway. On topics where the facts are well understood, Wikipedia tends to do pretty well.

Given the announcement that people are going to be able to write their own search engines that utilize Alexa’s index and Google has announced an API for creating widgets for Google Homepage, how long must we wait for an application that will enable us to search Alexa’s index from Google?

Biodiesel is great, right? Cooking oil that was going to be thrown away anyway gets converted to fuel that can be used in lieu of petrochemicals. When demand rises you turn surplus corn and soybean crops into biodiesel. Unfortunately, palm oil (often produced on plantations where rain forests once stood) is a cheaper source of biodiesel than recycled oils or anything we can grow in America, so an eco-friendly fuel turns into another threat for endangered ecosystems. We live in a complicated world.

As much as I love using Ruby on Rails, I still find it a bit rough around the edges. For one thing, the documentation leaves much to be desired. As I’ve said before, Agile Web Development with Rails is a great computer book, but Rails is far too large to be fully documented in one book. There’s also the API documentation, which is OK but not great.

The thing I find most exasperating, though, is the documentation for Rake, a Make replacement for Ruby. (If you’re a Java developer, think Ant.) It’s not the fault of the guy who provides the documentation, he’s a volunteer who I am sure is doing what he can. It’s just a sign that this Rails stuff is still pretty much on the cutting edge. (I seem to remember the Ant documentation being in a terrible state for quite some time as well.) What it comes down to is more hacking and less Googling, which is probably good for the brain anyway.

The US Postal Service is much maligned for poor customer service, inefficiency, and being a bloated government bureaucracy. They’re big, they touch everyone’s lives, and the sometimes screw up, so they’re an easy target for ridicule. I have to say that there’s one thing I generally like about the postal service though, and that’s low turnover. You don’t have to go to the post office too many times before you start recognizing the people working behind the counter, because they’re always the same. Sure some of the people working behind the counter are slow, cranky, or both, but once you get to know them, you’re rarely surprised. Sure, it would be nice if everyone were friendly and efficient, but that’s not realistic. I’d just as soon know what I’m getting.

I think that’s also an advantage of eating at family run restaurants. There’s a Vietnamese restaurant around here where I like to eat because the food is good, but the service is slow, I may never get a drink refill, and I always have to walk up to the register without my check and tell them my table number in order to pay and leave. That must sound miserable, but my wife and I are used to it. If we’re not in the mood for bad service, we eat somewhere else. i still find that infinitely preferable to hitting the local chain restaurant and dealing with whichever trainee is getting broken in for the week.

Everybody places a premium on good service, but I think that predictable service is somewhat underrated.

Ruby on Rails 1.0 is out. Perfect timing for me at work being that we’re deep in the throes of implementing a Ruby on Rails application. We are finding deployment a bit scary, but I imagine that with the rapid uptake Rails is enjoying, it will be as easily deployed as PHP within the next 12 months or so.

Update: the release announcement is here.

Jon Carroll’s column yesterday captures my feelings on capital punishment perfectly.

In a bit of a change of pace from the usual content here, I’m posting a job listing. I’m looking for a UI designer/Web developer to design the interface for a brand new content management system implemented using Ruby on Rails. This person will also contribute to the design of the public Web site where the content is published.

Basically what we’re looking for is an HTML/CSS/JavaScript hacker who has top notch user interface design skills. This isn’t a graphic design position, and things like Photoshop skills aren’t really necessary. We have the back end skills already, we just need someone to make our applications easy to use and attractive.

This is a contract position, and we’re located in Raleigh, North Carolina. You can work full time or part time, in our office or remotely, as long as you can get the job done. Pay depends on experience. If you’re interested, send me email. (I’m also open to requests from one man design shops who want to take us on as a client, the most important thing is getting good results.)

Update: I should probably mention the duration of the project. Basically we have several milestones, so the minimum would be a month. There’s no specified end date, as we have lots of features to implement and we could use the right person to help for as long as it takes to implement them.