rc3.org

BoingBoing has a post this morning about an online casino publishing MD5 hashes of their virtual decks of cards to prove that when a “deck” is generated at the beginning of a game, it does not change throughout the course of the game. That brings up a larger question that I have never figured out, [...]

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Don’t you hate it when something you think of as a good habit turns out to be a bad habit? I have long been a big proponent of defensive programming. Never assume the arguments being passed to a method are good, always validate everything, and generally protect yourself from other people’s bad code or [...]

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Larry Lessig pretty much gets to the bottom of the Net Neutrality debate:

One clue to this Net Neutrality debate is to watch what kind of souls are on each side of the debate. The pro-NN contingent is filled with the people who actually built the Net — from Vint Cerf to Google to [...]

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The reason I always harp on stories about missile defense is that the missile defense program is emblematic of government activity that’s expensive, useless, and exists only for symbolic value. It’s hard to make progress when it comes to preventing weapons proliferation, so the government comes up with these missile defense programs that will theoretically [...]

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The book Programming Ruby, also commonly referred to as “the pickaxe book,” is widely regarded in the Ruby community as a must-have. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really meet my expectations. You can find parts of the book online, so you can see for yourself what I’m talking about.

Take a look at the chapter on Basic Input [...]

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Looks like the article on Ceca, a Serbian pop-star/ultranationalist figurehead, is missing a bit of information. The article on her husband, Serbian war criminal Arkan, needs some work as well.

To me these sorts of articles are some of the most interesting cases for how well Wikipedia works. They are obscure to most Americans, so partisans [...]

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Even though I never actually read the book, Lawrence Lessig’s book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace is often on my mind. The book’s argument that code and algorithms are rules as much as anything else should be always be in the back of the mind of every programmer.

Just look at the different kinds of [...]

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When it comes to Ruby on Rails style, one of the toughest decisions to make is how many controllers you need. The default custom for Rails seems to center around having one controller per model, but that doesn’t always make the most sense.

To discuss this at a high level for a moment, models generally mirror [...]

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If more than half of the pictures on your Flickr account are screen shots, Flickr will suppress your images in global search results. The theory is that people come to Flickr to see photos, not group shots of your World of Warcraft guild or the sculpture you just created in Second Life.

This is strictly a [...]

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The other day I wrote about how YouTube has revolutionized video on the Web by making it accessible to just about anybody, regardless of which platform and browser they use. That’s still not the case for many other Web sites, even sites that launched recently. I have been trying to watch the video clips from [...]

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