Humorist Gene Weingarten takes on President Bush. First, the setup:

Once upon a time, no one criticized George W. Bush. That was about five years ago, when questioning the president was unpatriotic. Then, gradually, liberals began to voice grievances, then moderate Democrats, then liberal Republicans, then moderate Republicans, and now we’re seeing uber-conservative hammerheads such as Bob Novak and Rich Lowry using the I-words: “inept” and “incompetent.” Foreign heads of state have started to take potshots at Bush when he’s standing right next to them, during photo ops.

Follow the link for the payoff. Trust me, it’s funny.

Fred Wilson has some interesting thoughts on Google:

Google is a different company than it was even a year ago. It’s still got the world’s best search engine and I use it maybe a hundred times a day and really can’t think of not using it. It’s like firefox, a fundamental part of my daily web experience, a starting point for most anything and everything. Search for Google is like Windows for Microsoft, it’s the product that pays the bills for everything else and is ubiquitous.

That said, YouTube was the beginning of the end of old Google and the beginning of new Google. I personally love that Google bought YouTube, because I love YouTube and everything it’s about. But that was the line in the sand that Google crossed with the media owners. Google is now public enemy number one with content owners of all kinds. Witness Sam Zell saying that “Google steals newspaper’s content”. That is just not true. But the claim that YouTube (ie Google) steals Viacom’s content rings a bit truer (I also don’t agree with that statement). Google is big, powerful, and rich, but it’s also now in the same shoes as Microsoft was in the 1990s. They are the big powerful company that everyone hates (not me).

Google in some ways strikes me as the new Netscape. Google is infinitely more successful than Netscape ever was, and will probably be around forever, but there’s a certain vibe there that makes it impossible for me to get past the comparison. When Netscape was on the rise, people saw Netscape the same way that people now see Google. They were hiring tons of smart people, they were acquiring all sorts of companies, and they let the products they acquired gather dust and put the engineers on other projects. Business magazines wrote articles about how Netscape was changing the entire business landscape by pushing product out the door at such a blinding rate of speed.

This is not to say that I’m forecasting bad things for Google. Google builds outstanding products and they have a business model that is working extremely well. But we’re finally seeing them slowly transform from a company that everyone admires and envies to a company that lots of people resent. What will be interesting to see is whether Google goes from a company that hires the actual best and brightest to a company that hires people who just regard themselves as the best and the brightest. It’s happened to plenty of other firms in the software business. It’s extremely difficult to keep bringing in top notch hires when you’re growing as fast as Google is.

Ryan Tomayko has written a very informative post about how they use Rails to connect to multiple databases for scalability purposes on his project.

You should also check out this post by Blaine Cook, another engineer at Twitter.

Jamais Cascio makes some interesting observations about the One Laptop Per Child project, which I agree with completely.

A remembrance of the man, not the writer.

Apple has released a startlingly up front press release explaining that the release of OS X 10.5 is being pushed from June to October because resources were moved to the iPhone project. All of the people who argue that Apple’s personal computer business is taking a back seat to development of other devices just got some additional ammo. Hopefully this means Leopard will have even more cool features when it is released.

Update: Paul Kedrosky’s post on the implications of this development is worth reading.

InformationWeek reports that IT wages are at their highest levels since 2001 and are going up worldwide. I never believed that offshoring was the industrywide crisis it was made out to be (just like H1B visas weren’t), and it looks like the new numbers are vindicating that.

Since the start of the US Attorney scandal, we’ve been hearing a lot about “voter fraud”. Josh Marshall explains what that really means in practice.

San Francisco Columnist and longtime Well conference host Jon Carroll weighs in on the blogger code of conduct controversy today, comparing it to the lessons learned on the Well over the past twenty years. Good stuff. I liked this part in particular:

Almost as soon as the Well started, the calls went out: There should be rules. The people online then were disproportionately libertarian. They were First Amendment absolutists. Say what you want, and let the community sort it out. Good information will drive out bad.

But then exceptions began to spring up. What do you do about mild-mannered crazy people? What do you do about angry crazy people? What about posting someone’s home phone number without his permission? What about sneaking into a private women’s conference by pretending to be a woman? (On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.) What about fraud? No one wanted to do anything to alert the authorities to our cool little secret fort; on the other hand, no one wanted the Well to become hopelessly polluted.

Various codes of ethics were proposed. Codes turn the quarrelsome into lawyers. People found ways to skirt the spirit of the codes. And bad guys just ignored them, which is what bad guys do. Voluntary codes work only with people who approve of voluntary codes.

The Well continues. It’s not the coolest place around anymore; it’s hardly on the radar. But it’s a calmer place, in part because 20 years is 100 years in cyber time, and the community has grown wiser even if the participants have not.

Interesting interview with Alex Payne from the Twitter development team. He says that Twitter’s scalability issues are in part due to the fact that Ruby and Rails are just slow. Here’s a taste:

It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.

I think this is true and important, but it’s also an issue that will be resolved in due course if the popularity of Ruby and Rails continue to rise. At one time, Java was almost unacceptably slow. That has changed. That said, in a world where the amount of money it costs to power and cool server farms is becoming an issue for companies, running on a platform that requires more wattage than another will make a difference.

It’s also worth noting that most applications are not Twitter, they’ll have relatively few users and can comfortably run without performance issues in just about any environment.

I do wonder, though, if this kind of information is going to push some startups over to PHP or Java, even if they’d prefer the development efficiencies offered by Rails. As he mentions in the article, the longer you can put off being forced into using stupid scalability tricks the better off you are.

Update: Ruby on Rails creator DHH responds. His bottom line is that this is something that the Twitter developers themselves could help fix. I do think it’s pretty lame to leverage all of the development advantages of a platform to build your application and get it out there, and then lay all the blame on it when performance problems crop up. Ruby on Rails is not as old or as widely used as Java or PHP. There are risks.