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For the past few weeks, I’ve been completely obsessed with jQuery, one of the many fine JavaScript UI libraries that are competing for your attention these days. I can’t really tell you whether jQuery is better than any of the other libraries, but I can say that it’s infinitely better than writing your own JavaScript [...]

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The Washington Monthly devotes its full issue this month to articles arguing for a ban on torture. The Bush administration’s continual demand that we must be allowed to torture prisoners is the greatest blow to US moral standing in my lifetime. Plus, it makes me sick. Here’s how the magazine introduces the issue:

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Here’s an astounding statistic: 10% of homeowners have no equity at all in their homes. Click on the link to read about some of the implications of that number.

In related news, aggregate home debt exceeds home equity for the first time since 1945.

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Tyler Cowen posts about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the same themes that I was trying to hit last night. His post has the advantage of being both shorter and more erudite. He argues that the differences between the two are aesthetic, which I think is exactly right:

The two candidates represent two [...]

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When Apple announced the iPhone, there were no provisions whatsoever for third party applications. If you wanted to use the iPhone, you used Apple’s applications. People (myself included) went nuts over it, and Apple responded by telling developers to write Web apps.

Many people strongly suspected that Apple had plans for more than that from the [...]

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Preface this by noting that I’m no political analyst and some would say that my abilities as an analyst of human nature are lacking as well. In spite of those insufficiencies, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s kept Barack Obama from breaking through with a wider swathe of Democratic voters.

Needless to say, given a [...]

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Matt Raible (now a full time employee of LinkedIn) posts about how he came to work there as a result of a consulting project where he helped them evaluate open source web frameworks against a framework that they had built in-house. In the end, he recommended enhancing their internal framework to include some of [...]

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I realized today that for me there are only two time horizons. There is “same as forever,” which is any period of time that seems like more than enough to finish whatever I have to do before my deadline, and there’s “not enough time to finish,” which is any shorter amount of time.

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AOL has officially AIM to third party instant messaging clients under an initiative called OpenAIM 2.0. There’s now a documented API that IM client writers can use to interface with AIM. Before, software developers reverse engineered the protocol used by the official AIM client and updated their software whenever AOL made changes that cut them [...]

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Google developer Cedric Beaust argues that treating orthodox Test Driven Development as some kind of panacea is a mistake, a position that I find it difficult to argue with. In fact, I find myself rejecting nearly all dogmatic software development philosophies. I like to read about them, but in the end I just [...]

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