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Datawocky: The story behind Google’s crawler upgrade. How Google is crawling data accessible only through forms. Ars Technica: Red light camera monkey business may be a national trend. More on short yellow lights designed to result in red light camera tickets. Wide Awake Developers: Amazon Blows Away Objections. How Amazon is expanding the capabilities of its [...]

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Last year Anil Dash participated in the Donors Choose bloggers challenge. I had heard of Donors Choose before but I had never donated. I wound up donating $50 to help a band class somewhere buy a new tenor saxophone.

After going through the experience of finding a grantee and making my donation, Donors Choose was my [...]

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soapUI. The Web Service, SOA and SOAP Testing Tool. Combine stats not created equal. Which statistics collected at the combine correlate with NFL success for running backs, and which are meaningless? This is a sports story, but the lesson is for everyone. Just because you measure something doesn’t mean it’s important. Marginal Revolution: Incentives [...]

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Stephen O’Grady: Clouds Rolling In: The Google App Engine Q&A. Great rundown. Bruce Schneier: The Feeling and Reality of Security. Understanding the differences and how to manage them is the key to successful security policy. FP Passport: The Olympic torch’s mysterious companions. The torch escorts are members of a paramilitary group sponsored by the Chinese government. Their [...]

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gourmet.com: Betting the Farm. Great article on agriculture policy and how one family farm in South Dakota is bucking the trend of cashing in on ethanol money and government subsidies. Rogers Cadenhead: Washington Post Wins Another Phony Pulitzer. I loved the Washington Post article about the violinist planted in the DC subway, but Rogers argues that [...]

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Evaluating tools is sort of like judging art. The two questions you should have about a work of art are, “Do I like it?” and “Is it important?” They’re completely separate. You may not enjoy the music of The Beatles, but that doesn’t change the fact that they were hugely important in the evolution of [...]

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Scott Horton: Worst. President. Ever. What interests me most about the list is that every President other than Bush (43) who could be described as the worst ever was a single termer. Bush’s main competition, Millard Fillmore, was not elected in the first place (he took over for Zachary Taylor, who died after 16 months [...]

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I was discussing basic coding philosophy today and realized that I have a few rules of thumb that I bring to my programming. I guess you’d call them a basic sensibility of how to write code. The three big rules are:

Write less code. Use less indentation. Write more methods. Externalize everything.

I’ll write separate posts for each of these [...]

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Daring Fireball: Firefox 3 vs. Safari 3. The main sense I get from this review is that I could be getting more out of my Mac. Jason Kottke: Getting into Momofuku Ko. How this small but incredibly popular New York restaurant handles reservations using a Web application. It sounds like the basic model works like Ticketmaster.

There [...]

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The Quick and the Ed. How class (or income bracket) affects college admissions. Usually it’s better to be a rich idiot than smart and poor. O’Reilly Radar: Review Board is good software. Software for managing code reviews. David Pogue: Can Blogger-Bashers Predict the Success of a Product? Unlikely. I find the gadget blogs to be nearly useless. FP [...]

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