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TV producer Chuck Lorre uses the two second “vanity cards” displayed at the end of shows he produces to publish short essays on whatever he feels like. You can only read the essays if you pause the shows on your DVR. One recent card discussed the then upcoming WSJ article about Lorre’s essay. If that [...]

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The American Scene has a provocative article that argues that Harvard University is actually a hedge fund, one that happens not to be subject to taxation. Porsche (the luxury car company) also makes most of its money by way of derivatives, as opposed to building and selling cars.

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As you know, I frequently mine the long term road test blog at Edmunds Inside Line for interesting tidbits that relate to design and user experience. Today I ran into a problem at work where people could no longer log into FogBugz because the computer running Windows XP on which it runs had decided that [...]

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The Relevance blog has an excellent post on simplifying code called Refactoring from Ceremony to Essence. In part it explains why people find Ruby on Rails to be a compelling alternative to J2EE, but it also illustrates a number of techniques applied by Ruby on Rails that could just as easily be used regardless of [...]

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Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz wonders if there’s something a little wrong with becoming President, using the fame attendant with having been President to build a massive fortune, and then spending that fortune to attempt to get your wife elected President.

He also brings up the point that accepting fees for speaking and then loaning that [...]

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Andrew Leonard posts an explanation of why many conservatives hate the the concept of peak oil (and the idea that human activity is causing climate change):

Partisan conservatives pooh-pooh peak oil (and human-caused climate change) because they think that to concede that these challenges are real and must be confronted is to acknowledge that [...]

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Over a month later, post number two in my “rules of thumb” for developers series. The first post was on writing less code, period. This one is on using less indentation.

What I really mean by this is that I’m strongly not in favor of complex nested code structures. I find them to be difficult to [...]

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For the past six months or so, I’ve noticed a smattering stories that paint a very grim picture of goings on in Mexico. This morning’s news is that Mexico’s national police chief was assassinated in his home yesterday.

Last year the Washington Post reported on murders of Mexican musicians by drug cartels.

For more background, read about [...]

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… and then there are programmers. jQuery creator John Resig has ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript. Not only is this an incredibly cool hack, but it also makes Processing a heck of a lot more useful in a practical sense. I wonder if this will become the new best approach for presenting graphs [...]

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Good news: there’s now a native version of OpenOffice for OS X. Bad news: it’s really slow and buggy.

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