October 2008 – Page 5

Month: October 2008 (page 5 of 5)

VIce Presidential Debate: live blog

Impulse philanthropy

October 2, 2008 / Rafe / 1 Comment

First, let me say that the lupus walk is Saturday and I’m about halfway to my goal. If you feel so inclined, please donate to the cause, which is important to me personally, and probably to someone you know. Lupus is really not uncommon.

I also wanted to talk a little bit about philanthropic giving. Awhile back I basically resolved to start donating money to causes that seem positive to me as soon as I was asked. What I realized is that when I’m asked to give a donation, if I don’t donate immediately I generally do not donate at all. Even if I fully intend to go back and make a donation, I rarely seem to follow through.

So of late I’ve tried to pull the trigger right then if I feel moved by the request at all. I know some people plan out their charitable giving very carefully, but I’m not one of them. So I have tried to be more “impulsive” in my giving.

I would also note that people in the fund raising business seem to understand this all too well. That’s why they want you to give immediately rather than waiting to think about it. I guess I’ve decided to just go along with them.

Update: Have to admit I’m sort of overwhelmed by everybody’s generosity. Now I can never say no when anyone makes a personal request for a donation, ever.

Live Vice Presidential debate blogging

October 2, 2008 / Rafe / 0 Comments

We’re on again for live debate blogging tonight at 9pm (Eastern). Last week’s trial run was great fun, and tonight’s debate is, of course, the event of the century. Please join in the fun!

Here’s a popup link for the live blog (starts at 8). I’ll embed the actual live blog around the start time of the debate.

Bad drug interactions

October 1, 2008 / Rafe / 0 Comments

As a software developer, I love version control, and I love bug tracking systems. I honestly don’t know how anyone got any work done without them. I’ve got Subversion set up with a post-commit hook that reports my commits to FogBugz. This enables FogBugz to keep track of which code changes are associated with each issue. If, a year from now, I want to go back and see exactly which changes I made to fix a certain bug, FogBugz has that information. It’s really cool.

But, as usual, there’s a catch. I also use svnmerge to keep track of changes between branches. It makes it trivial to merge changes from the trunk to a release branch, or vice versa. When you merge changes from one branch to another, svnmerge makes a nice file with the descriptions of each change included in that merge so that you can use it as the log message when you commit the changes associated with the merge.

What I’ve just realized is that my post-commit hook is finding all the references to bugs in that message and updating each of the bugs in FogBugz with a link to the commit associated with the merge. This has two effects. One, it causes the commit to take a really, really long time. (The post-commit script calls FogBugz once for every bug reference in the commit message.) And the other is that now every bug referenced in the merge is going to have a link to this giant commit that’s not really associated with any of them.

Sometimes all of your brilliant individual ideas combine to produce a bad outcome. In the future I won’t be using the commit message that svnmerge provides.

Warren Buffett on evaluating people

October 1, 2008 / Rafe / 1 Comment

I loved this quote from Warren Buffett:

The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.

I’m a big believer that every competition is really against the standards you’ve previously set.

Mark to market roundup

October 1, 2008 / Rafe / 3 Comments

I’ve been fascinated by the argument that eliminating or suspending “mark to market” accounting rules will end the financial crisis on the cheap.

Wikipedia has a good explanation of mark to market accounting.

Matthew Yglesias posts a simple explanation of mark to market.

Paul Kedrosky argues that changing the accounting rules won’t solve anything, which is my general impression as well.

Here’s the argument in favor of suspending the rules from Brian S. Wesbury and Bob Stein.

Update: Andrew Leonard (one of my favorite bloggers) weighs in on mark to market.

Update: Here’s Kevin Drum on mark to market.

Apple blinks

October 1, 2008 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Apple has decided to drop the NDA for released iPhone software.

I assume this means released Apple software (rather than released applications for the iPhone), so now people are free to discuss any aspects of iPhone development that pertain to released versions of the OS, and that publishers will be able to start selling the iPhone books that have been in the works.

rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held