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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: May 2009 (page 3 of 3)

Two sides to the Dan Baum story

Dan Baum’s serialized account of his firing from the New Yorker is garnering a lot of attention, and rightfully so. The New Yorker is interesting, period, and Baum is an engaging writer.

But his side of the story is not the only one. Former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg speculates on the other side.

I really liked this bit, because everybody needs to understand it:

“The biggest disappointment was learning that, after all, it’s not only about the work on the page. That the writing life is not a pure meritocracy, or a refuge from office politics. All that crap still matters. Even at the top of the heap. Perhaps especially at the top of the heap. Who knew?”

My reaction to reading this observation is: If I were your editor and you ever said anything like that to me, I’d seriously consider firing you on the spot. No reporter can afford this level of naivete, and no editor’s budget should be spent on it. Reporters have to understand the world pragmatically, as it is, in all its mess and compromise; how can you trust a reporter who doesn’t even understand how his own profession works?

It’s not just reporters who have to understand the world pragmatically if they want to succeed.

Judging restaurants by a single dish

Tyler Cowen has posted a list of dishes he uses to evaluate the quality of ethnic restuarants. For example, he evaluates Turkish restaurants based on the doner kebab:

Turkish: Doner Kebab, taking special care to ponder the tanginess of the yogurt and how it interacts with the meat.

I find that when it comes to “bar food”, you can tell a lot from the fries. Are they the frozen, institutional fries or were they hand cut on the premises? If the latter, chances are they care about the quality of the other things they serve as well.

When it comes to Mexican restaurants and taco places, tortillas are key. It’s hard to take a place seriously if it doesn’t make fresh tortillas.

I’d be curious to know what people consider the best barometer dish to be at Italian restaurants.

Merging STDOUT and STDERR

Here’s a Unix shell lesson I always forget. Shell commands can send output to two places, standard output and standard error. The two are separated so that if you’re redirecting the output of the command to a file or piping it to another command, error messages generated by the command aren’t included with the expected output of the command.

This becomes a problem when you want to capture STDERR in a file, or pipe it to a command like grep so that you can search for specific things in the errors.

Fortunately, there’s a way to do this:

$ my_command 2>&1 | grep "somestring" 

The magic here is 2>&1. It means, “Redirect stream 2 to stream 1.” In Bourne shell derivatives (like bash, zsh, and ksh), stream 2 is STDERR and stream 1 is STDOUT. Once the streams are merged, you can do whatever you want with the single output stream, like pipe it to grep or redirect it to a file.

One common construct you’ll see in cron jobs is this:

1 0 * * *  run_some_script.sh > /dev/null 2>&1

Cron helpfully sends an email to the user that owns the cron job whenever the command cron is running produces any output. Putting the merged redirect to /dev/null in there sends both STDERR and STDOUT to the bit bucket so that no email is generated. Of course that also means that cron is eating the error messages, so if something goes wrong you won’t be notified in the traditional way.

The future of syndication

What’s the future of RSS, Atom, and other syndication formats? I’m still attached to my RSS reader, but it sounds like a lot of people are giving up.

For example, here’s RSS reader author Dare Obasanjo on RSS readers that work like mail clients:

The problem is that the RSS readers I use regularly, Google Reader and RSS Bandit, take their inspiration from email clients which is the wrong model for consuming casual content like blogs. Whenever I fire up an email application like Outlook or Hotmail it presents me with a list of tasks I must complete in the form of messages that need responses, work items, meeting invitations, spam that needs to deleting, notifications related to commercial/financial transactions that I need to be aware of and so on. Reading email is a chore where you are constantly taunted by the BOLD unread messages indicator silently nagging you about the stuff you haven’t done yet.

James Snell says feeds are useful but feed readers are dead.

This seems to be the discussion of the week as far as tech blogs go, so I’ll weigh in. I like my feed reader, and I deal with the overload of unread messages by not worrying about it. Right now I have 1600 unread items in NetNewsWire, and most of them will almost certainly wind up being marked as read without being viewed. The important stuff I don’t want to miss is in specific folders that I check all the time. The other stuff I usually just let accumulate until I mark it as read. I’m OK with that.

What I’m taking away from this discussion is that I need to account for people who aren’t using RSS but still want to keep up with my blog. To that end, I’ve created a Twitter account just for my blog — @rc3dotorg.

Update: I’m using the la petite url plugin for WordPress to generate short URLs for use on Twitter internally rather than using a URL shortener.

Mark Knoller, Twitter’s MVP

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a stamped of big media figures making their way onto Twitter. During the campaign we had folks like Ana Marie Cox and Slate’s John Dickerson. These days, we have everybody.

I wanted to call out the reporter who I think does the best job of anyone using when it comes to using Twitter — Mark Knoller, the White House correspondent for CBS Radio. If you ever wanted to know what life is like for a White House correspondent, or you want to keep up with what the President is up to on a daily basis, Mark Knoller is your guy.

His Tweets are well written, often funny, and almost universally informative. If you’re interested in politics at all, you should start following him immediately. When people protest that they don’t see the value in Twitter, Knoller should be part of the explanation of why they’re wrong.

Automating accountability

In business, people talk a lot about accountability. In essence, it means verifying that people do what they’re supposed to, and addressing it with them directly when they do not. There’s a big problem with accountability, though, and it’s that it’s not easy to hold people accountable. Telling someone that they’re not performing up to snuff is one of the most difficult jobs a manager has, in part because it’s uncomfortable and in part because it has to be done in such a way that it leads people to improve their performance. (Unless, of course, they’re being fired. That’s even worse.)

World of Warcraft blog runs an advice column for guild leaders, and last week’s question was from a guild leader who needs to address a performance problem with a member of his guild. The details are amusing, but what really interested me was the proposed solution — using an addon for the game called Failbot.

Here’s the description:

Add some public humiliation to your raid! FailBot reports in raid chat (or another channel of your choosing) whenever a raid member “fails.” These fails are only things that are preventable by the individual on a consistent basis, so if someone’s name pops up it was irrefutably their fault, which makes it a great way to see who in the raid needs to improve without having to personally call them out.

I’m fascinated by this tool. It makes me wonder how we might develop similar tools for software developers. Clearly automated regression testing suites are part of the answer. I’m also trying release tracking tools like Pivotal Tracker.

I wonder what the similar tools are in other fields.

Our place in the universe

sun_earth_sirius.jpg

I have no idea where this image illustrating the relative size of the Earth compared to other bodies in the universe came from, but it’s amazing.

I admit, I’m a total sucker for this sort of thing.

Every cop is a criminal

Popular JavaScript-blocking Firefox extension NoScript interferes with popular ad blocking extension AdBlock Plus to insure that ads on the NoScript site are displayed. There are also a number of sites that are included on NoScript’s whitelist to insure that NoScript users see NoScript’s ads.

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