rc3.org Strong opinions weakly held
The role of the federal government
What’s the role of the federal government? Here’s one answer, courtesy of Matt Yglesias:
One of the main things the federal government does is transfer resources from high-productivity urban areas to low-productivity rural ones.
In principle, I don’t have a huge problem with this. However, I do have a problem with the fact that the people in the more subsidized areas fail to understand that this is how things work, and indeed consider themselves to be exploited by the federal government rather than exploiting it.
Mainly, I just appreciated reading that sentence. I had never really thought of things that way.
How did Egypt drop off the Internet?
BGPmon.net looks at Egypt leaving the Internet. There was some speculation as to whether the government of Egypt had some sort of central kill switch they could use to shut down the Internet, but it appears as though the ISPs are shutting down individually at the request of the government.
Building distributable Web applications
My current project involves building a commercial Java Web application. For years I’ve built Web applications (using Java and a number of other platforms) to deploy on our own servers. Building something that’s suitable for distribution is a horse of a different color. I thought I’d write up my experiences for other people who are taking on similar tasks.
- Distribution format – Usually Java applications are distributed as WAR or EAR files, but many people also package their Java Web applications with a servlet container to run them to make things easier.
- Open source licenses – My application uses a number of open source libraries, and I had to go through and make sure that all of the libraries were distributable without much fuss.
- Configuration – What’s the best way to set up database connections and other configuration parameters?
- Deployment platform – In theory, Java Web applications should work with any servlet container, but the devil is always in the details. Many Java applications seem to be distributed with a servlet container as well. What’s the best approach?
Look for separate posts dealing with each of those issues.
I’m sure other considerations will arise as well, but those are the first few that have cropped up as I’ve started working on this.
Embarking on this process makes it clear why PHP has become the dominant platform for writing distributable Web applications. Regardless of its strengths and weaknesses as a development platform, its deployment story is hard to beat.
There are no real questions when it comes to distribution format. You archive the files and put them up for download. The end user downloads the archive, expands it, and puts the files in the directory where they want the application to appear.
As far as licenses go, many PHP applications have no external dependencies. PHP provides all of the functionality you need for most applications, and PHP developers have never really taken to using libraries to make things easier. Java developers tend to use tons of third party libraries, and Ruby on Rails applications often depend on dozens of Gems. PHP developers use what’s available as part of PHP and that’s it. PEAR is out there, but it isn’t terribly popular. I assume that’s because so many PHP applications are deployed on shared hosting. It’s just not worth the risk to bring in dependencies if you don’t have to.
Configuring a PHP application usually involves editing one heavily commented PHP file. Most people consider that to be inelegant, but it’s hard to argue with the simplicity.
PHP is ubiquitous, so there’s not much to worry about in terms of deployment. You just need Apache with PHP support.
When you look at those factors as compared to Java or Ruby, it’s easy to see why PHP maintains its massive popularity over other development platforms, and why we see explosive growth among applications built using PHP, like Drupal, WordPress, and MediaWiki. For all its drawbacks, PHP has evolved in a world where simple deployment and configuration are both hugely important, and that has given PHP some powerful advantages that other platforms aren’t even trying to compete with.
Keep your eye on the scoreboard
Lately I’ve taken to playing Words With Friends, a Scrabble game for the iPhone. One of the first things I learned from playing against good players is that Scrabble is not about showing off your good vocabulary, it’s about turning the tiles you draw into points. A two letter word that nets you 31 points because you dropped a Q onto a triple letter score to make the used-only-in-Scrabble word “QI” is better than busting out a 6 letter word nobody’s ever heard of that nets 18 points.
I thought about that when I read Rands’ interview with Marco Arment about Instapaper, and being a one-man software development shop. Here’s what Arment says about making it as a sole proprietor:
The biggest design decision I’ve made is more of a continuous philosophy: do as few extremely time-consuming features as possible. As a result, Instapaper is a collection of a bunch of very easy things and only a handful of semi-hard things.
This philosophy sounds simple, but it isn’t: geeks like us are always tempted to implement very complex, never-ending features because they’re academically or algorithmically interesting, or because they can add massive value if done well, such as speech or handwriting recognition, recommendation engines, or natural-language processing.
Both are nice reminders that efficiency is one of the keys to success.
Be sure to read the explanation of how the Instapaper bookmarklet works, as well. It’s a marvel.
RIP, Charlie Louvin
Emmylou Harris on the Louvin Brothers:
I’d always loved the Everly Brothers, but there was something scary and washed in the blood about the sound of the Louvin Brothers.
From the New York Times obituary for Charlie Louvin. I strongly recommend Louvin’s self-titled album released in 2007. His tribute to his brother Ira, who died in 1965, is particularly moving.
Where we are today
Ezra Klein sums up the current state of the union as briefly and accurately as you could hope for:
When they were asked about shifting their focus to the future when the economy was so bad in the present, they explained that they got pretty much everything they thought they could get — and, in fact, more than they thought they could get — in the tax-cut deal, and it was time to let that work. Left unsaid is that they can’t get anything more out of a Republican House, and so there’s little point in begging.
In the meantime we’re treated to Republicans repeating the words “failed stimulus” over and over as if they cannot be used separately, in spite of the fact that state governments all over the country are facing massive deficits in the absence of the federal stimulus dollars that saw them through the worst of the crisis.
Be extremely careful with free WordPress themes
I recently built a business Web site for a friend using WordPress and was shocked at how easy it was to create something really good, really quickly. I used a commercial theme and a few popular plugins and wound up with something really nice that looked professional and didn’t look at all like a blog. I didn’t consider using free themes at all, and it looks like that was the right idea.
Siobhan Ambrose took a survey of some sites are highly ranked in searches for free WordPress themes and found that of the top 10 sites, the only one that you could trust was the themes pages on the official WordPress site. The piece is very well reported and also provides a ton of useful information on how to ferret out malicious code in WordPress themes and plugins. Her article is titled, appropriately enough, Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else.
The 25th most loathesome American
My friend David Brooks, now assigned special “most hated” status for tricking me into linking to his New Yorker article by writing one interesting paragraph, makes an appearance at #25 on the Buffalo Beast’s list of The 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2010:
The Bernie Madoff of American letters, every tortured construct and inaccurate assumption ever set to print by this annoyingly self-described “Bourgeoisie Bohemian” is a fraudulent attempt to justify why his house is more expensive than yours. Brooks couldn’t even wait for the bodies to cool after the Haiti earthquake before writing about how useless it is to send money because those voodoo-lovin’ savages simply can’t be helped.
I look forward to this list every year.
Where passion comes from
Lane Wallace, who’s writing a book on passion, finds that it starts with a vision:
And the origins of passion, I’ve concluded, are directly linked to this idea of ‘vision.’ For passion to take hold, we first have to have a vision of an alternate future that ignites a fire within us: a vision of a wrong righted, a community developed, a great new product made and sold, a goal achieved, or just a new relationship full of happiness and bliss. Not every vision leads to a passionate pursuit of it, of course. But in all cases where people do pursue something with passion, it’s because there was a vision, first, that sparked an unquenchable flame and desire to make that vision real.
It’s easy for me to be cynical when people start talking about vision, but I’ve never seen a team (or a person) succeed at anything difficult without one. The responsible business person in me would add that once you have a vision and you’ve decided to work toward it, you need to set measurable long term and short term goals to make progress toward that vision.
Google acknowledges content farms are a problem
Google has announced they’re going to more aggressively take on content farmers:
As ‘pure webspam’ has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to ‘content farms,’ which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.
It’s good to be reminded that content farming is a reaction to search engines getting better at filtering out pure spam.
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