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Posts Tagged ‘religion’

Links from June 3rd

In Commentary on 3 June 2009 tagged Apple, business, cars, css, Google, iPhone, links, politics, religion, The Media, Web development, wine with 5 comments

• Edmunds.com: “Confessions of a Car Salesman” Updated for 2009. The original series was a classic on the shady business practices of car dealerships. Turns out the same basic practices are still being applied.
• Bloomberg: Ballmer Says Tax Would Move Microsoft Jobs Offshore. Microsoft exec threatens to move more jobs offshore if the government closes some unrelated tax loopholes that the company takes advantage of.
• Dan Froomkin: Celebrity Journalism at the White House. A strong critique of NBC’s silly news special this week on the Obama White House.
• slacktivist: Killing in the name of. An important blog post on the history of the anti-abortion movement.
• Carrer Blog: 1 line CSS Grid Framework. Everything good and bad about CSS in a single line.
• Daring Fireball: Why Palm’s WebOS ‘Media Sync’ iTunes Integration Can’t Be Legit. Don’t miss the followup on the legality of the Palm Pre impersonating an iPod.
• Hivelogic: Deploying ExpressionEngine from GitHub with Capistrano. This approach should work for any PHP app.
• Andrew Leonard: GM: Into bankruptcy, out of the Dow. Companies that file for bankruptcy are automatically delisted.
• Joe Gregorio: Wave Protocol Thoughts. On the plumbing.
• Trader Joe’s Wine Compendium. A blog that reviews only wines sold at Trader Joe’s.
• The Atlantic: Do CEOs Matter? What do chief executives add? One thing’s for sure, a bad CEO can certainly be a disaster for a company.

Rumsfeld’s special messages to President Bush

In Commentary on 17 May 2009 tagged religion, war with no comments

GQ has obtained one of the most astounding things I’ve seen — a series of covers from daily Pentagon intelligence reports prepared for the President during the Bush administration. Each includes a photo with some military theme and a selected Bible verse. Here’s one example:

It’s impossible to escape the conclusion that the Pentagon (under Donald Rumsfeld’s guidance) was angling to play into President Bush’s well-documented belief that he was on a mission from God to take on evildoers. No matter how much we learn about the Bush administration, we always find out it was worse than it appeared.

Here’s the accompanying article.

Links from March 1st

In Commentary on 3 March 2009 tagged books, drupal, economics, hardware, links, music, religion with no comments

• Dries Buytaert: Drupal sites. A big list of Drupal sites.
• Hivelogic: Review: The NewerTech Voyager Q. Docking station that lets you use internal hard drives as external hard drives. Seems like a great solution for certain backup strategies.
• Music Machinery: In search of the click track. Programmatically determining which drummers use click tracks and which don’t. Really, really interesting.
• David Plotz: What I learned from reading the entire Biblee. I was obsessed with his Blogging the Bible series, and I’m glad to see it’s now a book.
• TheMoneyIllusion: An open letter to Mr. Krugman. A really interesting alternative to the stimulus plan, suggesting novel monetary policy rather than fiscal policy. I have no idea whether this would work, but it’s an interesting idea.

Links from January 29th

In Commentary on 30 January 2009 tagged drupal, evolution, food, games, links, religion, Ruby on Rails, science with no comments

These links are for the past three days.

• fudgestudios’s bort at master – Skeleton Ruby on Rails project with a common set of plugins already baked in. I need to create a version of this for myself.
• Michael Ruhlman: Anti-Bacterial America. An inspired rant about Americans becoming germophobes and the implications of that transition.
• Aten Design Group: On Becoming a Drupal Development Shop. I’m fascinated by a company tying itself so closely to one tool.
• Jason Kottke: More on Candy Land. Pointers to an interesting discussion on the value of Candy Land as a game.
• The Guardian: Attenborough reveals creationist hate mail for not crediting God.
• rentzsch’s clicktoflash at master. New home of the Safari plugin that blocks Flash movies.
• Jack: Rack for JavaScript. Because it’s there.
• Al Arabiya: Obama tells Al Arabiya peace talks should resume. The first big interview of the Obama presidency goes to the Arab media.
• Marc Lynch: Obama to Arabs: “what you’ll see is someone who is listening”. Analysis of Obama’s interview with Al Arabiya.
• The CMS Myth.
• mezzoblue: Sprite Optimization. A very cool technique that I just learned about.
• FiveThirtyEight.com: Just Five Red States Left? This is a map we can believe in.
• Media Matters: O’Reilly don’t know much about (WWII) history. Jessica Alba knows more geography than Bill O’Reilly. Not surprising.
• Dr. Saturday: Hug your friendly neighborhood recruiting rankings. In light of the recent articles on talking about how hard it is to project the performance of professional football players based on college performance, it’s interesting that the performance of college teams can be predicted fairly accurately by the quality of their recruiting classes.
• How to Choose Chart Types. Very useful resource for determining which kind of chart to use to visualize data.

Links for March 24

In Commentary on 24 March 2008 tagged links, politics, religion, sex, statistics, war with 1 comment

• Emily Yoffe: Forget Juno. Out-of-wedlock births are a national catastrophe. Seeming fact-based defense of marriage. I don’t have strong opinions on this either way, but it certainly seems like marriage is to be encouraged for people who would be parents. The number that stands out to me is that only 4% of mothers who are college graduates are unwed.
• 10 Zen Monkeys: Can America Handle a Little Truth? Great essay on the Jeremiah Wright controversy.
• FP Passport: McCain’s wars. John McCain’s transformation into a neocon on foreign policy issues.
• New York Times review of Nicholson Baker’s pacifist argument against World War II, Human Smoke.

Against TDD orthodoxy

In Commentary on 3 March 2008 tagged religion, software development with 3 comments

Google developer Cedric Beaust argues that treating orthodox Test Driven Development as some kind of panacea is a mistake, a position that I find it difficult to argue with. In fact, I find myself rejecting nearly all dogmatic software development philosophies. I like to read about them, but in the end I just steal the parts that work for me and do what seems to make the most sense.

My dirty secret: I almost never write a test, watch it fail, and then fill in the code necessary to make the test pass. That seems gratuitous to me.