Posts

I’ve seen several links today to The Stag Cook Book, published in 1922 with the subtitle “Written for Men by Men.” I’m pretty sure it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever read. The book’s concept is simple – famous people of the time were asked to supply recipes and short essays. It has a recipe for waffles from Warren G. Harding, Houdini’s deviled eggs, and Charlie Chaplin’s steak and kidney pie. Rube Goldberg supplied a funny article about hash. Montague Glass provides a recipe for bouillabaisse that’s a timeless piece of food writing. Frank Ward O’Malley’s article on Rum-Tum-Tiddy captures its period better than an entire season of Mad Men. ...

John Gruber says people who’ve never used a smart phone with a keyboard won’t miss them. Tim Bray differs. I’m not sure where I come down in this debate. I like keyboards – I use one all day, but I’ve only had an iPhone, and I don’t regret not having a physical keyboard. It could be that I just don’t know what I’m missing, but that’s Gruber’s point. There are a lot of people who won’t know what they’re missing. I do know that I love the fact that the iPhone is remarkably thin and small and has a huge screen, and I am sure you’d have to give that up to some extent to have a keyboard. I’m willing to remain ignorant of the physical keyboard advantage. ...

Salon: The Learjet repo man. Just an entertaining article. Dahlia Lithwick: Guantanamo is the least of America’s prison problem. “The United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, houses nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.” Marginal Revolution: Why U.S. health care policy is especially egalitarian. Guaranteed to undermine at least one thing you believe to be true. crontab2english. Stop trying to wrap your brain around cron configuration. McClatchy: Why’d Obama switch on detainee photos? Maliki went ballistic. Make of this what you will. MySQL Performance Blog: A rule of thumb for choosing column order in indexes. Helpful. Ruby Best Practices: Reading Ruby’s Standard Library for Fun and Profit. Solid article on reading code. WoW Insider: Beware of Blood Elves selling mounts. A complex phishing and identity theft scam in World of Warcraft. They used to say that all Web innovations begin on porn sites. I think you can look to World of Warcraft to see tomorrow’s fraud today. Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Introducing Page Speed. Google’s version of YSlow. O’Reilly Radar: TOSBack: EFF’s Much-Needed Terms of Service Tracker. Tracking changes to the terms of service from popular sites. Elder Game: Yes, the MMO Industry Really is That Bad. Cautionary tale on working in the MMO industry. Monica Youn: Why Sonia Sotomayor was talking about race in the first place. Useful context for the “wise Latina” speech. YouTube: R.E.M. 10/10/82 The Pier, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. Old footage someone dug up. For more information on the Village Subway, see this excellent post from Goodnight, Raleigh. High Performance Web Sites: Using Iframes Sparingly. The performance of iframes is really bad. O’Reilly Radar: Google Squared is an Exponential Improvement in Search. Particularly interesting in light of the recent release of Wolfram Alpha.

As I’m sure you already know, I’ve created the rc3dotorg Twitter account so that I can let people on Twitter know when I’ve published something. One unfortunate side effect has been that it has complicated my workflow when I write new posts. Normally I just compose the post in MarsEdit and hit the publish button. I’m sure the process could be greatly simplified, but for two things that complicate the process. The first is that I like to use short URLs that I furnish myself, and the second is that I like to compose the tweets by hand. ...

Tyler Cowen on bloggers: I have never once met a person whose blog I like and then been disappointed. Never. I wonder if the converse is true as well. Would you like a person if you don’t like their blog?

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.

I am a long-time fan of bug tracking applications. One day I’ll post my basic toolkit for setting up a new development team, but suffice it to say, a good bug tracking application is a key part of the picture. Obviously this isn’t revolutionary – most software development teams use a bug tracking tool of some kind or another. Lately, though, I’ve been using Pivotal Tracker, a project planning tool that resides somewhere between Microsoft Project and your favorite bug tracking application. The idea behind it is that it allows you to enter all of the tasks associated with a project, put them in order, chunk them into iterations, and then track your progress toward milestones. ...

Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com unearthed this amazing statistic: In 1980, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Democrats (or at least white Carter voters) – likewise, in 2008, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Obama voters. But whereas, in 1980, just 9 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Carter voters, 21 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Obama voters last year. Thus, Carter went down to a landslide defeat, whereas Obama defeated John McCain by a healthy margin. ...

In a long, wide-ranging dialog with Bill Simmons, Malcolm Gladwell makes the following observation: After my piece ran in The New Yorker, one of the most common responses I got was people saying, well, the reason more people don’t use the press is that it can be beaten with a well-coached team and a good point guard. That is (A) absolutely true and (B) beside the point. The press doesn’t guarantee victory. It simply represents the underdog’s best chance of victory. It raises their odds from zero to maybe 50-50. I think, in fact, that you can argue that a pressing team is always going to have real difficulty against a truly elite team. But so what? Everyone, regardless of how they play, is going to have real difficulty against truly elite teams. It’s not a strategy for being the best. It’s a strategy for being better. I never thought Louisville – or, for that matter, Missouri – had a realistic shot at winning it all in the NCAAs this year. But if neither of those teams pressed, they wouldn’t have been there in the first place. I wonder if there isn’t something particularly American in the preference for “best” over “better” strategies. I might be pushing things here. But both the U.S. health-care system and the U.S. educational system are exclusively “best” strategies: They excel at furthering the opportunities of those at the very top end. But they aren’t nearly as interested in moving people from the middle of the pack to somewhere nearer the front. ...

Security Fix: Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension. This is why nobody trusts Microsoft. Pulling this sort of stunt as an OS vendor is really irresponsible. Scott Rosenberg: Rosen and Sotomayor: Blame it on the blog. After writing a really irresponsible hit piece, Jeffrey Rosen tries to blame his own crappy reporting on the fact that he was writing a blog post. Even though he wasn’t. drupal.org: Apache Solr Search Integration. How to use Solr for site search with Drupal. drupal.org: Zappos.com and Drupal. A case study. Ajaxian: GWT team Wave’s goodbye to annoying question; It’s the API stupid. How Google Wave makes use of Google Web Toolkit.