Posts

Delicious creator Joshua Schachter has a good post on the downside of URL shorteners. I think his prescription for addressing them as a problem are right: One important conclusion is that services providing transit (or at least require a shortening service) should at least log all redirects, in case the shortening services disappear. If the data is as important as everyone seems to think, they should own it. And websites that generate very long URLs, such as map sites, could provide their own shortening services. Or, better yet, take steps to keep the URLs from growing monstrous in the first place. ...

Want to know whether you’re infected by the dread Conficker worm? Use this handy eye chart. (Simple and 100% effective, no kidding.)

Sure, everybody is going to link to this article, but I’m not going to let that stop me. Google has revealed the server hardware it uses, as part of a larger effort to push for more energy efficient data centers. The details of how servers work are interesting, but what’s just as interesting to me is the degree to which the range of possibilities widens as things scale up. When you are rolling out servers by the thousand, it makes sense to design them yourself. I laughed at Google when I read about the study they did to select the right shade of blue, but their hardware efforts show what can be gained from taking a highly data driven approach. This article is a must-read. ...

FiveThirtyEight.com has a simple explanation of why GM is dying: GM was willing to cut its employees some very attractive deals in the 1950s through the 1980s – provided that they took them in the form of retirement benefits rather than salary, which wouldn’t hit GM’s books until much later and which until 1992 weren’t even required to be carried on its balance sheets all, making its financial statements (superficially) more appealing to its shareholders. That health care costs have risen so substantially in the United States have made a bad matter worse. ...

Eric Ries posts about continuous deployment at O’Reilly Radar. This is the second post on this approach I’ve seen lately, and I find it to be something interesting to think about, if not to be adopted. Point five in his five step plan for migrating to continuous deployment is root cause analysis, or “the five whys”. He has a whole post just on that topic that’s definitely worth reading. The case for using root cause analysis is self-evident, the rest of the continuous deployment process is more interesting to discuss. ...

Earth Hour was totally worth it just so this post at The Big Picture could be compiled.

For their one year anniversary, Hulu sent special T-shirts to the first 100 people who registered for the site. Very cool.

Jason Santa Maria: Reflections on Layer Tennis. Really, really great post on participating in Layer Tennis. I loved this. SF Gate: Food, service uneven at Absinthe. A review of Top Chef participant Jamie “Top Scallop” Lauren’s San Francisco restaurant by Michael Bauer. Brutal. John Resig: Determining Browser Market Share. Deep thoughts on measuring browser market share. New York Times: Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries. Uncovered by researchers at the University of Toronto. Also read this followup from James Fallows. Goodnight, Raleigh: Memorializing a Magnificent Oak and “The Great Pacificator”. A little local knowledge about Raleigh. The Economist: Germany’s racy auto banks. Tim Bray: On Rack. A nice, short introduction to Rack, the glue that provides an interface from Ruby applications to Web servers. MySQL Performance Blog: PROCEDURE ANALYSE. Very useful for optimizing your MySQL schema. Vanessa Fox: Transforming the Relationship Between Citizens and Government: Making Content Findable Online. Advice on making data more searchable, pertinent to anyone publishing online. Last.fm: Last.fm Radio Announcement. Users not in the US, UK, or Germany have to pay up to listen. Music licensing sucks. LastFM Firefox Extension. Scrobbles Pandora tracks to Last.fm, for people like me who feel weird anytime they listen to a song and the data isn’t transmitted to Last.fm. intranation: Development virtual machines on OS X using VMWare and Ubuntu. A clever alternative to MacPorts or Fink. Trustico: Buy GeoTrust, VeriSign SSL Certificates At Cheaper Prices - Strategic Partner United States. I hate paying for certificates. These guys are cheap.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been looking at PHP frameworks for a project. I’ve dug into the PHP MVC world any number of times, and have even used a couple of these frameworks before, but I’ve never been really satisfied with any of them. I’d make a table comparing them, or something, but that’s not really how I work. Generally, the way I evaluate software is that I just pick something and start using it until I run into a problem that I am not willing to accept or work around, then I move on to something else. Sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes a single project, and sometimes it takes years, but the methodology never changes. ...

I really wish I’d gotten to attend Merlin Mann and John Gruber’s SXSW talk on blogging for a living. Mann posits that the successful formula is: obsession plus voice. It reminds me of what I usually tell people who are wondering what kind of career they pursue, which is: do the thing that you can’t not do. There’s a lot of misguided career advice out there that suggests doing what you “love”. But there are a lot of people who love to do something but would no longer love it if they were forced to do it for 2,000 hours a year. Loving to cook and wanting to stand in a restaurant kitchen for 11 hours a day are two different things. ...