Mohammad Sephery-Rad, minister of Iran’s High Informatics Council, on replacing Windows with Linux for reasons of security: All the software in Iran is copied. There is no copyright law, so everybody uses Microsoft software freely but we cannot continue like this much longer. Apparently Iran is also seeking admission to the WTO, which would require them to respect international copyright laws.
The New York Times has a list of food myths, solicited from a variety of experts. The main takeaway is that all you really need to pay attention to when it comes to diet is Michael Pollan’s 2007 article on nutrition, in which he provides a simple suggestion: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Everything else seems to be subject to change based on the latest of the research and the fashions and hysteria of the day. ...
There are a whole ton of links in the backlog today. xhtmlrenderer: The Flying Saucer Project. A tool to render HTML in PDF format (supports CSS). Antonio Cangiano: Ruby’s Biggest Challenge for 2009. A plea for Ruby developers to move to Ruby 1.9.1. Getting all of the libraries and Rails plugins updated is going to be a big job. Ajazxian: Richard Stallman: Free the Javascript. People make full of rms, but he is an extremist for a good cause. His radical stance in many ways frames a debate that is worth having. TV Guide: Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore Answers Our Burning Questionsm. I totally get the unhappiness with all of the deus ex machina aspects of the series finale, but I enjoyed it anyway. Thoughtbot: Testing Rake’s Integration. How to write integration tests for Rake tasks. Doug Bowman: Goodbye Google. Remarks on leaving Google. Nice reading for all of us who were never offered a job by Google. The Big Picture: Scenes from 30,000 meters above. High altitude photographs taken by a weather balloon launched by Spanish students. The Best Pictures from the BOREALIS Archives. Another student weather balloon project. Karl Martino: Here’s to dreaming big and doing it. More links relating to the weather balloon project. What they make: The highest paid chief executives in digital media. I’m surprised the CEO of Tivo makes more than the CEO of Netflix. WoW Insider: Authenticator app coming to iPhones, iPods, and other mobile devices. Blizzard is expanding the authentication options that prevent World of Warcraft account theft. FiveThirtyEight: Why AIG Paid the “Bonuses”. Most interesting remarks I’ve read on this topic. istartedsomething: Expression Web SuperPreview makes cross-browser testing like moist delicious cake. Seems like a major advance in cross-browser testing. Laughing Meme: Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors. Insightful remarks on the Facebook redesign. New York Times: Hadoop, Analytical Software, Finds Uses Beyond Search. I still don’t understand MapReduce as well as I should. Antonio Cangiano: Introducing Redis: a fast key-value database. Still looking for the right project to use this technology for. The Annotated Watchmen. For after I finish the graphic novel.
This is not developer-friendly: response.should be_success Unless you have fully internalized RSpec, it is nigh impossible to know where the space, underscore, and period go. The goal is to come up with code that looks like sentences but the end result is to come up with something a non-developer can read but that developers shouldn’t have to write.
Frank Rich writes that an inability to manage populist anger could undermine everything Barack Obama hopes to accomplish. I agree. But in the process, he writes some stupid stuff that’s likely to encourage more populist anger. To wit: Bob Schieffer of CBS asked Summers the simple question that has haunted the American public since the bailouts began last fall: “Do you know, Dr. Summers, what the banks have done with all of this money that has been funneled to them through these bailouts?” What followed was a monologue of evasion that, translated into English, amounted to: Not really, but you little folk needn’t worry about it. ...
Battlestar Galactica had its high points, but does it really deserve to even be mentioned in the same sentence as The Wire? The Guardian seems to think so, but we’ll assume they’re just trolling.
I wanted to post a few thoughts on last night’s Battlestar Galactica series. I watched the entire series, from the miniseries/pilot to the big finish last night, and found the quality to be somewhat uneven. Its high points were very high, but it had plenty of low points as well. The biggest spoiler I saw going into the finale was series creator Ron Moore saying in the special about the show’s production that the show was about the characters, not about the plot. I think that showed from beginning to end – the best parts of the show were very much character-driven rather than plot driven. ...
Today the Federal Reserve announced it’s buying up $1.2 trillion in bonds as part of a program of quantitative easing. It’s a path to lowering interest rates once you’re in Paul Krugman’s famous liquidity trap. A few weeks ago self-described right wing economist Scott Sumner suggested that quantitative easing be tried, and Tyler Cowen described his plan as the best he’d seen by far. I know there’s been a surge of optimism lately, and an attendant degree of skepticism that we’re really even in a major crisis. This move should remind everyone that the Federal Reserve and Obama administration are still very, very worried about the state of the economy. ...
Today’s New York Times has an op-ed written by Toby Barlow on people moving to Detroit. Yesterday I linked to a photo essay that illustrates Detroit’s decline. The op-ed talks about Detroit’s possible rise. Creative people who don’t want to have to worry about money have always flocked to places that are under severe economic distress. Go read Ed Ward’s old blog BerlinBites for stories of the artistic community that arose in Berlin after Germany’s reunification. People also flocked to Buenos Aires when Argentina’s economy collapsed in 1999. ...
Mark Danner: US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites. There can no longer be any debate on whether the US tortured detainees. We did. The evidence is undeniable. It’s time to investigate the crimes and start charging people. Time: Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline. Just about the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. James Dumay: Mac OS X Tip: Preventing accidently launching FrontRow when cycling windows. Simple solution to an incredibly annoying problem with OS X.. Ms. Glaze: Make It Nice or Make it Twice. I really want to write a whole blog post on this, but I’m linking to it in case I don’t. Michael Ruhlman: Duck Confit: It’s What’s For Lunch. The key piece of information here is that you can make confit just as well with olive oil as you can with duck fat. David Pogue: Unify the Phone Numbers and All Else Follows. Google Voice sounds great, but I hesitate to use Google products for everything.