Posts

Today I took a survey on Object Oriented Concepts. Two computer science researchers are trying to determine how divorced the theory they teach is from the day to day practices of professional programmers. Here’s the introduction: You have done some programming for fun, or you are a professional that has been on one of those $2000 a day professional development courses, or read the latest book, or subscribed to the current in-RSS feed, so you know how you’re supposed to write good code. But do you actually write code the way you’ve been told is The Way, or do you ignore the theory and follow the tried and true practices learned the hard way in the School of Hard Knocks, the way that really works? ...

Glenn Greenwald has written the definitive post on the AIG bonuses. I’d summarize but I don’t want to spoil it.

I, like everyone else on the Internet (it seems) watched Jon Stewart pummel Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last night. At the end, Jon said, roughly, I hope that was as uncomfortable for you as it was for me. It was. But an aversion to that kind of discomfort is a disease that prevents big problems from being solved. I had in mind a different post about the show, explaining that Jon Stewart’s criticism of how Jim Cramer and CNBC cover Wall Street describe the overall failure of journalism across the board, but Glenn Greenwald wrote that post for me. ...

Kurt Cagle: Is Dreamweaver being beaten by Drupal? The real question being asked is whether the features associated with dynamic database-driven Web sites are more compelling than the pinpoint control and top notch user experience of Dreamweaver. Pathfinder Development: Keeping Up With The Joneses: Keeping Rails and its extensions up to date. Managing dependencies is generally one of the most unpleasant aspects of any software development project. Eric Burke: Ban Software Patents. Yet another example of ludicrous patents. Michael Ruhlman: Michael Symon’s Pickled Chillis. Really cool recipe. Serial Consign: Desktop Deja Vu. The history of the default desktop picture that shipped with Windows XP. useum: Measuring Social Participation in a Science Museum. Useful for more than just museums. Wired: The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist. Looks fascinating but I’m not reading it ’til my Wired comes in the mail. High Performance Web Sites: Performance Impact of CSS Selectors. Hard numbers on the varying performance of different CSS selectors. Also a reminder that there’s a lot more we could be measuring that we don’t. oobject: formula 1 user interfaces. Incredibly fascinating comparison of the current state of steering wheels in Formula 1 cars. PC Pro Blog: I’m sorry but Dreamweaver is dying. Another argument that high end page-based authoring tools are giving way to Drupal.

Last week I posted about the dangers of giving advice. I’ll say flat out that I’m not a fan of advice, even though people ask for it all the time. As an alternative, I would recommend education. The other day a client who’s building an application in Rails sort of apologized for using Subversion for version control and said they were looking at migrating to Git. Other Rails developers had apparently asked why they weren’t using Git, and he seemed a bit abashed by it. I could have advised him to migrate to Git, or that he should stick with Subversion, but instead I explained how Git differs from Subversion, and what people like about it. Given a better understanding of how they differ, he was able to make his own decision. (He stuck with Subversion.) In the end, it was consideration of his own circumstances that led to what was probably a good decision. Some people working on the project use Windows, and aren’t interested in the headaches of using Git on that platform. ...

The editor of Sri Lanka’s Sunday Leader newspaper was murdered on January 11. A few days before his murder, he wrote an editorial to be published upon his death: No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last. ...

Nelson Minar has a short post explaining Google’s new interest-based ads and the privacy controls available to users associated with them. Here’s the crux: I’m usually quick to criticize Google on privacy issues. But not this time. Because along with this juicy new ad product, they’re giving users unprecedented control and visibility into the ads they are shown. We can opt out of tracking entirely. Or we can set our ad preferences, viewing and altering Google’s profile of ourselves. And Google has a detailed and readable page describing how their ad products works with personal user data. All of this privacy protection looks real, a user-focussed product, not just some sham to satisify lawyers. ...

There was a presentation at ETech today on a topic that interests me – how to reinvent credit ratings given that the existing system failed catastrophically. The job of ratings firms like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s is to rate the ability of businesses to repay their debts. Many firms that have collapsed retained AAA ratings right up to their moment of failure. There have been some proposals that the federal government take over the traditional role of the ratings agencies, but I’ve been persuaded that’s not the right answer. Could an open data effort supplant the private ratings firms? It seems possible, given that the private agencies do not insure their predictions in any way. There was no financial penalty for the ratings agencies for completely missing the boat on AIG’s horribly bad bets on the real estate market. ...

This post is for all of my non-programmer readers who have to deal with programmers on a day to day basis. It’s a description of how things that may seem simple really aren’t. Maybe I’ll write another post later about how things that seem complicated can be very simple to fix. I’m working on a Web page that is supposed to display some events from a Google calendar. When I started, it grabbed the JSON feed from the calendar and displayed the first two events in it. Generally speaking, these are the next two upcoming events on the calendar. The feed contains a lot more events, though – some from the past and a lot from the future. ...

I really want to buy the new Neko Case album, released last week, but I have a suspicion that Amazon.com is going to make it the deal of the day sometime soon. What would an economist tell me? On one hand, it’s only $7.99, and it would probably be on sale for $1.99 (or $3.99, the daily deal price for most new releases). On the other hand, if I buy it for full price and they put it on sale a few days later, I’ll feel a tinge of regret. On one hand I want it now, on the other, I have the whole rest of my life to listen to it either way. ...