Posts

John Gruber today posted a lengthy review of Safari 4. If you’re keeping score at home, I: Agree with his request to bring back the Safari 3 progress indicator. I like the way the new tabbed interface looks, but I agree with nearly all of his complaints about the difficulties they present for users. His complaints about the tab colors are something I’d never have noticed, but I agree should be rectified. I love the new Top Sites feature, and I didn’t even know you could edit the list or that it checks for updates to those sites automatically. All things considered, I’m pretty sure Apple should hire Gruber as QA lead for Safari. If nothing else, I hope the QA folks at Apple are reading his blog and filing bug reports. ...

Today’s number one selling track in Amazon’s MP3 store is “Right Round” by Flo Rida. Why is this obscure track today’s best seller? It was played over the opening credits of CSI: Miami last night. I know because I used Shazam for the iPhone to figure it out. There are a number of web sites that identify the songs played on TV shows as well. I think there’s a lesson in this for the music business. Update: Rogers Cadenhead’s post on Life on Mars has some interesting music-related notes as well. ...

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.

Joel Lovell writes about the trouble with giving investment advice (professionally): I mention this less as a confession of my own incompetence than as an example of how difficult it is to say anything with genuine authority these days, at least when it comes to financial advice. Should you jump into the market now and buy low? Should you keep everything in cash for the next year or two or five? Should you invest in China or natural gas or gold? Beats me. I’ve been writing this column for about a year and a half, so I’ve done my research, talked to a bunch of investment analysts and made an effort to understand what’s going on now and where we might be headed. But really, I can’t begin to claim to know. And when I think back on the advice I’ve given and realize that my readers would have been far better off if each month I’d said, “You know what, let’s stick with Plan A and just stuff our money into a satchel and bury it beneath the swing set” – well, it makes me feel like a bit of a fraud. ...

People who are accustomed to listened to music in MP3 format prefer it to other, higher quality formats. This mirrors the phonograph affectation that many audiophiles have: I remember wondering what audiophiles were up to, buying extremely expensive home audio systems to play old vinyl records. They put turntables in sand-filled enclosures with elaborate cabling schemes. I wondered what they heard in that music that I didn’t. Someone explained to me that audiophiles liked the sound artifacts of vinyl records – the crackles of that format. It was familiar and comfortable to them, and maybe those affects became a fetish. Is it now becoming the same with iPod lovers? ...

Rick DeNatale posted a link to a video of Ward Cunningham explaining the debt metaphor. The whole video is essential watching, but I wanted to quote this little explanation of refactoring that works as well as any I’ve seen: It was important to me that we accumulate the learnings we did about the application over time by modifying the program to look as if we had known what we were doing all along and to look as if it had been easy to do in Smalltalk. ...

A couple of weeks ago, I set a magnetic money clip on top of my MacBook, killing the hard drive pretty much instantly. It made a funny grinding noise, the beach ball spun, and that was it. The hard drive never had a chance. Fortunately, I have been backing up my Mac regularly with Time Machine, and I had a backup that was only a week or so old. I do nearly all of my work in version control or in the browser, so the only thing I stood to lose was a few tracks I had purchased from the Amazon.com MP3 store. ...

I liked this from Glenn Greenwald: Adversarial challenges to one’s statements are a vital check on errors and deceit. Clashes of ideas are an irreplaceable instrument for truth-finding. Shielding oneself from such challenges (or just ignoring them) is not only irresponsible and cowardly, but ensures that one can opine without accountability. That’s why bloggers who have an active, smart and critical comment section with which they interact have a major advantage over journalists who hide from critical scrutiny. In all of this, it’s reasonable to exercise some discretion – not all criticisms and/or critics merit attention – but those who avoid any real challenges to their statements (whether politicians, journalists, or pundits) ought to be stigmatized for doing so, and it ought to be viewed as a powerful indictment against their credibility (Ambinder’s post will prompt me to resume efforts to invite onto Salon Radio those who are criticized here and to make note of those who refuse). ...

Joe Gregorio prompted me to take a second look at O’Reilly’s “state of the market” report for books on programming languages. Of particular interest to me is what they report on Ruby: We reported last year that Ruby had grown nicely, had passed Perl and Python, and was knocking on the door for Visual Basic’s spot. However, Ruby had the largest decrease in unit sales in 2008. Let’s go to the numbers, 95,731 Ruby books were sold in 2007, and 61,171 Ruby books were sold in 2008. That’s a big drop. In terms of absolute size, in 2007, the Ruby book market was about 40% of the size of the Java and C# markets. In 2008, Ruby’s market was about 28% of the size of the Java market, and 22% of the size of the C# market. (Python has almost caught up with Ruby.) ...

Andrew Leonard on today’s budget announcement: The size, goals, and funding strategies for the new budget ensure a political battle of monstrous proportions. And in retrospect, it clarifies the Obama administration’s strategy on the stimulus package. Suppose the administration had pushed for a much bigger stimulus package, along the lines of what some progressives were arguing for. Many progressives actively wanted to provoke a Republican filibuster, as a show of strength and an opportunity to shame the GOP publicly as obstructionists. But why provoke that kind of fight in your first weeks of office, if what you’ve got in your back pocket is a budget proposal bigger, more expensive, and more fundamentally transformative of the United States’ economy than anything proposed by a Democrat or Republican since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society? ...