Carl Malamud is actively campaigning to be appointed to head the Government Printing Office, and has described exactly what he intends to accomplish if appointed to that position. Not only does Malamud’s plan sound great, but he’s also got the track record that shows he can be very effective in this position. Seems like a no brainer to me.
Jamis Buck: Net::SSH, Capistrano, and Saying Goodbye. It’ll be interesting to see how Capistrano fares without its author and long time maintainer. This will also be a test of the Github model. Anyone can create their own Capistrano fork and go forward, will consensus arise around one particular fork? Paul Krugman: What should government do? A Jindal meditation. Really excellent academic definition of public goods. Harold McGee: Do You Need All That Water to Boil Pasta? McGee takes on one of the great sacred cows of the kitchen. Ars Technica: Hands on: Safari 4 beta fast, mixes polish, rough UI edges. Nice review of the new Safari beta. Datawocky: Reboot: How to Reinvent a Technology Startup. The Washington Monthly: What about the filibusters? Turns out Senate procedure doesn’t require Senators to make interminable speeches to maintain a filibuster.
Roger Ebert takes a stand against snark: Snarking is cultural vandalism. I have arrived at this conclusion belatedly. I have been guilty of snarking, and of enjoying snarks. In the matter of snarking, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But it has grown entirely out of hand. It is time to put away childish things. I must restore my balance, view the world in a fair way, hope to inspire more appreciation than ridicule. No doubt there will always be a role for snarking, given the proper target and an appropriate venue, and I reserve the right to snark when it is deserved, as in certain movie reviews. But in general I must become more well-behaved. ...
Actual financier Paul Kedrosky posts at the Daily Beast, examining the argument that the stock market hates Obama’s economic policy: But all of this is beside the point: The Barnes/Hannity market model isn’t how stock markets work anyway. Markets are, in the short run, a random walk, right up there with Brownian motion of molecules in a coffee cup. To the extent they even do anything semi-predictably, however, they rise on the rumor, and fall on the news. In other words, far from being surprised that two major and widely anticipated Obama announcements saw market declines, a more intelligent take is that things played out pretty much as expected. Saying otherwise is plain dumb, or maybe simply being grotesque and cynical. ...
Good news: the producers of Slumdog Millionaire are furnishing the child stars of the movie with new homes and transportation to school every day. That’s great news after last month’s story about the brutal conditions that they faced.
One line I see repeated a lot lately by Obama detractors is that he’s causing the stock market to tank by talking about economic catastrophe and talking about the tough times ahead. These people apparently miss the Bush days when our President’s outward stance was that he was oblivious to the real world we all live in, steadily projecting optimism in such a way that made him look detached and clueless. ...
David Gammel asked the following in the comments on my previous post on technical debt: Do you think the technical debt has to be paid off with a balloon payment? It seems to me like you can’t really pay off this kind of debt on a 30-year fixed interest model, it all comes due at some point in the future and must be paid in full, at once, in order to move beyond it. ...
Tyler Cowen on the economics of ratings systems: Evaluation systems with fewer and grosser distinctions are often more credible because they are easier to monitor. On the topic of Spin magazine going from rating records on a scale of 1 to 5 to a scale of 1 to 10.
The two child stars of Slumdog Millionaire who hail from the slums of Mumbai will be in attendance at the Oscars.
I was reading Douglas Crockford’s excellent JavaScript: The Good Parts and came across a great sentence that you wouldn’t find in many technical books: If you want to learn more about the bad parts and how to use them badly, consult any other JavaScript book. That’s the sort of thing that cuts through the tedium of reading a book about programming.