Posts

Michael Parekh notices that Harman and Mercedes are working on building an upgradeable navigation system for cars. As the article points out, car navigation systems are ridiculously expensive and obsolete the day the cars leave the factory: From the initial details, it’s not clear if Harman has advanced the state of the art or offered automakers a short-term BandAid fix while they figure out why their navigation devices cost two to 10 times as much as portable navigation devices (PNDs). Traditional automaker navigation (as on the Mercedes-Benz C-Class, photo above) costs $1,500 to $2,000. ...

I’m looking for people to give me some ammunition to win an argument with myself. I have a database table that stores denormalized data for presentation in reports. One of the columns will hold some messages that are taken from three different tables. The three tables are parents, children, and child_messages, which contains custom messages associated with the keys stored in children. To include the children in a report that lists a number of parents, you have to do all sorts of stupid tricks. Denormalization is easier, especially because on this report there are a number of similar scenarios that all involve different tables, making things even more complex than I’ve already described. (I’m planning a blog post to describe this denormalization approach for later.) ...

A few links from the past few days. Martin Fowler: Flaccid Scrum. An argument that the Scrum process, which is focused on project management, is doomed to failure without good technical process operating in the background. Fraser Speirs: On the Flickr support in iPhoto ‘09. Musings from a third party developer whose product is being subsumed into the platform. Bruce Schneier: The Exclusionary Rule and Security. A perspective on the recent Supreme Court ruling that loosened the restraints on police handling of evidence. Schneier argues that loosening the rules creates poor incentives for the police. Last.fm: Closing in on clean metadata: artist and track spelling auto-correction is here. Very cool. Dom Sagolla: How Twitter Was Born. Dealbreaker: No More Than The President Of The United States. A look at the President’s real compensation. Food & Think: Wing Shortage Looms On Eve of Big Game. 5% of the chicken wings consumed each year are eaten on Super Bowl Sunday. Vitalsecurity.org: Direct Revenue: A Twisting History. An informative followup on this widely linked interview with a reformed adware author. Marginal Revolution: What is the best food produced en masse? An interesting answer to an interesting question about food. Felix Salmon: Where’s Markopolos’s Blog? An argument that had Harry Markopolos, the guy who tried repeatedly to inform the SEC of the Madoff ponzi scheme, just published his findings on a blog, he would have seen results. Wikileaks would have worked too. Sam Ruby: Rails 2.3.0 RC1. I don’t know how developers keep up with all the changes in Rails, I feel particularly bad for authors publishing Rails books. git ready: converting from svn Michael Widenius: Time to move on. MySQL creator leaves Sun. Paul Buchheit: Communicating with code. An argument for skipping design and requirements and just iterating in code.

TPM DC’s Matt Cooper says that Tom Daschle will be confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services: First, he apologized which is a necessary but not sufficent precondition to surviving these things. Second, Max Baucus, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee which has jurisdiction over Daschle’s nomination, came out for him despite a history of tension between the two. Third, Obama stood by Daschle–a sentiment echoed by Robert Gibbs at his press conference although Gibbs used the slightly miffed phrase, “a report we heard this weekend,” about the Daschle contretemps. Fourth: Silence. The blogs are not on fire–yes, there’s Greenwald, I know–but there’s not pitchfork mob calling for his head of the size and scope usually needed to kill a nomination. The optics of the thing are terrible but it’s not deadly. ...

Fred Wilson explains how to run a business: Let me explain. Businesses are worth the net present value of future cash flows. Cash flows means profits basically (capital expenditures are important but I’m going to leave them out of the discussion on this post). So a business is worth the sum of all of its future profits, discounted back to a net present value. For those who don’t want a lesson in finance, you can simplify this theory even more by using a cash flow multiple as a proxy for a net present value. I like to use a 10x multiple for cash flow as a simplistic proxy for net present value. ...

I was looking at some code and a simple rule just occurred to me. If you’re creating an object oriented system, any time you start writing a method that accepts an instance of a class that you created as an argument, you should ask yourself whether that method should really be a member of the object being passed in as an argument. I’d also recommend that any time you’re asking a question about an object (in a loop condition or an if statement, for example), it’s worth considering whether that logic should be encapsulated as a method of the object as well. ...

These links are for the past three days. fudgestudios’s bort at master - Skeleton Ruby on Rails project with a common set of plugins already baked in. I need to create a version of this for myself. Michael Ruhlman: Anti-Bacterial America. An inspired rant about Americans becoming germophobes and the implications of that transition. Aten Design Group: On Becoming a Drupal Development Shop. I’m fascinated by a company tying itself so closely to one tool. Jason Kottke: More on Candy Land. Pointers to an interesting discussion on the value of Candy Land as a game. The Guardian: Attenborough reveals creationist hate mail for not crediting God. rentzsch’s clicktoflash at master. New home of the Safari plugin that blocks Flash movies. Jack: Rack for JavaScript. Because it’s there. Al Arabiya: Obama tells Al Arabiya peace talks should resume. The first big interview of the Obama presidency goes to the Arab media. Marc Lynch: Obama to Arabs: “what you’ll see is someone who is listening”. Analysis of Obama’s interview with Al Arabiya. The CMS Myth. mezzoblue: Sprite Optimization. A very cool technique that I just learned about. FiveThirtyEight.com: Just Five Red States Left? This is a map we can believe in. Media Matters: O’Reilly don’t know much about (WWII) history. Jessica Alba knows more geography than Bill O’Reilly. Not surprising. Dr. Saturday: Hug your friendly neighborhood recruiting rankings. In light of the recent articles on talking about how hard it is to project the performance of professional football players based on college performance, it’s interesting that the performance of college teams can be predicted fairly accurately by the quality of their recruiting classes. How to Choose Chart Types. Very useful resource for determining which kind of chart to use to visualize data.

How would the Romans handle the financial crisis? Tom Ricks has the answer.

Matthew Yglesias’ father told him this: To this day I remember when I was in eighth grade and my father first explained to me that there was a man named Alan Greenspan who ran a government agency that watched with an eagle eye for the day when there might be an insufficient number of unemployed people. If too many people had jobs, he was supposed to swoop in, tighten the money supply, and make sure some people lost their jobs. Otherwise, wages might get too high! ...

Two of the child stars of Slumdog Millionaire apparently still live in abject poverty in the slums of India. This is one of the saddest things I’ve read. It would be unjustifiable under any circumstances, but particularly in this case because the children play major parts in the movie and act incredibly well. To make a movie that in part serves to highlight the plight of children in India that at the same time exploits the children involved is not the kind of irony one can laugh about. ...