Posts

I was recently asked to make a really irritating change to a report. This seemingly minor change makes the code significantly more complex, hurts performance, and will force me to add some really ugly code to what should be a very simple page. Because I find working on this feature so distasteful, I have been procrastinating even looking at it for a couple of days. When I woke up this morning, I had an inspired idea for fixing this problem in the long term. I’m still going to have to write some ugly code now, but I’ve got a solution in mind that will enable me to get rid of that ugly code and a whole bunch of other really nasty code along with it. ...

This is the best idea I’ve heard of in some time. Credit Suisse Group AG is going to pay its executives bonuses out of a pool of toxic mortgage-backed assets that it cannot currently sell. I love this because it is both just and clever. The executives at the bank now have every incentive to figure out a way to make these rotten assets turn into something less rotten, and if they don’t, they’re in the same boat as the investors who purchased them. ...

Marc Ambinder reminds us that Caroline Kennedy is a legacy pick, not a beneficiary of nepotism. As a practical matter, I’ll throw in my hat with Ross Douthat. If Caroline Kennedy wants to enter a Democratic primary, raise money, and campaign for a Senate seat, I wish her well. To request appointment to the Senate on the basis of no practical political experience whatsoever is just silly. And the soap opera-esque aspects of the whole thing make me want to throw up. ...

I make pessimistic pronouncements about Ruby and suddenly interesting things turn up.

Scott Rosenberg has a good explanation of how the Wall Street Journal blew today’s inflammatory cover story on network neutrality, and also provides all of the essential supporting links.

Steve Jobs on what motivates Apple: We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is. ...

Take a look at the Edmunds.com list of price change alerts for every model currently being produced. The constant stream of down arrows tells the story of the auto industry today. The US automakers are doing poorly, but so is everyone else. In many ways, the difference between how the US automakers are doing and how everyone else is doing is that their labor relationships go back a lot further than do the labor relationships of foreign automakers that are producing cars in the US. ...

The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein calls out Wall Street executives for failing to lead in the years when the entire economy shackled itself to the unsustainable rise in housing prices. In this case, leadership means accepting reality and helping other people see and accept that reality as well. Throughout the expansion of the real estate bubble, there were plenty of people out there who were saying that the bigger the bubble got, the more damaging the collapse was going to be. Unfortunately, none of them were in a position to do much about it. ...

I’ve had a blog post about Ruby sort of simmering on the back burner, but I haven’t written it because I don’t really feel qualified enough to substantiate the case that I wanted to make. As so often happens, somebody else has beaten me to the punch and written something much like I had in mind. In this case, it’s KirinDave, who explains his suspicion that Ruby is a soft of dead end. There’s a funny thing about programming languages. They’re some of the only pieces of software that really seem to eventually be finished. Perl has seemed finished for a long time. I suspect that Python may be finished. C has been finished forever. Ruby, at times, seems over but not finished, if you get my meaning. ...

This morning a friend of mine sent an email asking whether Will Muschamp had opted out of being “head coach in waiting” at the University of Texas and taken the job as head football coach at Auburn. He said he’d heard something on the radio. My first stop was Google News, but there were no stories today that mentioned Muschamp. I was despairing being out of the loop a little bit when it occurred to me that the next best stop was search.twitter.com and found that Twitter was abuzz with the latest Muschamp-related scuttlebutt. ...