Posts

I’ve been fascinated by the argument that eliminating or suspending “mark to market” accounting rules will end the financial crisis on the cheap. Wikipedia has a good explanation of mark to market accounting. Matthew Yglesias posts a simple explanation of mark to market. Paul Kedrosky argues that changing the accounting rules won’t solve anything, which is my general impression as well. Here’s the argument in favor of suspending the rules from Brian S. Wesbury and Bob Stein. ...

Apple has decided to drop the NDA for released iPhone software. I assume this means released Apple software (rather than released applications for the iPhone), so now people are free to discuss any aspects of iPhone development that pertain to released versions of the OS, and that publishers will be able to start selling the iPhone books that have been in the works.

New York Times writer John Schwartz writes about the current state of online communities for people who are conferring about their own medical conditions. Things have gotten a lot more advanced than the usual “Googling about symptoms” that I occasionally engage in. Here are some hard numbers on the quality of information that’s available: Can online information be trusted? The answer, increasingly, is yes. In a study earlier this year, a report in the journal Cancer looked at 343 Web pages about breast cancer that came up in online searches. The researchers found 41 inaccurate statements on 18 sites — an error rate of 5.2 percent. Sites promoting alternative medicine were 15 times as likely to offer false or misleading health information as those sites that promoted conventional medicine, the study found. ...

It’s easy to blame the House Republicans for the failure of the $700 billion bailout bill today, but the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza has the real story: The data suggest that this bill was far from a political winner for members of Congress set to face voters in 36 days. And, for vulnerable Republicans who believe that the free-spending attitude of Congress and the Bush Administration was either partially or primarily responsible for their ouster from majorities in the House and the Senate in 2006, the idea of floating the federal government another $700 billion was simply unpalatable. ...

The live debate blogging yesterday was great fun, and the Cover It Live software worked really well. Thanks everyone who participated. I did it mainly as an experiment, and I consider the experiment to have been a success. I’ll definitely be live blogging the Vice Presidential debate on Thursday night as well. Please join me. I learned about Cover It Live from the Houston Chronicle. Their beat writer for the Houston Cougars uses it to live blog football games from the press box. I was impressed with the functionality and wanted an excuse to try it myself, and after Twittering my heart out during the political conventions, I thought using Cover It Live to discuss the debates would work out well. ...

Live blogging of the first Presidential Debate.

Despite growing interest in other storage media, relational databases are still the dominant data storage medium for Web applications. Indeed, as SQLite and other databases that can be embedded in applications grow in popularity, we’re seeing the use of relational databases expand even further. It seems to me, though, that actual knowledge of SQL seems to be falling. I blame this on the growing popularity of persistence frameworks that abstract the database away, allowing developers to interact without databases without writing much (or any) SQL. Ruby on Rails has ActiveRecord, Django has its own persistence components, and there are many ORM frameworks for Java that work very well. There are even a number of persistence frameworks for PHP. As developers come to rely on these frameworks, their SQL skills grow rusty. Many developers don’t even learn SQL in depth, period. ...

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be getting up on a Saturday morning to participate in the Lupus Walk. I participated last year as well, but I didn’t do any fund raising, which kind of defeats the purpose. My brother in law has lupus as does one of my coworkers, and it’s a really, really crappy disease to have. I also have a neighbor who’s confined to a wheelchair due to lupus, so I worry about the future that other people with lupus face. ...

Political blogger Ezra Klein says that making limiting executive compensation a part of the bailout plan is scam. I disagree. Most critics argue that penalizing the companies involved serves no good outside of providing catharsis for the taxpayers required to fit the bill. Fed chairman Benjamin Bernanke and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson argue that penalizing executives will make it more likely that companies will opt out of the plan. The point of penalizing the companies by limiting executive compensation or through other measures is to keep them out of the plan if they don’t really need to be in it. The basic idea of the bailout plan is that the federal government will purchase debt from banks at some price above the market clearing price. These companies are failing because they hold assets (in the form of securities and derivatives) that nobody knows how to value right now. The government is expected to buy them at roughly the price that the failing banks paid. ...

Google says that rewriting dynamic URLs is obsolete as far as they’re concerned. Google has no longer has any problem indexing sites that are built using dynamic URLs. I prefer frameworks with nice URLs, but if you’re not using one, it’s fine to just go with the standard URLs produced by the application rather than using Web server hacks to make improvements that are no longer needed.