ABC’s Charlie Gibson has won the honor to be the first journalist to interview Sarah Palin since she was nominated to the Vice Presidency. It’s a great opportunity for him, and I imagine he’ll be working overtime getting ready, since everyone suspects that he was chosen because he can be counted on not to put any pressure on Palin. (Indeed, Josh Marshall reports that the terms of the interview guarantee that he won’t.) ...
Most IDEs will format your code for you these days, making sure that your braces are always where you want them to be, and that everything is indented properly. Some will do even more for you. Eclipse provides save actions that will make sure that you always include braces around blocks, and even sort your methods and declarations for you. How much control do you turn over to your editor? Lately I’ve been inclined to let the editor do as much as it can. Aside from aesthetics, I’ve decided that the single most important advantage offered by consistently formatted and organized code is high quality diffs when you’re reviewing your code history. ...
Looks like there’s a huge rights grab in the Google Chrome end user license. These overly broad agreements are common and do not seem to be abused very often, but I think they’re still worth noting.
Time magazine reports on Sarah Palin’s tenure as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska: Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor. ...
A beta version Google’s Web browser, Chrome, will be released tomorrow. It’s based on WebKit (the same engine used by Safari) and will feature a new JavaScript engine. I’m kind of curious about the name. Is it a joke on the fact that the biggest difference between the major browsers these days is the chrome? Is the new browser war between WebKit and Gecko (the Firefox engine)? I’m pretty excited by the renewed competition on the browser front, with Microsoft taking Internet Explorer seriously again, and Apple, Google, and Mozilla all competing hard in the browser market. (The fact that Opera continues to innovate and lead is notable as well.) ...
Tim Bray warns of the dangers of Ruby Gems as an attack vector. The risk is that basically anyone can create a Gem and make it available using the gem installer. I’ll say that this is why real systems administrators detest the various packaging schemes that scripting languages offer. It’s generally a much better practice to manage libraries through the operating system’s centralized packaging system – Red Hat’s RPM, FreeBSD Ports, Debian/Ubuntu’s APT, and so forth. Administrators who want to go beyond the vendor-approved repositories for packages are free to do so, but packages from the vendor list can be installed with relative confidence. ...
I just posted this on Twitter, but I may as well post it here as well: Be skeptical when people try to explain why something that doesn’t appeal to them will appeal to other people they don’t really understand.
The Presidential campaign this year has me thinking about the topic of experience. The Democrats have nominated the relatively inexperienced Barack Obama for President, and now John McCain has selected the even more inexperienced Sarah Palin as his running mate. It has me thinking about how I evaluate experience. The approach is the same regardless of whether I’m deciding who to vote for in an election or which programmers to bring in for interviews based on their responses to a Craigslist ad. I see experience as a relatively primitive criteria for making decisions. ...
What’s the general consensus on BBEdit 9 versus TextMate for working on Ruby on Rails applications? Is there a compelling reason to migrate away from TextMate?
A couple of years ago, I posted a link to an article which said that the essence of wisdom is strong opinions, weakly held. Tyler Cowen points to an article from the New York Times which says essentially the same thing in a different way. It explains that most people who claim to be undecided really aren’t and that more importantly, not recognizing your own subconscious leanings makes you more captive to your own biases. ...