Posts

More evidence that email is dead: automatic replies sent to the forged from address on incoming spam like the one below.

I have been watching the Presidential campaign far too closely for months now, and I just wanted to call for a bit of a time out (not that anyone involved will heed it). People are obsessing over the daily polls, the content of ads, and which candidate seems to have the upper hand on a day to day basis. This is fueled mainly by the maddening commentary from people whose paychecks depend on an audience obsessively checking their blogs, reading their columns, or watching their shows on a day to day basis. They depend on getting people’s emotions ratcheted up about the Presidential election, and they’re good at playing on those emotions. ...

Is China blocking access to the iTunes Music Store because an album called Songs for Tibet was added? What’s interesting to me is that regardless of why China started blocking access to the store, everything that happens from this point will serve to confirm some people’s assumptions on the matter, and we’ll probably never really know for sure what happened or how it wound up playing out.

Tim O’Reilly’s warning against a Web where sites link mostly to their own content is worth paying attention to. He makes two suggestions to sites that link to their own content, but his second rule says it all for me: Ensure that the pages you create at those destinations are truly more valuable to your readers than any other external link you might provide. To shorten that even more, your links should point to the best resource in that context, whether it’s on your site or somebody else’s. As long as you’re following that rule, I think you’re on solid ground. ...

Jeff Atwood has a great series of screen shots describing how malware distributors spoof user interfaces to convince users to install their software. The more operating system and browser vendors do to prevent people from inadvertently installing software they don’t want, the more the malware distributors do to entice people to override the security measures that are in place to help install software that can only harm them. This is just one of many arms race scenarios that plague the digital world. As DRM improves, people come up with better ways to crack the DRM. As Blizzard comes up ways to keep people from artificially inflating their arena ranking in World of Warcraft, players come up with newer and better ways to game the system. And as antivirus and anti-fishing software gets better, criminals figure out better ways to enlist the user in circumventing that software. ...

Unlike me, you probably didn’t sit through John McCain’s hour with Rick Warren at the Saddleback Civil Forum last night. Here’s their conversation, distilled. Pastor Rick Warren: Who are three wisest people you’d rely on for advice if you are elected? John McCain: David Petraeus, who is the greatest American in history besides me, John Lewis, and Meg Whitman. RW: What’s your greatest moral failure and America’s greatest moral failure? ...

Jack Shedd on why should be no separation between design and engineering: The idea of design divorced from engineering is laudable, but the way it so often plays out makes it implausible. Yes, in theory, the design team should come up with a perfect solution and the engineering team should be smart enough to figure out how to pull it off and neither should ever have to talk to each other. The resulting product would look exactly as designed and would work perfectly. Keep on trucking you radical dreamer. Here’s a quarter for the jukebox. ...

Last night I took the opportunity to watch Barack Obama and John McCain each spend an hour being interviewed by megachurch pastor Rick Warren. Overall, I thought Warren did a good job of asking interesting and fair questions, and I thought both candidates acquitted themselves well, although I thought it was clear that McCain was mainly interested in segueing from Warren’s questions to his own talking points, whereas Obama seemed more interested in giving thoughtful answers to the questions that were asked. ...

The other day we had an interesting discussion at work about when the overhead of using a framework is justified. Incorporating a framework into an application has costs in terms of performance and complexity. In this case, we have a few JavaScript features that we wind up using on most Web sites, and the question was whether or not to use jQuery to reimplement those features, or to just use some simple home grown scripts that we already had. ...

Looks like an old saw I cited frequently has finally bitten the dust. That saw is that no two countries with McDonald’s restaurants have ever gone to war against one another. Russia’s invasion of Georgia has rendered it inoperative.