Posts

Tyler Cowen gives a very strong recommendation to Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe. The topic is ethically eating seafood in a world where the seafood supply is dwindling rapidly. I’m going to buy it tonight.

Nelson Minar recommends that the popular blog tools dump RSS and provide their feeds in one format, Atom. This echoes the best practice established at least two years ago when Nick Bradbury and Sam Ruby recommended choosing a single format for your feeds and sticking with that rather than providing the same data in multiple formats. I agree with that sentiment and also endorse choosing Atom makes sense at this point. The only remaining advantage for RSS is that it has better name recognition and its name doesn’t conflict with the smallest particle that comprises an element or any of the other things also called “atom”. ...

Paul DePodesta is a baseball guy who was made famous in Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball. At the time of the writing he was the assistant to A’s general manager Billy Beane, and then went on to serve as general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Now he works in the front office for the San Diego Padres. On his blog, he writes about the basics of building a successful team. The key is to focus on process rather than outcome: ...

The Supreme Court ruled today that Gitmo detainees have rights after all: In a stunning blow to the Bush Administration in its war-on-terrorism policies, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign nationals held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to pursue habeas challenges to their detention. The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights. If Congress wishes to suspend habeas, it must do so only as the Constitution allows — when the country faces rebellion or invasion. ...

WebMonkey today asks whether or not it’s OK for Web sites to require JavaScript. My opinion on this question has changed a lot over the past year or two. Not long ago, I would have said that it’s never to require JavaScript, but I don’t feel that way any more. I think that if your site centers around publishing, you should certainly make all of your content available to users who have disabled JavaScript, but if you provide more application-like functionality, requiring JavaScript for certain features is OK. ...

Inspired by this post where Flickr’s developers talk about their toolset, here are the tools I use to get the job done: 20" iMac with second 20" monitor (in the office) 24" iMac (home) black MacBook (don’t leave home without it) Terminal.app Quicksilver TextMate (for Rails and PHP development) Eclipse (for Java development) vim (for everything else) Subversion MySQL Perl (I still rely on it for one offs) Adium Gmail (all my mail goes through my Gmail account) MarsEdit Google Reader NetNewsWire Update: I inadvertently removed Firefox (and Firebug) from the list when I was working on this post. I honestly don’t know how people do JavaScript without Firebug. ...

Here’s an old essay I wrote back in 1998, reproduced for no good reason. The story is completely true, and the client in question was Pfizer. Adventures in Consulting, Episode 1 Sometimes as a consultant, you make seemingly innocent suggestions to your clients that end up haunting you for months. For example, I was working on a groupware project, and the client wanted usage reports to see how the application was being utilized. ...

I saw two interesting Barack Obama-related items over the past few days. (This isn’t a “vote for Obama” post, it’s more about process.) The first is this spreadsheet of internal predictions from the Obama campaign that was leaked on February 7. In it, his campaign predicts how the popular vote and delegate allocations will turn out in each state, and the thing about it is that it’s amazingly accurate. He underestimates his margin in some states he won, but his predictions aren’t far off until late in the primary season. ...

Houston blogger John Royal writes an obituary for sportscaster Jim McKay. It seems silly to let someone who was truly great at what they did pass without notice. It’s odd to think that humanity will never again witness the birth of the electronic mass media, and the iconic figures who set the standards for that medium will hold a sort of unique historic position. As Royal points out, McKay is one of the last few of a generation that will be much missed. ...

Warren Buffett has placed a $1 million long bet on the following prediction: Over a ten-year period commencing on January 1, 2008, and ending on December 31, 2017, the S & P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees, costs and expenses. Interestingly, the exact terms of the bet are confidential. The challenger is, of course, a hedge fund partnership. ...