Posts

With the news this morning that Bill Clinton and other Hillary Clinton supporters are openly pushing for Barack Obama to choose Hillary as his running mate, it has become apparent that the Clinton camp is going through the stages of the Kübler-Ross model of coping with death or tragedy. Stage one is denial. I think we’ve all seen that in the fact that Hillary keeps loaning her failed campaign millions of dollars even though Obama’s delegate lead is insurmountable and the superdelegates keep shifting away from her. ...

Peter Merholz on the habit of overwork among designers: One of the things I’ve seen among many in the design profession is a willingness to put up with crappy jobs. Jobs where their talent and labor is exploited (this is doubtless true in other fields, but I suspect it’s especially true in ours) . The thing that cheeses me off most is overwork. It’s not uncommon for services firms to have their staff work 50+ hour weeks. I wouldn’t mind that if people were compensated accordingly. But most are simply compensated for “full-time” — there’s no over time. The thing is, I know their employer is billing out every one of those extra hours to the client. Which means that person is bringing a LOT of money into the firm, and not seeing it herself. ...

Last week we went to go see The Swell Season, the traveling name of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova’s band. If you don’t know who they are, go get the DVD for the movie Once and watch it immediately. The story behind the movie is pretty incredible in and of itself, so be sure to read that, too. The concert was at Meymandi Concert Hall, and judging from the sound in our seats at the back of the upper balcony, otherwise known as the worst seats in the house, the acoustics of the room are impressive. Hansard sang the first song of the concert without a microphone or amplification of any kind, and we could hear him perfectly well from the very back. The view was not quite as good, I could barely see what the people on stage were doing. ...

Seems like there’s a little discussion percolating about whether it makes sense to support wiki-like markup languages for formatting text fields in your Web applications or to just support HTML. I took a position in this debate last year. That position was to favor supporting Markdown. Here’s what I said: I’ve basically decided at this point that whenever I write applications that allow users to enter blocks of text to be displayed on a Web page, I’m going to provide Markdown support. It follows conventions that people have been using in text-based email for years, it’s unobtrusive if you don’t know what it is, it plays nicely with embedded HTML markup, and it takes care of turning line feeds in text into paragraph tags in HTML. Best of all, text with Markdown in it is not only readable, it’s eye pleasing. What’s not to love? I’ve been using Markdown when posting to this site for a long time now, and have included it in some applications, but my thought at this point is, why not include it everywhere? ...

TV producer Chuck Lorre uses the two second “vanity cards” displayed at the end of shows he produces to publish short essays on whatever he feels like. You can only read the essays if you pause the shows on your DVR. One recent card discussed the then upcoming WSJ article about Lorre’s essay. If that doesn’t make his essays a blog in an unusual format, what would?

The American Scene has a provocative article that argues that Harvard University is actually a hedge fund, one that happens not to be subject to taxation. Porsche (the luxury car company) also makes most of its money by way of derivatives, as opposed to building and selling cars.

As you know, I frequently mine the long term road test blog at Edmunds Inside Line for interesting tidbits that relate to design and user experience. Today I ran into a problem at work where people could no longer log into FogBugz because the computer running Windows XP on which it runs had decided that too many people were connected and I was violating the arbitrary rules Microsoft imposes to force you to purchase Windows Server 2003. Here’s the thing – nobody was actually using FogBugz at the time and the problem went away when I rebooted the server. ...

The Relevance blog has an excellent post on simplifying code called Refactoring from Ceremony to Essence. In part it explains why people find Ruby on Rails to be a compelling alternative to J2EE, but it also illustrates a number of techniques applied by Ruby on Rails that could just as easily be used regardless of which language you’re using to develop your applications. One point in their post directly addresses the “use less indentation” rule I posted about on Sunday. I spoke in favor of doing all of the basic sanity checks up front in a method and avoiding nesting, this post recommends leaving them out entirely: ...

Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz wonders if there’s something a little wrong with becoming President, using the fame attendant with having been President to build a massive fortune, and then spending that fortune to attempt to get your wife elected President. He also brings up the point that accepting fees for speaking and then loaning that money to a political campaign seems to exploit the campaign finance laws in a pretty obvious way. If I’m a billionaire, I can donate a maximum of $2,300 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, or I can hire her husband to speak at a corporate meeting for as much as I like, and he can then loan that money to her campaign with no expectation of repayment. That doesn’t sound right to me. ...

Andrew Leonard posts an explanation of why many conservatives hate the the concept of peak oil (and the idea that human activity is causing climate change): Partisan conservatives pooh-pooh peak oil (and human-caused climate change) because they think that to concede that these challenges are real and must be confronted is to acknowledge that greed is not always good, and that free market capitalism must be restrained, or at least tinkered with substantially. Peak oil and climate change are fronts in the culture wars, and to some conservatives, watching the price of oil rise as the Arctic ice melts, it might feel like being in Germany at the close of World War II, with the Russians advancing on one front while U.S.-led forces come from the other. The propositions that cheap oil is running out and the world is getting hotter – as a result of our own activities – threaten a whole way of life. The very idea that dirty Gaia-worshipping hippies might be right is absolute anathema. ...