Posts

Michael Coté: Getting “Love” (and Attention) for Your Whizbang 2.0 Application - Fast, Frequent Features. Thoughtful musings on development models, community-related features, and social marketing. O’Reilly Radar: Publishers Beware: Amazon has you in their sights. I think you have to take what you see in 10K filings with a grain of salt. Financial Times: Google faces loss of talent. I strongly reject the idea that Apple’s culture is completely top down, it doesn’t fit with any model of how large organizations work. Waxy.org: Google App Engine ported to Amazon’s EC2. Never mind about the lock-in. Jay Rosen: The Uncharted: From Off The Bus to Meet the Press. How the Obama small town story was broken in the first place. Scott Rosenberg also has insights into the story.

Datawocky: The story behind Google’s crawler upgrade. How Google is crawling data accessible only through forms. Ars Technica: Red light camera monkey business may be a national trend. More on short yellow lights designed to result in red light camera tickets. Wide Awake Developers: Amazon Blows Away Objections. How Amazon is expanding the capabilities of its cloud computing offerings. O’Reilly Radar: Is Google App Engine a Lock-in Play? - The single biggest question for people deploying to GAE. Steve Vinoski: Bob Ippolito on Erlang :: ’s Blog - Add it to the list of stuff I need to read more about. Making Light: Could lead to goose-stepping. Mindless authoritarianism makes me sad.

Last year Anil Dash participated in the Donors Choose bloggers challenge. I had heard of Donors Choose before but I had never donated. I wound up donating $50 to help a band class somewhere buy a new tenor saxophone. After going through the experience of finding a grantee and making my donation, Donors Choose was my new favorite charity. I wound up giving Donors Choose gift certificates as Christmas presents, and making a couple more donations on my own. ...

soapUI. The Web Service, SOA and SOAP Testing Tool. Combine stats not created equal. Which statistics collected at the combine correlate with NFL success for running backs, and which are meaningless? This is a sports story, but the lesson is for everyone. Just because you measure something doesn’t mean it’s important. Marginal Revolution: Incentives are everywhere. Red light cameras create perverse incentives for municipalities. In this case, the red light camera that issues the most tickets in Texas features a yellow light shorter than the minimum recommended by the Texas DMV. Coincidence? Kottke.org: An interview with Robin Wilson. I did not know that the number of friends a band has on MySpace is a useful economic indicator. John Royal: Dick Vitale, Adrian Dantley, Pat Riley, Patrick Ewing and Hakeen Olajuwon Make the Hall of Fame, But What About Guy V. Lewis? It really is a hall of “fame,” not a hall of merit.

Stephen O’Grady: Clouds Rolling In: The Google App Engine Q&A. Great rundown. Bruce Schneier: The Feeling and Reality of Security. Understanding the differences and how to manage them is the key to successful security policy. FP Passport: The Olympic torch’s mysterious companions. The torch escorts are members of a paramilitary group sponsored by the Chinese government. Their comrades are in Tibet suppressing dissent by force right now. I’m glad the Olympics are going to be in China because it has served to remind the world of the brutality of the Chinese regime. Continuing Intermittent Incoherency: App Engine: Most Of The Stuff I Want, None Of The Stuff I Don’t. Another take on Google App Engine.

gourmet.com: Betting the Farm. Great article on agriculture policy and how one family farm in South Dakota is bucking the trend of cashing in on ethanol money and government subsidies. Rogers Cadenhead: Washington Post Wins Another Phony Pulitzer. I loved the Washington Post article about the violinist planted in the DC subway, but Rogers argues that it’s more reality TV than news reporting. Ian Kallen: The WordPress Security Cancer. Outdated WordPress installations are being exploited to distribute spam. If you run it, be sure to keep your installation up to date. Dave Winer: Early notes on GoogleApps (Scripting News). I have my own thoughts on this but I haven’t gotten around to posting them. Ars Technica: Gmail being throttled, blocked by some anti-spam vendors. Now that Google’s CAPTCHA has been cracked, spammers are using bots to sign up for accounts and sending spam through Gmail. Freedom to Tinker: Phorm’s Harms Extend Beyond Privacy. Smart take on the many ways the Phorm Internet snooping scheme was hostile to users. 2008 NFL Mock Draft Database. I’m a sucker for mock drafts, and this site lists them all. FP Passport: The Colbert bump is real. Democratic Congressmen who take their lumps in “Better Know a District” are rewarded with a big jump in contributions.

Evaluating tools is sort of like judging art. The two questions you should have about a work of art are, “Do I like it?” and “Is it important?” They’re completely separate. You may not enjoy the music of The Beatles, but that doesn’t change the fact that they were hugely important in the evolution of popular music. When I’m looking at tools, I try to keep both of those questions in mind. I don’t care for Enterprise Java Beans, but it was important for me to know what they’re used for and why they’re important. Git, the distributed version control application, has been getting a lot of attention lately. I haven’t had a chance to take much of a look at it myself, and I’ve been wondering whether I would like using it. The excess hype has awakened my inner skeptic, but I’m still very curious. ...

Scott Horton: Worst. President. Ever. What interests me most about the list is that every President other than Bush (43) who could be described as the worst ever was a single termer. Bush’s main competition, Millard Fillmore, was not elected in the first place (he took over for Zachary Taylor, who died after 16 months in office) and did not receive his party’s nomination when his term expired. With Bush, we’ve had two terms and the Republican nominee wants to continue all of his worst policies. Bruce Schneier: The Liquid Bomb. Some details of the liquid bomb plot are revealed. Could the plan have actually worked? Based on an extremely interesting stream of comments, I’d say that the particular plans hatched by the would-be terrorists could not have worked in a million years (they didn’t even test the explosives they planned to use), but that the general plan could have potentially worked (maybe) in the hands of terrorist masterminds. The College Board has eliminated one of the advanced placement tests for Computer Science. There are two exams, and the more difficult of the two is to be discontinued. Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia has a lengthy article that describes the composition of both exams.

I was discussing basic coding philosophy today and realized that I have a few rules of thumb that I bring to my programming. I guess you’d call them a basic sensibility of how to write code. The four big rules are: Write less code. Use less indentation. Write more methods. Externalize everything. I’ll write separate posts for each of these rules, starting with this one. The “less code” movement has gained a lot of attention over the years, mainly with people migrating to scripting languages (like Ruby and Python) from Java. Using languages that encourage concise coding is helpful, but you can adopt less code as a philosophy regardless of the language you use. ...

Daring Fireball: Firefox 3 vs. Safari 3. The main sense I get from this review is that I could be getting more out of my Mac. Jason Kottke: Getting into Momofuku Ko. How this small but incredibly popular New York restaurant handles reservations using a Web application. It sounds like the basic model works like Ticketmaster. There would have been more links in this post, but I’m too old for dangerous sweatshop blogging. Also, people get paid to do this? ...