I realized today that for me there are only two time horizons. There is “same as forever,” which is any period of time that seems like more than enough to finish whatever I have to do before my deadline, and there’s “not enough time to finish,” which is any shorter amount of time.
AOL has officially AIM to third party instant messaging clients under an initiative called OpenAIM 2.0. There’s now a documented API that IM client writers can use to interface with AIM. Before, software developers reverse engineered the protocol used by the official AIM client and updated their software whenever AOL made changes that cut them off. Hopefully this is one more step toward federation among services.
Google developer Cedric Beaust argues that treating orthodox Test Driven Development as some kind of panacea is a mistake, a position that I find it difficult to argue with. In fact, I find myself rejecting nearly all dogmatic software development philosophies. I like to read about them, but in the end I just steal the parts that work for me and do what seems to make the most sense. My dirty secret: I almost never write a test, watch it fail, and then fill in the code necessary to make the test pass. That seems gratuitous to me. ...
I didn’t know until just now that you don’t need to include the closing ?> in PHP files that consist entirely of code. The Drupal coding standards explain why you probably want to leave it out: Note that the final ?> should be omitted from all code files–modules, includes, etc. The closing delimiter is optional, and removing it helps prevent unwanted white space at the end of files which can cause problems elsewhere in the system. ...
Google is using its GrandCentral service to offer free voice mail to San Francisco’s homeless population. Signing up for the service will give them a local telephone number that they can forward to any number they choose (if one is available) and that is associated with a voice mail box that they can check from any phone line. This service is already freely available to anyone who can sign up online, but it’s great to see Google specifically going out and offering it to the homeless. They stand to benefit more from the service than people who already have phone lines, and there’s probably very little chance they would even find out about it otherwise. ...
On the occasion of the 10 year anniversary of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, a couple of people wrote retrospectives that are worth checking out. The first is an argument for the greatness of the album by Will Robinson Sheff. The second looks at what Jeff Mangum has been up to since the album was released by Taylor Clark. Sadly, the answer is not “making more music.” If you’ve never listened to this album, I strongly encourage you to go out and buy it immediately. It’s one of the most affecting pieces of art I’ve ever encountered. It’s hard to believe it’s been around for ten years. ...
If you’ve been looking for an area of policy where there Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama differ substantially, you should read today’s op-ed by Jeffrey Rosen on civil liberties. Most Americans don’t really care about civil liberties, at least enough to pay attention to them or to vote based on that issue. Many Americans are, in fact, completely OK with abuses of civil liberties as long as those abuses come with a promise that they’re necessary to keep us safe. Civil liberties are an area where the President has the most discretion. Even if Congress authorizes the executive branch to abuse civil liberties, the President can choose not to act on that authority. (Or, in the case of the Bush administration, can claim authority not actually granted to the executive branch by Congress or the Constitution.) For those reasons, as a civil libertarian, this is a key issue for me as a voter. ...
My number one point of frustration with Ruby on Rails is that as easy it as it is to build Rails applications, it’s a big challenge to get them deployed properly (mainly due to lacking documentation for Capistrano) and to keep them running happily. I have a simple Rails application that I’ve deployed using Apache and Mongrel, with three Mongrel processes. When I looked at top this morning (it had been running awhile), it was consuming over 500 megs of RAM. My first thought was, of course, “memory leak”. I restarted the app, and the ‘‘mongrel_rails’’ process was consuming only 32 megs of RAM. I’ve since watched it grow to 45 megs of RAM consumed. That appears to confirm my suspicion that something is leaking memory. ...
Even if Hillary Clinton is losing in terms of the delegate count going into the convention, she doesn’t plan on losing the nomination. Her plan is to convince more superdelegates to vote for her than vote for Obama, and to make sure that the delegates from Florida and Michigan have their votes counted, even though those primaries were held under the assumption that those votes would not count. Unsurprisingly, she won both of those states, in fact, Barack Obama’s name wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan. ...
Why is it that people keep publishing articles about the economic philosophy that underpins Barack Obama’s policy proposals without publishing similar articles about the other Presidential candidates? This time, Noam Scheiber writes about Obama’s economics. I find the pragmatism of a behavioral economics-based approach very appealing. There’s a ton of good stuff in the article, but I’ll highlight a few paragraphs: And, yet, it’s not just the details of Obama’s policies that suggest a behavioral approach. In some respects, the sensibility behind the behaviorist critique of economics is one shared by all the Obama wonks, whether they’re domestic policy nerds or grizzled foreign policy hands. Despite Obama’s reputation for grandiose rhetoric and utopian hope-mongering, the Obamanauts aren’t radicals–far from it. They’re pragmatists–people who, when an existing paradigm clashes with reality, opt to tweak that paradigm rather than replace it wholesale. As Thaler puts it, “Physics with friction is not as beautiful. But you need it to get rockets off the ground.” It might as well be the motto for Obama’s entire policy shop. ...