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The terms of the deal between Apple and ThinkSecret? Apple agrees not to sue and ThinkSecret agrees to close up shop. Ouch.

Tyler Cowen on Ron Paul. I think this holds in general: There’s what a politician believes, and how a politician believes. As I get older I put increasing weight on the latter.

Here’s something I haven’t seen before. A member of the MooTools development team made some intemperate remarks about some other JavaScript frameworks in a presentation, posted a video of the presentation to the project home page, and was kicked off the team. Here’s the upshot: The apology here is not that Olmo gave his little rant, nor that it got posted on our blog. I am personally sorry that he did, but that’s not the point. No, my apology is for letting this kind of perspective have a place on our team. It’s immature, but it’s also disrespectful, and while I looked at it light heartedly as something fun, Olmo seems to have truly felt this way and I should have recognized that as both dangerous and infectious. ...

World of Warcraft offers an arena system where players can create teams and fight other players. Participating in rated arena matches earns points that players can use to buy equipment that in turn makes them more formidable in the arena. Teams that compete in an arena are assigned a rating of 1500 to start out, and their rating goes up when they win matches and goes down when they lose matches. Teams that are average to below average get roughly the same number of points, and higher rated teams get a lot more points than average teams. A team that maintains the default 1500 point ranking gets 344 points for the week. A awful team with a rating of 1250 gets 289 points. A team with a good rating, 1750, gets 683 points, and an outstanding team with a 2000 rating gets 1054 points. Here’s the scale on a graph (from here: ...

The Russian Business Network is a hosting company that specializes in offering services to online criminals. Need someplace to host your phishing site? Want some help setting up a shell company? These are your go to guys. Washington Post Internet security reporter Brian Krebs published a story about RBN on Wednesday. There’s also a blog that reports on RBN’s activities. How did I not hear of these guys until today?

Amazon has added a new company to their S3 and EC2 services called SimpleDB. Rather than providing a traditional relational database, they’ve created an object-oriented database that is supposed to be simpler to use. That’s probably not a bad idea, given the popularity of ORM libraries like Hibernate and ActiveRecord. They’ve already created libraries for Java, Perl, C#/.NET, and PHP, and the documentation is thorough. The thing I always wonder about with solutions like these is what happens when you get beyond the simplest mode of usage. It’s great to abstract away all that nasty SQL until your database gets big and your queries start getting slow, but then you need to get closer to the metal and figure out what’s going on in there. How do you do that with SimpleDB? Or is it expected that most users won’t build big enough sites with SimpleDB to have to worry about that? ...

Last week I asked what one question you could ask programmers to screen out viable candidates from poor candidates in a preliminary interview. I think that the one question you should keep in mind when interviewing programmers is, “What can I learn from this person?” If you get through an interview and can’t think of anything the candidate could teach you, they’re probably not right for the job.

Google is launching a new Web site aimed at individuals who want to publish articles on the Web. Google calls the articles knols, and based on the example, I’d say they’re most similar to Wikipedia articles. The difference is that the knols are closely associated with one author, whereas Wikipedia articles are all treated as collaborative works. Here’s how Google describes it: The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors – but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. ...

The open source version of Movable Type has been released. There’s even a public Subversion repository.

Anil Dash named this blog one of his blogs of the year. Needless to say, I’m completely humbled by the compliment, and especially humbled by the fine company I’m in. Anytime I’m mentioned in the same light as Nelson Minar, I know I must be doing something right.