Posts

Looks like publications that review games play fast and loose with the ethical standards espoused (if not embodied) by most journalists. ArsTechnica explains how game companies manipulate their press coverage: While gaming may look like a huge, scary industry from the outside, it can be a surprisingly cozy place once you know that world a bit. It’s easy to make enemies, and since public relations staffers change on an almost monthly basis, you never know who is holding a grudge at what company. If you anger one publisher or the wrong PR person, you could find yourself out of luck for information, interviews, or even invitations to trade shows for a long time to come. For sites that need fresh, exclusive news to function, it’s the kiss of death. Even without lording advertising dollars over your head, they know how to hurt you. ...

Let’s say your company was hiring new developers, and the HR department was pre-screening candidates before passing them off to the technical team for interviews. Assuming the résumé passes muster, what’s the one question you’d have the HR person ask to find out whether a developer should move on to the next step in the process? The HR person isn’t technical, so they need to be able to ask the question and evaluate the answer. ...

All of the big papers today report that the most recent National Intelligence Estimate says that Iran froze its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The assessment is the consensus view of 16 US intelligence agencies. I don’t think that the war party clamoring for an attack on Iran will be discouraged at all by this news. Fred Kaplan says this means that the US is not going to war with Iran while President Bush is in office. ...

Here’s a horror story from the BBC technology department: The BBC’s infrastructure is shockingly outdated, having changed only by fractions over the past decade. Over-priced Sun Enterprise servers running Solaris and Apache provide the front-end layer. This is round-robin load balanced, there’s no management of session state, no load-based connection pool. The front-end servers proxy to the application layer, which is a handful of Solaris machines running Perl 5.6 - a language that was superseded with the release of Perl 5.8 over five and a half years ago. Part of the reason for this is the bizarre insistence that any native modules or anything that can call code of any kind must be removed from the standard libraries and replaced with a neutered version of that library by a Siemens engineer. ...

This one’s short. CNET fired Gamespot editor Jeff Gerstmann (a 10 year employee) because he wrote a bad review of a heavily advertised game. I never read CNET anyway, but now neither should anyone else. (via Daring Fireball)

Check out this blog post from Wired editor Chris Anderson. It doesn’t come as a surprise that all of the stuff you see on subscription offers from magazines is totally dishonest, but seeing it all laid out really is impressive.

I’ve surprised myself by becoming a huge fan of Layer Tennis. Every Friday, two graphic designers take turns creating images in a graphic design thrown down. The tool of choice is usually Photoshop, but this week’s battle is a Flash battle, and a couple of weeks ago there was an Illustrator battle. There are 10 shots per match, and the competitors take turns. A coin toss determines which competitor gets the first shot and which gets to wind things up. The appeal is in seeing what someone can do in 15 minutes. Audiences have seen hand-drawn text, staged photographs with models, and some really amazing Photoshop work. ...

Tyler Cowen has a great post on the willingness of arguers on both sides of any debate to ascribe motivation to their interlocutors without any evidence of those motivations: I’d like to propose a new research convention. Anytime a writer or blogger talks about what The Right or The Left (or some subset thereof) really wants or means, I’d like them to list their personal anthropological experience with the subjects under consideration. Davies presents Friedman as a shill for the Republican Party; I’d like to know how many (public or non-public) conversations he has had with Friedman about the topic of the Republican Party. I’ve been present for a few, and while I’m open to feedback from Davies, my guess reading his post is that he hasn’t been there for any. Yet he writes with a tone of certitude: “it’s clearly not intellectual honesty that makes American liberals act pretend that Milton Friedman wasn’t a party line Republican hack.” ...

The mathematicians behind Baseball Reference, Pro Football Reference, and Basketball Reference are joining forces to launch a company to support their sites. All three sites were started as hobbies, but have grown to be as essential in their own areas as Wikipedia is in general. Baseball Reference was the original and motivated the creators of the other two sites, and all three of them are friends who met at math conference. ...

I have some code that opens a socket, sends a message, receives a response, and closes the socket. I need to add a timeout to shut down the socket connection if it takes longer than a specified duration. This code is written in Java, but this is a design question. Sockets support a read timeout. To see how it works, read about setSoTimeout() in the Javadoc for java.net.Socket, or try man 2 getsockopt on your local Unix machine. All socket implementations provide this same timeout functionality. ...