Posts

Looks like the site was down for a bit due to some server configuration mistakes that I made. Note to self, don’t reference Apache::Registry in your server configuration when you don’t have the Perl module installed.

F-Secure security researcher Mikko Hyppönen suggests that in order to combat phishing, a new top level domain should be set aside for use by banks and other entities that are often spoofed. The organization that manages the domain would verify that the sites are owned by actual financial institutions and that they were not being used for fraudulent purposes, and the registration fees would have to be high enough to support the due diligence required. ...

Was the quickly retracted iPhone delay news this morning the product of fraudsters attempting to manipulate Apple’s share price? I’d sure love to know.

My mind absolutely refuses to let me believe that the two images on this page are identical.

Ruby on Rails includes the concept of layouts, which enable you to specify that outer framework that pages in your application will be rendered within. Most view libraries support includes, which enable you to do things like this: My page Do stuff here. Layouts are a bit nicer in that you don’t even have to maintain the includes on each page. One nice feature of layouts is that if you create a variable within a page, it will be accessible when the enclosing layout is rendered. So you can have a layout like this: <%= yield :layout %> And then a page like this: <% @page_title = “My Web Page”> ...

Check out Jeff Atwood’s description of developing in C#: The second is the C# compilation tax. When working in C#, I’m constantly compiling the solution to ensure that I haven’t broken anything. It’s a ridiculous productivity tax in an endless loop: Write some code. Compile. Write a little more code. Compile. Change a function. Compile. Rename a variable. Compile. Refactor some methods. Compile. Then compile again, just to be sure. Wait a second.. did I compile this yet? Compile! ...

Matt Haughey has posted his recommendations for people trying to establish and moderate an online community. They’re right on the money.

Check out Stephen O’Grady’s FAQ on the Fortune article I linked to earlier on Microsoft’s declaration of war on open source software. He provides a lot of supplemental information that’s worth taking in. I agree with this bit completely: Q: How does the picture change over the longer term? A: Microsoft has spent the past few years rehabilitating - at great expense and great effort - a highly negative public image. One that, importantly, did not terribly impact its ability to do business, but one that left the firm with very few defenders and advocates. It was, in many respects, the least loved firm in the industry. ...

This post from The Storytellers clearly explains something that I’ve known but couldn’t articulately describe for a long time. The crux of it (via Kottke): Stories, by their nature, have some sort of conflict. Otherwise, they would be boring. Conflict, by its nature, has at least two sides. To be able to write these two sides well, the artist has to understand, deep inside, that both sides are equally human. The more he portrays the other side as human, the better the story. The less human the other side, the more flawed the story. ...

Microsoft is claiming that open source software violates 235 patents that it holds. The article claims that Microsoft is seeking royalties from end users of open source software, but I suspect that what Microsoft really wants is to discourage people from adopting open source software entirely. I don’t think that will work. Everybody knows that SCO has been a stalking horse for Microsoft in its lawsuit against IBM, and that case hasn’t had any appreciable effect on the market for Linux or other open source tools. Now Microsoft is taking the direct approach to shaking down users of open source software. ...