Posts

Is MSNBC really touting an RSS reader/breakout mashup on their new site? How crazy is that?

Looks like 21 workers at the Shorja market died yesterday as Sunni insurgents set out to prove that the statements made by John McCain and Indiana Congressman Mike Pence about the market’s safety were wrong.

It’s one a.m. and I’ve just deployed the latest version of your application to the production server. I tested it on my local computer, I saw it work on the development server. Now it’s broken and I’m trying to decide whether to try to quickly fix the problem or roll back, assuming I’ve left myself with an easy way to roll back. This has happened to me more times than I’d like to admit. Lately I’ve been trying to figure out ways to make the deployment process more predictably successful. ...

I’ve been very interested in the Overton window for a few months now. Patrick Nielsen Hayden has a good post explaining what it is, and why it matters. (He in turn quotes another good post from Amanda Marcotte.) For what it’s worth, I first learned of the term “Overton window” from Tim Bray.

I’m proposing a law which states that if your application supports any concept of tabs, that users must be allowed to select tabs using some accelerator key and a number. On the Mac, it’s usually the Command key and a number, and on the PC, it’s ordinarily the Control key and a number. For example, if you’re using a Mac and you have a Firefox window open with five tabs, you can go to the fourth tab from the left, you can just hit Command-4. (On Windows, Control-4.) ...

Paul Kedrosky has some interesting thoughts on the Apple-EMI deal. He observes that the music industry got something they’ve wanted from Apple for a long time – tiered pricing.

Here’s a project to keep an eye on. Slate (bizarrely, with the support of Cisco) is rebuilding its message boards, with a proposed launch date of May 30. They’re starting out by soliciting feedback from users. It’ll be interesting to see what they build, what they use to build it, and whether they meet their deadline.

The capture of the 15 British soldiers by Iran provides a tidy test case for torture apologists. The sailors have already confessed to trespassing in Iranian waters, even though I’m sure that most of them have no idea where they were in the Persian Gulf, exactly, when the Iranians picked them up. Is it fine for Iran to coerce confessions and information from these British sailors? What if Iran declares them “unlawful combatants” before they do it? And most importantly, what moral authority do we have to demand that the Iranians not mistreat those sailors given our own practices when it comes to torturing people we capture? Or must we just rely on letting them know that we have bigger guns, so they must bend to our will? ...

Dave Winer celebrated the tenth anniversary of Scripting News yesterday. Incredible. Scripting News was one of the main inspirations for this site, and it’s great that Dave is still as prolific as ever.

Tim O’Reilly interceded to get Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke talking last week, and the result was separate written statements by both of them this morning. Sierra has written a meta post about the statements as well. Like most everyone is saying, now is the time to move onto examining the larger issues and to stop fixating on the individuals involved in this incident.