Posts

Last week, over on the link blog, I pointed to a kottke.org blog post that in turn pointed to a New York Times article about email sign-offs. For some reason, that article has been bumping around in my brain since then, because it relates to a topic that has been much on my mind for the past year or two, which has something to do with thoughtfulness. My first reaction upon reading the article was to think about possible alternative default sign-offs for my email messages that may work better than what I use now. (Usually just my name.) I thought of “Best” or “Regards” or any number of other alternatives, but that’s missing the point. The point of the article, and maybe the point of life, in some ways, is to be more thoughtful. Or at least to be thoughtful about a wider variety of things. ...

I got an email yesterday offering me 1500 bucks if I’d put ten text links to “sponsors” for one year in the sidebar of this site. Lots of other sites have gone this route, so there’s not really any novelty here, other than that I’ve never gotten such an offer, and I never knew exactly what kind of money people were getting for this sort of thing. The arrangement, of course, is straight PageRank farming. The ten links aren’t to actual sponsors, but rather to sites that want to up their PageRank through links from other sites that have already earned their PageRank the hard way (or at least by just being around for a long time). ...

From the Onion AV Club interview with Demetri Martin, on working for The Daily Show: AVC: What allowed you to transition from intern to correspondent? DM: It was a pretty simple process. All I had to do was leave the show, work at temp jobs, then become a full-time proofreader, do hundreds of stand-up shows, some comedy festivals, a couple of writing jobs, some screenplays, two pilot scripts, and about 20 minutes of Pilates. Then, a mere eight years later, I returned to the show to become the nation’s least relevant fake reporter. ...

Periodically, Netflix sends me an email asking me when I received a movie that they mailed, or when I mailed a movie back to them that they received. I assume that this is so that they can confirm that the mail is getting delivered in a timely fashion, and I’m sure that some people regard them as a nuisance, but these emails actually make me feel better about the service. They give the impression that somebody at Netflix actually cares. (Needless to say, I always click through to let them know that the service is working.) ...

I’ve decided to start a little series of post about interesting music I’ve found at emusic.com. Not because I want to promote that site, but rather because it’s where I’m finding most of the new (to me) music that I’m listening to these days. Today’s interesting album is 1000 Years of Popular Music, a live album by Richard Thompson. I’ve been familiar with Richard Thompson for quite some time, but I had never heard of this release. Thompson was asked to come up with a list of the greatest songs of the millenium, and being serious about his task, actually came up with a list that comprised songs from the entire millenium. He wound up doing a series of concerts where he performed songs from his list, and that in turn resulted in this live album. ...

AutoWeek reports that Ford put a release candidate of its new model, the Edge, in the hands of some customers for last minute testing. They’ve made some minor changes to the vehicle in response to feedback from the testers, and will reportedly tweak the production line over the course of the year with other changes. I find it interesting that even the most old school manufacturing industries are trying to tweak their release cycles to be more responsive to customers. ...

I confess that I’m a sucker for quantitative analysis of sports. Heck, I’m a sucker for quantitative analysis of just about anything. One argument people who are interested in statistics often hear is that the numbers suck the joy out of the game. Breaking down the stats is somehow a less noble way to follow sports than to just watch the games. David Berri, one of the authors of The Wages of Wins, asks the following: ...

When it comes to stories, the difference between a mystery and a thriller rests on the knowledge held by the audience versus the knowledge held by the protagonist. In a mystery, neither the protagonist nor the audience know the answer to the question central to the plot. The challenge is for the audience member to solve the mystery before the protagonist does. In a thriller, the protagonist doesn’t know what’s really going on, but the audience does. (See Alfred Hitchcock’s famous explanation of suspense to François Truffaut.) ...

Let’s say you’ve got a project in a Subversion repository, and you’ve created a branch of trunk, in branches/newfeature. You’ve been merging changes from trunk to branches/newfeature for awhile, but now you’re done with that work and you’re ready to move all of the changes in the branch back to the trunk. What’s the best way to do this? You can follow the directions in the Subversion book, but that leads to a huge number of conflicts. Is there a cleaner way? If you’ve merged everything from the trunk into the branch, then what you really need is to just move the latest stuff in the branch into the trunk, without worrying about conflicts at all. ...

I am a huge fan of object-relational mapping. One of the most tedious problems for developers who use object-oriented languages is transforming query results into objects and generating insert and update statements to save objects. There are a number of ways to deal with this problem, but the easiest way to handle it is to use somebody else’s ORM tool. Ruby on Rails includes an ORM library called ActiveRecord. This morning I ran into a problem with ActiveRecord that turns out to be an application design problem. I thought I’d write it all up in case anyone else runs into a similar problem. ...