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I was watching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip last night and it occurred to me that writing a TV show is better than writing a blog. Sure, I could write tedious posts explaining why gay marriage should be legal, but that’s really nothing compared to being able to write dialogue. You can dream up two people who are on opposite sides of the issue, write their arguments for them, and make your point in a way that’s totally entertaining. Plus millions of people will watch because the other shows you wrote were actually good. ...

O’Reilly has a series of short books that they distributed in PDF form, called Short Cuts. Yesterday, I bought Cody Fauser’s RJS Templates For Rails, which explains exactly what the title says it will. The sweet spot for these books seems to be between finding information about a topic with Google and ordering a book on the topic from Amazon.com. The nice thing about this series is that the books are only as long as they need to be (the PDF I bought is 56 pages long) and the downloadable format provides instant gratification. ...

Needless to say, yesterday was a big day for the Democratic party. They won the House going away, and it looks like they may take the Senate as well. Democrats have their first majority among the nation’s governors since 1994. There are a few things that stood out to me that are probably worth noting: Despite high turnout in some states, overall turnout was average. That’s disappointing. Exit pools indicate that corruption was a big issue with voters. For all the talk about this election being about hatred of Bush, independents voted for Democrats because they were sick of Republicans running Congress as if they were Visigoths sacking Rome. I hope the first order of business for Democrats is restoring most of the rules that the Republicans did away with in order to suppress the minority party in Congress. The Democrats could keep those rules in place and abuse the Republicans the way they were abused, but that’s bad governance. Congress was a more effective and civil institution before the Republicans took over in 1994. Hopefully the Democrats can restore that to some extent. I worry about how President Bush will react. He did not accept that the President is accountable to Congress when Republicans ran the place. He couldn’t even be bothered to ask a friendly Congress for permission to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists more freely. Now he has to deal with the Democrats. How will that work out? Howard Dean deserves a ton of credit for insisting that Democrats run their party as though elections in every state are winnable. By recruiting the right candidates and spreading their funds around widely, Democrats picked up seats that seemed impossible only a few months ago. Being in the right place at the right time is as much a part of success as anything, and Dean deserves a lot of credit. Maybe this really was the year for the netroots. I read last night that 60% of Jim Webb’s campaign donations came in via the Internet. Hopefully this is the end of right wing bashing of the judicial branch. Their constant drumbeat of idiocy with regard to “activist judges” was bad for the country, and was mainly the result of their having to find something to gripe about given that Republicans held the Presidency and the legislative branch. Now that they can focus on hating Nancy Pelosi, maybe they’ll leave judges alone. More than anything, yesterday’s election was a relief for me. I’ve been watching Republicans govern the nation poorly for the past six years, and I have been waiting for Americans to wake up and see that ideology aside, these guys were doing a rotten job. Hopefully the new Congress can do better. ...

Since everyone else seems to be blogging their voting experiences, I figured I’d do so as well. I voted at lunchtime today, and at my polling place there was no line. I asked the poll worker about turnout and she said it was pretty good. (I was the 169th person to vote in my precinct.) It’s rainy here, but there were still a couple of greeters outside urging us to vote for Democrats in local elections. The poll workers were, as usual, some older ladies and gentlemen, but there was one woman wandering around behind the tables. I suspect that she was a monitor of some kind, but have no idea. ...

If you’re a developer, it’s a good idea to read blogs. OK, maybe not Perez Hilton or Talking Points Memo, but it’s a good idea to read blogs related to software development. Yesterday at work a bug was fixed that involved the dangers of using the HTP GET method for operations that are not safe or idempotent. Google had spidered the site, and made a bunch of chances to content by following links that made changes to the content on the server. ...

National Geographic is my favorite magazine. There are other magazines I like, but the only one I subscribe to is National Geographic, and I’ve been getting it for about ten years. I’ve kept every issue I’ve received, and even have them all in the slipcases you can order to keep them organized. The thing is, I never go back and look at old issues, and my archive is already up to a good 80 or 90 pounds. Assuming I continue to subscribe for the next twenty years, I’ll have shelves and shelves of National Geographic magazines. I think it’s time to cut and run from my magazine collection. The question is, what should I do with them? I can’t imagine throwing them away. ...

Copyright infringement is not the killer feature of YouTube. It’s a killer app because it makes the videos that define our times easily accessible. Much of the stuff you can find on YouTube simply isn’t available anywhere else. The problem, of course, is that a lot of it is protected by copyright, but that to me just illustrates how badly the copyright laws are failing us. Are you a sports fan? Where else can you easily watch The Play? Or the Immaculate Reception? Or the shot heard ‘round the world? Or the World Cup goal of the century? Or the famous call of the miracle on ice? ...

Is it just me, or are all of the Sourceforge mirrors gone? For every package I try to download, I find that only the University of Kent (UK) server is available. Needless to say, it’s not responding. The Sourceforge status page has nothing about this seeming outage. Update: The mirrors all seem to be back now.

I’ve always fancied the idea of having a law named after myself. I don’t aspire to the fame Mike Godwin achieved with Godwin’s law, but a little fame would be nice. Here’s the first draft of Rafe’s law: An Internet service cannot be considered truly successful until it has attracted spammers. Based on my observations, this law is true. You know your application or protocol has really made it when is popular enough for spammers to take notice of it. We’ve seen this phenomenon with Usenet, email, weblog comments, wikis, Trackbacks, splogs, and instant messaging. Needless to say, all of these services are a big success. ...

Firefox 2.0 uses tabs more aggressively than Firefox 1.5 did. In Firefox 1.5, if you clicked on a link that attempted to spawn a new window (not a popup, just another regular browser window), Firefox did as it was asked. Now it opens those links in a new tab in the current window. As before, if you open a URL from another application, it opens that link in a new tab in the foremost browser window. ...