How does someone go from writing an article as smart as Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States to drawing silly maps of the optimal Middle East? I can’t think of any pundit who has fallen father in my estimation than Ralph Peters. Update: don’t miss Andrew Brown’s comment, which illustrates Peters’ psychosis nicely.
Today O’Reilly Radar has a post about homophily, the tendency to congregate with people with the same interests as your own. The article explains how application developers can enable their users to move beyond homophily and make serendipitous discoveries. I find that weblogs are a vaccine against homophily. Most people have plenty of widely varied interests, and unless we’re very careful, mingling with people with whom we share an interest will expose us to plenty of other information that we maybe aren’t so interested in. I encounter the same effect when reading weblogs. I may read a weblog because it’s got useful information about Ruby on Rails, but what I wind up finding is a new band I want to listen to or a way to manage my time more effectively. ...
I’m not an economist but I’m a big believer in incentives. In this Err the Blog post on his Ruby on Rails toolbox, he has this to say about the excellent exception_notification plugin for Ruby on Rails: E-mails us whenever an exception is raised on the site. Some days I just gather up the exceptions in my Inbox and bang away on those bugs for an hour or two. Then, no more e-mails. It’s very gratifying. ...
Did a legitimate venture capital firm just fund a gossip blog to the tune of $5 million? What’s Pink is the New Blog worth, $50 million?
I keep reading that the computing platform for the younger generation is the mobile phone. For me and my generation, it’s the personal computer. I see the mobile phone mostly as an annoyance. I loathe texting, I don’t really care for voice mail, and I certainly don’t want to talk on the phone unless I absolutely have to. Reportedly other people don’t see their phones that way. They text constantly, use their phones to surf the web, and generally use the phone as their communications platform of choice. I don’t get it, but there you go. ...
One practice that I internalized a long time ago but that I still see a lot of experienced developers ignore is habitual . Most applications have common strings that are used in a number of places. These should pretty much always be stored in constants (however your language of choice implements them) rather than appearing as string literals anywhere other than when they are initially assigned. For example, a blog publishing tool might have a status field for posts with possible values of “published”, “draft”, and “scheduled”. ...
This morning I actually took the time to update Movable Type to version 3.33 and I updated the template for the Atom feed from version 0.3 to version 1.0 (a long overdue change). I’m also getting rid of the RSS 1.0 feed (found at /index.rdf) and soon I’ll probably move the Atom feed to /index.xml and retire the RSS feed. Update: How do you get Redirect directives to work with the rewrite tricks that Movable Type requires in your .htaccess file? My redirect for the RDF index isn’t working at all, I assume because the rewrite rule is eating all of the requests. ...
Rebecca Blood has some interesting points to add to my post about how operational upgrades work at airlines (and how the Internet works at disseminating information). She also has some flattering things to say about me, but you can ignore that part since you probably have your own opinion about how wonderful (or horrible) I am.
Today I saw a pointer to a forum posting at flyertalk.com from DullesJason, a former gate agent for United Airlines. In it he explains how gate agents for United are supposed to assign “operational upgrades,” otherwise known among passengers as getting bumped to first class. There’s a lot of lore about the best way to put yourself in position to get such upgrades, most of it driven by the idea that it is completely up to the gate agents who they choose, and that the best approach to getting an upgrade is to suck up. DullesJason says that’s not so, and provides plenty of details about how they actually are handed out. Here’s a snippet: ...
These are the covers of various editions of Newsweek from around the world. Draw your own conclusions. (I had a terrible version of the picture up here, but since everyone and their brother is doing the same thing I outsourced the graphics component.)