Posts

In reading this article about splogs, I noted the following paragraph: For that to happen, though, the companies must identify the splogs they want to weed out – a harder task than it may seem. Take Some Title, the splog that mentioned me. Any human reader can tell instantly, as I did, that the site is tripe. But even if hosting services and search engines hired armies of people, the blogosphere is simply too big to sift through blogs one by one. Computers are faster but notoriously unable to distinguish sense from nonsense – they can’t tell Some Title from Shakespeare. ...

A friend of mine, Duff, has started a new site for posting and sharing reviews of anything, called Soapbox. It’s a very slick site built by one person (with the help of a designer that I’ve also worked with, Rich at Samedis Design). The basic idea is that you can write reviews and build a network of people whose reviews you care about. One interesting aspect of the site is its attempt to make the service useful to bloggers. One problem I have with social networking sites is that I already have enough places to write about things. I have this blog, my link blog, and my Vox blog. There’s also del.icio.us, Flickr, Last.fm, comments on blogs that I read, the mailing list I share with my college friends, all of the message boards I’m registered for, and probably a bunch more sites that I’m forgetting. ...

Is it just me or are niche job boards suddenly all the rage? Perhaps I’ll start one for companies that want to hire programmers who find themselves reading newspapers online when they should be writing code.

Aaron Swartz has compiled statistics that show that the bulk of Wikipedia articles are not written by the core community of editors but rather by more casual users. This makes lots of sense, when you think about it. Most people know enough to contribute substantively to Wikipedia articles on a few selected topics, and very few people know enough to contribute substantively to articles on a wide variety of topics. Furthermore, doing the research to write an encyclopedia article on a topic is a lot of work. I may be willing to work on an article about my favorite baseball player, or the college I went to, or my home town, but I probably wouldn’t do the work required to write dozens of articles. ...

Another year, another bout of kvetching over the attendee list for O’Reilly’s Foo Camp. Before I get started, let me say that I have never been invited to Foo Camp, and even if I were invited I probably wouldn’t go because I never go to conferences of any kind. Let’s say I’m throwing a party and I want for it to be fun for myself and for the guests. I’m going to carefully choose who to invite in order to create the best mix of personalities and conversations that I can. I’m probably not going to invite people that I know to hate each other. I’m certainly not going to invite anyone that I don’t like. ...

Why did human beings adapt such that we look most distinct from one another when we’re adults? Babies, regardless of their race or ethnicity, look a lot alike. Our appearance also converges with our fellow human beings as we get older. Most everybody’s hair turns gray or white and our skin loses some of its pigmentation. As adults, we look as different from everyone else as we ever will. I have often wondered if there’s some biological explanation for why that is. ...

Jim Henley on the politics of war: War swallows up lesser distinctions. That, God help us, is what so many people like about it.

I am very happy with Subversion as far as version control systems go, but it has one glaring deficiency. When you create branches, it can be extremely difficult to keep track of which changes you’ve merged from one branch to another. This is probably best explained with an example. Let’s say you have a repository, and it’s setup with trunk (where the main development takes place), branches where you work on versions of the code separate from the trunk, and tags, where you mark development milestones. One common development model for Web applications is to work on new features in the trunk and create a branch for the version of the application that’s actually deployed. You create that branch like this: ...

Picking up the meme: “Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery “I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.” – G. K. Chesterton “Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.” – George Jean Nathan ...

If you get the chance, be sure to watch Bourdain in Beirut on the Travel Channel. As you may have read, he was filming an episode of No Reservations there when Hezbollah abducted the two Israeli soldiers, and was stuck in the city for another week or so while waiting to be evacuated. The Travel Channel quickly turned the footage into a special that aired last night. The show is, of course, incredibly sad. Bourdain had just eaten a meal with his Lebanese guide, who had been enthusing about how the city was on the rise and Lebanon was finally back on the seat when suddenly the cameraman captures Hezbollah supporters driving around, honking their horns and celebrating as though Lebanon just won the World Cup. The guide looks ashen and Tony is just confused. The amount of loathing I felt for those people celebrating the opening shots in a pointless war is nearly impossible to describe. From there one of the locals the show had hired to help them out evacuates to Damascus, another’s home in South Beirut is leveled in an air strike. The crew winds up sheltering in a hotel in North Beirut for about a week waiting for the American government to get them out of the country, with a pool side view of the unfolding devastation. Eventually they’re evacuated by way of a Marine landing craft. ...