One of my long standing goals is to always pay as little as possible in airfare. The latest tool to achieve that end is Farecast which tracks airfares over time and lets you know if you should buy tickets for a trip now or wait for prices to drop. There’s a lot of received wisdom about when you should buy tickets, but Farecast uses quantitative analysis to make predictions about how to best time your purchases. ...
I just read a job listing for a couple of Perl programmers, and in addition the job description and the basic requirements of the job, it included two homework assignments. One was to explain why you’d use a certain programming construct in Perl, and another to explain how you’d solve a big refactoring problem that the employer must need to solve. There are two objectives for any interview: to determine whether the person is qualified for the position in question and to determine whether the person is a good fit for the organization. The second is the easiest for me. After interviewing someone, I almost always know whether I’d enjoy working with them and whether they have the enthusiasm requisite for the job. The first is more difficult. I’ve tried a number of approaches in that regard, and I’ve not been satisfied completely with any of them. ...
A Florida House candidate has apologized for remarking that based on his experience, African Americans generally can’t swim. What fascinates me is that he has obviously not put any thought toward why that might be. In Baton Rouge, Lousiana’s city park, they have a swimming pool that’s been filled with dirt. It was open for public use until a federal court ruled that the pool must be opened to both blacks and whites. Rather than allow blacks to use the pool, the city chose instead to just fill it in. (A woman who was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace when she tried to integrate the pool was pardoned last year by Louisiana’s governor.) Maybe the fact that blacks in his home state of Alabama often didn’t know how to swim should have inspired a bit of reflection on Tramm Hudson’s part. ...
I’ve been using the Motorola Pebl I bought on eBay for a couple of weeks now with much success. I am able to call people, sync the address book with my computer, check my voice mail, and access the Web. The phone still has the wrong menu entries (they’re for the Italian mobile carrier) and some wallpapers from the Italian mobile carrier. It’s also missing a menu item mentioned in the manual which allows you to let your carrier set the time on your phone. It also has an issue where the phone gets a strange text message every time a call goes to voice mail. I assume the network is sending a message to the phone that it’s supposed to handle transparently but instead just sticks in my in box. ...
The Foreign Policy blog describes a new “terrorist detector” that the TSA is considering adding at airports. Basically, you sit in the machine and answer questions while hooked up to sensors of some kind. It uses answers and measurements to determine whether you’re “afraid of being caught.” What’s interesting to me is that they claim an 85% success rate. That sounds atrocious to me. You can read that a number of ways, but let’s say they’re speaking plainly and the machine returns the correct result (“terrorist” or “not terrorist”). For starters, that means that the machine says that 1 in 6 or 1 in 7 people who sit in the machine will be flagged as a terrorist when they’re not. ...
Let me get this straight: the British authorities had been tracking a cell of would-be terrorists for nearly a year, and had appraised the US government of the threat months ago. Furthermore, they have known for some time that the terrorist plot involved the use of liquid explosives, a potential means of attack that was already well known to law enforcement. Pakistan arrests affiliates of the British cell, so the British authorities move in and arrest the locals before they figure out that the jig is up. ...
I think he’s exactly right when he says: It is not clear that bloggers had much real impact on the Connecticut primary, but they’re a new wild card in the political process, and that makes them a story. I have always appreciated the fierce independence of bloggers, and I fear that, as they accumulate influence, they’ll be co-opted in the classic capitalist way. (As soon as bloggers really influence elections, Rupert Murdoch will begin buying them by the long ton.) ...
I wanted to solicit some advice regarding status reports. Let’s say you’re managing a project with several participants. Do you require them to submit weekly status reports? I am of two minds about this. On one hand, I can see where the reports would be useful. It would be interesting to have a list of what people are working on and the problems they’re running into all in one place. On the other hand, I have always hated writing status reports and swore to myself that I would never make anyone write them. ...
Over at O’Reilly Radar Nat Torkington debunks an argument that I was once very sympathetic toward, which is that Apple (and other platform vendors) are evil when they incorporate features into the operating system that are provided by third party software vendors. In this case, the argument specifically revolves around small third party shareware applications that make using an operating system more livable. Nat makes a variety of arguments about this, but to me, it all comes down to one thing. If you create an application that makes a platform easier to deal with, you can expect it to become part of the platform at some point. Not because the platform vendor wants to eat small software developers, but because no matter how good your shareware application is, all of the users of an operating system will never download and install it, but it very well might be useful to everyone. To survive in that ecosystem, you have to expect that the platform vendor is going to be coming after your features, and the better and more useful those features are, the sooner the platform vendor is going to make them part of the platform. ...
Last weekend I took my first real trip with the Nikon D50 in tow, a few impressions follow. First of all, the pictures it takes are wonderful. I find myself to be lacking as a photographer, but I certainly can’t blame the tool. The pictures are sharp, the colors are great, and the indoor photos came out very well. (I never worry about outdoor photos, pretty much any camera will take good pictures on a sunny day.) ...