Posts

Just a couple of hours ago, Germany beat Argentina on penalty kicks in the World Cup. I was reading an article about Juergen Klinsmann, Germany’s coach which mentioned that he had replaced goalkeeper Oliver Kahn with Jens Lehmann for the World Cup. Looking at Lehmann’s Wikipedia article, I noticed the following: A highlight of Lehmann’s international career came in the 2006 World Cup quarter final match (30 June 2006, Olympiastadion, Berlin) of Argentina vs. Germany. The game remained tied after regulation and two overtime periods. The game came down to penalty kicks and Lehmann carried his team through. He made two critical saves of Argentinian penalty kicks, one from Roberto Ayala and another from Esteban Cambiasso. Meanwhile, the Germans made all of the necessary goals to win the penalty kicks 4 - 2. It was Lehmann’s skill in goal that allowed Germany to move on the semifinals and avert a national disappointment by early elimination. ...

Google has released an API for allowing external applications to authenticate against its user database. I’m not going to let Google manage the identities of my users, but this product does exactly what I need an authentication system to do, so I may copy some parts of its design. I have been using a Web-services based system in my applications, so my applications actually accept the user’s username and password and then query the service to authenticate the user. Google’s system uses a proxy and token-based system, so users never type their Google password into a third party application. Instead the requests are passed off to a Web page run by Google, and Google hands back a token to the calling application indicating whether or not authentication was successful. ...

I just installed the Growl plugin for iTunes today, and I’m completely mystified by something. It displays album art that I don’t have in my iTunes library. How does that work? Where does it get it?

Yesterday a Net Neutrality amendment to a larger telecommunications bill did not make it out of committee. I never had much faith in Congress to come up with common-sense regulation that would prevent the telecommunications companies from abusing their customers, but I think that the fight was important anyway. It enabled people to state their principles and attract a lot of attention to a technical issue that’s really pretty obscure. Now if telcos start abusing the fact that they own the last mile, there’s enough of an awareness of the problem that activists can go out and put pressure on them to stop. Had activists not waged this fight, they wouldn’t be very well positioned to fight subsequent customer-hostile actions by the telcos. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not despairing the temporary end of the legislative fight, and that I think a lot of valuable work was done despite the fact that we didn’t achieve the outcome we wanted. ...

I had all sorts of things I wanted to say about Warren Buffett donating his fortune to Bill Gates’ foundation, but then Jacob Weisberg went ahead and said it all for me. Just read what he wrote.

A college buddy of mine kept a fortune in his wallet with his driver’s license. It read, “Today’s vice is tomorrow’s virtue.” Ironically, this guy went on to become a police officer in the Houston Police Department, but that’s beside the point. A study shows that his favorite fortune was pretty much correct. Take a look at the results of this study to see what I mean.

Tim Bray posts that an answer to a tough technical problem came while mowing his lawn. I don’t have a lawn any more, but when I did, I often did my best thinking while mowing. Unlike Tim, I really enjoyed mowing. So much so, in fact, that I mowed my lawn and the next door neighbor’s lawn every week. You just walk around cutting stripes in the lawn and thinking about whatever it is you need to think about. There’s even the mindless drone of the lawnmower engine to drown out other distractions. Incredibly peaceful. ...

I have no idea whether a couple of famous liberal bloggers behaved in an unethical manner by secretly pumping candidates that were giving them cash for political consulting. If they were, then they deserve to be exposed and chided or whatever. What I found interesting was how making allegations about people automatically puts them and their friends in a no-win position, well-described here by Billmon: But there’s no question Kos made a dumb mistake when he asked his blogging buddies to pipe down about the “story.” It kind of put them in a no-win position, particularly once the TNR’s GOP counterparts in the corporate media (David Brooks and Newsweek’s Jonathan Darman) decided to get their licks in. If lefty bloggers ignore the story, then they’re keeping silent to protect the tens of dollars they receive each month from the all-powerful blog ad cartel Kos supposedly controls. If they defend him, they’re just pathetic monkeys dancing on his string. And if they criticize him, no matter how gently, well, they’ve only confirmed that the vague, unsubstantiated accusations against him must be true – “see, even his own paid minions admit it.” ...

I guess today I’m just going to comment on stuff I saw at BoingBoing, but I couldn’t pass up the story about the “independent state” of Sealand being destroyed by fire yesterday. If you haven’t read about Sealand, it’s an offshore platform that was turned into a “micronation” by its owners. You can read all about its history at Wikpedia. The biggest fans of Sealand are anarchists, libertarians, and other folks who believe that government is a nuisance best done without. Unsurprisingly, however, the self-reliant residents of Sealand did not rescue themselves, instead a whole battalion of first responders from various UK agencies made their way out to Sealand to put out the fire and fetch the residents. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. ...

BoingBoing has a post this morning about an online casino publishing MD5 hashes of their virtual decks of cards to prove that when a “deck” is generated at the beginning of a game, it does not change throughout the course of the game. That brings up a larger question that I have never figured out, which is why anyone trusts online casinos at all. There are many ways for online casinos to cheat, and very few mechanisms for detecting the cheating or getting your money back if you are defrauded. Are people just that desperate to gamble? ...