Posts

The other day over on Of Interest I linked to an <a href="interesting post from an Adobe developer explaining why rolling out an Intel-native version of Photoshop is a lot of work. Today I visited the page again in order to get the URL to post somewhere, and happend to skim the comments. Some of the commenters had interesting things to say, but a lot of them just wanted to whine, accuse the guy wrote the post of incompetence, or accuse him of lying to cover up an Adobe scheme to wring more money out of customers. I love transparency and the idea that markets are a conversation, but it really sucks to have a conversation with jerks. ...

James Wolcott describes America: One of the great paradoxes of our age is how the US can be so dimly complacent and so sharply fearful in the same breath. We’re in a constant state of sluggish agitation, worked up into a righteous state of indifference.

I’ve been looking at digital cameras (again) lately, and I’m a bit confused about the economics of the various classes of camera. It seems like one relatively new category is the super-zoom camera. There are several cameras in the $350-$400 range with 5 or 6 megapixel CCDs and good 12x zoom lenses. Examples include the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7, the DMC-FZ5, and the DMC-FZ20. There’s also the Canon Powershot S1 IS and the Sony Cyber-shot H1. ...

I’ve not been all that interested in the latest setback for Windows Vista, mainly because I live in Mac world these days. My Windows PC, which I use for games and to run Eclipse, works perfectly well with Windows XP. Anyway, what I am interested in is the fact that immediately after admitting to the Vista delay, Microsoft put a new guy in charge of the Windows group. I know that they had to replace Jim Allchin before he retires, but the timing sure makes it look like they’re acknowledging that somebody screwed up. I’ll be keeping an eye on Mini-Microsoft to see what the rank and file think about all this. ...

One interesting debate that seems to crop up now and again is whether to provide full feeds or not. Shelley Powers offers partial feeds because she likes her site’s design and wants people to <a title=“Burningbird � A Pale Moon’s Shadow” href=“http://weblog.burningbird.net/2006/03/22/a-pale-moons-shadow/">see it. I, on the other hand, would prefer people not to see mine, so I provide full feeds gladly. The main reason I provide full feeds is that I like it when other people do it. I would love to visit every Web site I read every day, but the convenience of RSS trumps the overall experience of visiting particular sites for me. And besides, I have NetNewsWire configured so that the page for an entry opens in a new tab in my browser every time I hit enter. For longer entries, I usually just do that and go read them on the site where they live. ...

I just read that the terms of running Yahoo ads on your site include blocking non-US visitors to your pages to prevent them from seeing the ads. What’s the reason for this? I suspect that it’s clickthrough fraud. If the levels of fraud demand this sort of hamfisted approach, there’s a lot of trouble brewing in ad-land.

This morning I created a Web service for the identity management application that I have talked about a few times. We’re rolling out a new application and it needs to authenticate against our centralized user database. After a discussion with the developers who are working on the new application, we came up with a very basic spec for this single API call. You submit a username, password, and application key (which is used to identify and authorize the calling application) via HTTP POST. If the authentication or application key are invalid, the application returns an HTTP status code of 401 (unauthorized). If the credentials are valid, it returns 200 (success) and an XML document containing the details of the user’s profile. ...

Have you ever noticed that people who are really good at their jobs tend to do them even when they’re not at work? I know that good graphic designers obsess over the design of every poorly designed thing that they see. What does a quality assurance engineer do? Find defects in everyday things, report them and make sure that they get fixed. ...

I’m linking to Nicholas Lemann’s New Yorker profile of Bill O’Reilly just so I can republish this one bit: Mainly, O’Reilly, like every political talk-show host with a big following, is a populist, who, in his beyond-irony way, is a rich, middle-aged white guy aligned with the ruling party, and who has the guts to stand up to the elitists who run (but also hate) this country. To say that that doesn’t make any sense is to deny oneself the pleasure that a close study of O’Reilly affords. ...

I just started using the migrations feature of Ruby on Rails. Migrations are a way to capture changes to a database schema so that you can apply them without destroying data, and so that you can roll them back if you made a mistake. Before I understood how they worked, I thought they were basically magical and was hesitant to try them out because I don’t believe in magic. Some Rails developers I’m working were extolling them, so I investigated further and discovered that they are not magic, but that they are pretty darn useful. ...