The reason I read Rogers Cadenhead’s blog every day is that his brain works completely differently than mine. It would never occur to me to go to Wikipedia and investigate whether Jimbo Wales (the site’s founder) edits his own article, but that’s OK, because that’s exactly the sort of thing Rogers does all the time. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s a treasure trove of unseemly behavior there just waiting to be exposed. ...
I have some Java code that leaks memory and causes Tomcat to die with an out of memory error once every couple of days. After finding a way to reproduce the problem reliably in a JUnit test outside Tomcat and exhausting the obvious means that I know about to find such problems, I’ve jumped into the world of profilers. I’ve always felt like profilers are a tool that real developers should know how to use, but I’ve never had to use one. (I also feel that way about debuggers. I debugged programs for years with print statements until I learned how to use a debugger – now I could never go back.) ...
Earlier this year, Yahoo caught a lot of justified flack for helping the Chinese government track down a dissident writer so that he could be charged with a crime for exercising a right Americans take for granted. DefenseTech notices that Cisco is deserving of similar criticism. They provide the infrastructure the Chinese government needs to block access to Web sites and otherwise suppress dissent.
Jason Levine nails a big problem I’ve had lately with Amazon.com but never thought to write up. These days it’s nearly impossible to tell whether an item is offered by Amazon.com or one of their affiliated merchants, and I think most people (myself included) would prefer to buy from Amazon.com itself when possible. I’m not even going to get into the problem I had where I bought a gift from Toys R Us via Amazon.com, they charged me for shipping because they didn’t honor my Amazon.com membership, and then they offered free shipping on all Christmas gifts the next day. ...
As promised, Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin filibustered the extension to the PATRIOT Act today, and perhaps surprisingly, a cloture vote failed. That means that the bill goes back to the drawing board for revisions to satisfy Feingold and his allies. What I find more interesting, though, is that Senator Feingold has been blogging about his efforts against the PATRIOT Act all week over at TPM Cafe. Maybe I’m making too much of this, but it seems like something remarkable and new. ...
J. Alex Halderman at Freedom to Tinker has a helpful guide to creating your own <a title=“Freedom to Tinker � Blog Archive � Make Your Own Copy-Protected CD with Passive Protection” href=“http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=946">copy protected audio CDs. You can be just like Sony only without the rootkit or public humiliation.
Nature, the leading scientific journal did a study comparing the accuracy of scientific articles in Wikipedia articles to those in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and found that Wikipedia is not substantially worse. Most of the problems people have with Wikipedia concern controversial topics that are in the news right now, and those are the hardest to cover in an encyclopedic fashion anyway. On topics where the facts are well understood, Wikipedia tends to do pretty well. ...
Given the announcement that people are going to be able to write their own search engines that utilize Alexa’s index and Google has announced an API for creating widgets for Google Homepage, how long must we wait for an application that will enable us to search Alexa’s index from Google?
Biodiesel is great, right? Cooking oil that was going to be thrown away anyway gets converted to fuel that can be used in lieu of petrochemicals. When demand rises you turn surplus corn and soybean crops into biodiesel. Unfortunately, palm oil (often produced on plantations where rain forests once stood) is a cheaper source of biodiesel than recycled oils or anything we can grow in America, so an eco-friendly fuel turns into another threat for endangered ecosystems. We live in a complicated world. ...
As much as I love using Ruby on Rails, I still find it a bit rough around the edges. For one thing, the documentation leaves much to be desired. As I’ve said before, Agile Web Development with Rails is a great computer book, but Rails is far too large to be fully documented in one book. There’s also the API documentation, which is OK but not great. The thing I find most exasperating, though, is the documentation for Rake, a Make replacement for Ruby. (If you’re a Java developer, think Ant.) It’s not the fault of the guy who provides the documentation, he’s a volunteer who I am sure is doing what he can. It’s just a sign that this Rails stuff is still pretty much on the cutting edge. (I seem to remember the Ant documentation being in a terrible state for quite some time as well.) What it comes down to is more hacking and less Googling, which is probably good for the brain anyway. ...