I’m beginning to think that the day when your contract with your mobile phone provider ends should be celebrated like your birthday. As of December 5, I’m no longer on the hook with Cingular Wireless and I am free to get a new phone (along with a new contract) and perhaps a new provider. I’ve used a Sony Ericsson T616 for the past two years. It’s an OK phone, but I never seem to hear it ring, and the display is completely unusable outdoors. ...
Veteran technology writer Andrew Leonard is working on a new project at Salon, a weblog on globalization called How The World Works. He’s just getting started, but I guarantee that it will wind up being a must-read, and that it will be often linked from this site. This is the first time in awhile that I’ve really been excited by something Salon is doing. How The World Works doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed yet, hopefully that will be corrected. ...
When President Bush originally nominated Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, I commended him for picking a nominee whose beliefs and judicial philosophy were public knowlege. At the time, I wrote that this nomination would be about reading the tea leaves but rather about arguing over substantive issues. Little did I suspect that the Judge Alito and the White House would try to play down his conservative bona fides at every turn. The White House is actively pushing back against journalists who describe Alito as conservative. They probably should have stuck with stealth nominees. (Via Eric Umansky.) ...
Dahlia Lithwick is ringing a warning bell when it comes to Sam Alito and the war on terror: I have written before that the arc of his Supreme Court nominations can best be explained by his desire to pack the courts for all of the Hamdan, Hamdi, and Padilla cases to be heard by the courts for years to come. Think about it: Roberts, Miers, and Alito each have a long track record of endorsing executive power. Each seems highly likely to strongly support the president’s claims to virtually limitless executive authority in wartime. The Bush administration saw that claim repudiated by a margin of 8-1 in Hamdi. And the president won’t let that happen again. ...
Since I started using a Powerbook regularly a couple of months ago, I’ve been trying to decide on which text editor to live in. For writing Java code, I continue to use Eclipse, but I needed to decide on something to use for HTML, PHP, Ruby, and other random stuff. First, a quick list of products I tried but decided not to stick with. The first editor I tried was gvim. I use vim whenever I’m editing files within a console window, and under Windows I use gvim for everything but Java. On a Mac, though, gvim just doesn’t fit in. You don’t use a Mac every day to use an editor that’s a rough port of a command line application. I still use vim twenty times a day, but not as my GUI editor. ...
James Roberston has a good post summaring a debate between competing philosophies of language design. The subject is Java’s java.util.List versus Ruby’s Array class. Refactoring guru Martin Fowler argues that Ruby’s version is better because it includes bunches of convenience methods, and Elliotte Rusty Harold argues the converse, that fewer methods is better. My contribution to this debate is to say that I was hacking on some Java code last night and found myself wishing that Java’s List class had methods for grabbing the first and last elements in the list. To me, the convenience methods make your code much more readable. In the Java world in particular, everybody uses editors that auto-complete method names anyway, so it’s not as though we need to memorize all of the public methods of every class we use in the first place. ...
Eric Umansky has posted the second entry in his torture policy glossary series, this time addressing the phrases “for the purpose of interrogation using torture” and “when we believe he will be tortured.”
Clive Thompson’s latest column on gaming for Wired News discusses a topic that I find persistently interesting, the uncanny valley, which he defines as well as anyone: This paradoxical effect has a name: the “Uncanny Valley.” The concept comes from the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, who argued that simulacra of humans seem lively and convincing so long as they’re relatively low-resolution. Think of history’s best comic strips: With only a few quick sketches on a page, Bill Watterson can create vivid emotions for the characters in Calvin and Hobbes. When an avatar is cartoonish, our brains fill in the gaps in the presentation to help them seem real. ...
News.com has an article on Wikipedia’s two incidents last week. The first was John Siegenthaler’s op-ed for USA Today explaining that someone had written a Wikipedia article about him that stated that he was at one time thought to be complicit in the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy which had gone uncorrected until he noticed it himself. The second was the flap over Adam Curry’s rewriting the article on podcasting to suit his own recollection, eliminating mention of some contributions made by others. ...
I’ve been following the ongoing debate over the One Laptop Per Child project with interest. I’ve generally been in the camp that says that if we want to help the world’s poorest people, our resources should go toward providing reliable sources of clean water, addressing preventable disease, and addressing conflict and famine. The technology divide is important, but aid dollars are scarce, so we should maximize our bang for the buck. ...