Posts

James Surowiecki has a piece on tipping for the New Yorker. In it, he says: Waiters like tipping because it gives them the chance to distinguish themselves from the crowd and to score an occasional windfall. Had he read comments on the Waiter Rant piece responding to the earlier New York Times op-ed on tippig, he’d know that one of the biggest reasons waiters want to preserve the institution of tipping is that they feel that it prevents their employer from pocketing a big chunk of their income. ...

Tim Bray is a member of the herd of people <a title=“ongoing � Shiny Red Rock” href=“http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/08/27/Ruby">checking out Ruby. Being a sensible man, he’s started out by reading a book on Ruby programming. I, on the other hand, skipped that and am learning Rails first and picking up just enough Ruby along the way to get things done in Rails. I’ll have to go back and read the Pickaxe book at some point, but I’m working on a specific project that I want to get into a usable state, so I’m cutting corners at the start. Anyway, his thoughts on Ruby as compared to other languages are worth reading. I’m with him on the “end” statement. I prefer the handling of blocks in C-style languages and Python to the way Ruby does it. ...

A reader sent me a link to Lessons from the Swiss Cheese Map, an article by a former Israeli soldier who was charged with creating the map to be used during the 1995 Oslo negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. The map illustrated which areas would be placed under Palestinian control, which would be under joint Israeli/Palestinian control, and which would remain under Israeli control but eventually be transferred to the Palestinians. Unfortunately, the map was not well received: ...

I’m much obsessed with hurricane Katrina today (and have been since I learned yesterday that it had gone from being a category 1 storm to category 5 while I wasn’t paying attention.) The good news this morning is that the storm seems to have turned northeast a bit and will probably not hit New Orleans directly, thus sparing the city at least some destruction. (You can see in this satellite photo that if it continues moving due north it will come ashore in Mississippi.) ...

So today I want to install one new package from PEAR on my laptop. Before doing so I decided to upgrade the packages I had already installed. The upgrade went smoothly enough, but once it was complete, the PEAR command line program would no longer work. Whenever I run pear.bat now, I get the following helpful error messages: Warning: array_shift(): The argument should be an array in pearcmd.php on line 54 Console_Getopt: Could not read cmd args (register_argc_argv=Off?) ...

Tim O’Reilly responds to Phil Ringnalda’s post publicizing O’Reilly’s participation in the search engine spam game. I was particularly interested to see his response because his company has so much credibility that they never even needed to say anything like, “Don’t be evil.” Everybody already knows that O’Reilly isn’t evil. Now w’re confronted with a case where O’Reilly’s behavior does seem a bit evil. Anyway, after a list of observations, Tim boils it down to a key question: ...

As was widely rumored, Google has released its instant messaging client, Google Talk. The download is small and the installation is quick, and the UI is rather simple as you might expect. I haven’t even used the instant messaging features yet, but I’m pretty enamored with its functionality as an incoming email notifier for Google Mail, which I’m currently using for nearly all of my personal email. Feel free to ping me if you like – my ID is rafeco. ...

Eric Umansky notices the following today: Only the Journal highlights a crucial bit of procedure: If two-thirds of the population of any three of Iraq’s 18 provinces vote no in a constitutional referendum, then the political process goes back to square 1, requiring not only a new draft constitution but a new transition parliament. So, how many provinces are Sunni-dominated? Is there anything better to get Sunnis to embrace politics than to give them the ability to torpedo a Constitution that they strongly object to? I’m pretty certain that there are at least three provinces in Iraq that are dominated by Sunnis, who will have a huge incentive to vote, regardless of whether they love or hate the government. This is the most hopeful sign I’ve seen in some time. ...

Mr. Jalopy has some interesting thoughts on what it means to own something. Inspired by the outrageous cost of a replacement part for a Chevrolet pickup truck, he writes: With the rise of DIY, hardware hacking and the rise of basement tinkerers, perhaps this is the time to demand our rights to truly 0wn our equipment. It’s like DRM. When I pay for things, I want to own them. I won’t buy Itunes tracks, because I find it offensive that I need to learn and play by a set of arbitrary rules foisted upon me. Just as I am able to play 8 tracks and 78 RPM records, I know that I will always be able to play a CD, but I don’t have that feeling when buying an Itunes track. ...

Looks like O’Reilly has added its name to the list of companies whoring out their PageRank to search engine spammers. I expect better from them. By the way, don’t miss the comments on Phil’s post, inspired by the fact that Shelley Powers mentions that she has the same links on her site and that they help her make her car payment. I guess my position is that publishing those links on your site isn’t the most unethical way to earn a buck, but it is unethical. Publishing these links makes the Web a little bit worse for everybody. I guess a person could rationalize it by saying that the things that make a site a worthwhile spot to put those links in the first place adds value to the Web, and so it’s justifiable to post those links and offset some of the value being added to the Web in exchange for profit, but I still don’t like it. ...